sourceType:: book author:: Eric Hoffer sourcePublication:: The True Believer ref:: noteTitle:: The True Believer, Eric Hoffer (book)
The True Believer, Eric Hoffer (book)
Desire for change
Mass movements are effective instruments of change.
They rely on hope for the future and faith that positive change will come.
They require that the participants don’t understand the depth of their challenge.
Both the rich and the destitute have a type of conservatism because they fear Change in the future. The rich want to keep their luck. The poor don’t want to upset the delicate status quo.
“Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us.Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change. The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on.” (Eric Hoffer, The True Believer)
“Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.” (Eric Hoffer, The True Believer)
“When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.” (Eric Hoffer, The True Believer)