Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by Eric Hoffer.

Successful mass movements need not believe in a god, but they must believe in a devil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer

Hoffer initially attempts to explain the motives of various types of personalities that give rise to mass movements and why certain efforts succeed while others fail. He articulates a cyclical view of history and explores why and how said movements start, progress, and end. Whether intended to be cultural, ideological, religious, or whatever else, Hoffer argues, mass movements are broadly interchangeable even when their stated goals or values differ dramatically. This makes sense, in Hoffer’s view, given the frequent similarities between them in the psychological influences on their adherents. Thus, many will often flip from one movement to another, Hoffer asserts, and the often shared motivations for participation entail practical effects. Whether radical or reactionary, such movements tend to attract the same types of dissatisfied people and use very similar tactics and rhetorical tools.
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As examples of the interchangeable nature of mass movements, Hoffer cites how almost 2000 years ago Saul, a fanatical opponent of Christianity, became Paul, a fanatical apologist and promoter of Christianity. Another example occurred in Germany during the 1920s and the 1930s, when Communists and Fascists were ostensibly bitter enemies but in fact competed for the same type of angry, marginalized people: Nazis Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm, and Communist Karl Radek, all boasted of their prowess in converting their rivals.
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To spread and reinforce their doctrine, mass movements use persuasion, coercion, and proselytization. Persuasion is preferable but practical only with those already sympathetic to the mass movement. Moreover, persuasion must be thrilling enough to excite the listener yet vague enough to allow “the frustrated to… hear the echo of their own musings in the impassioned double talk”. Hoffer quotes Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels: “a sharp sword must always stand behind propaganda if it is to be really effective”. The urge to proselytize comes not from a deeply held belief in the truth of doctrine but from an urge of the fanatic to “strengthen his own faith by converting others”.

Successful mass movements need not believe in a god, but they must believe in a devil. Hatred unifies the true believers, and “the ideal devil is a foreigner” attributed with nearly supernatural powers of evil.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/34/The_True_Believer_Revisited

The main point Hoffer stresses in his book is that, for the ‘true believer’ (someone so committed to a cause that he or she is willing to unthinkingly die for it) ideologies are interchangeable. It is the frustrations of life which lead the believers to join a cause that gives meaning to their own existences, and the more frustrated they feel, the more attracted they are to extreme revolutionary solutions to their problems. Such frustrations can be the basis for positive social change, but usually mass movements have less beneficial effects. The message that self-sacrifice is needed for the good of a cause can often justify the most heinous of endeavors, and followers are treated as interchangeable cogs in a machine rather than as flesh-and-blood humans. Abstractions and atrocities often go hand-in-hand.

Hoffer is very perceptive in his criticisms, and much of what he has to say is relevant to the present situation. For instance, he points out that we often imitate what we hate. “Every mass movement”, he writes, “shapes itself after its own specific demon.” And it can then become the very demon it denounces. Christianity in the Middle Ages became so obsessed with devils and witchcraft that it justified mass slaughter and the very sorts of atrocities one would normally attribute to satanic forces.