What are the characteristics of mass movements?

Don't believe everything you think.

This is the first of several articles about Eric Hoffer’s classic book, The True Believer, first published in 1951 after the Holocaust and the beginning of the Cold War. Hoffer’s book, The True Believer is about social movements: how they are born, what fuels them, how they develop and are sustained.

I found very interesting and helpful in understanding the MAGA movement in the Republican party today. The book was first published in 1951 and yet Hoffer's observations and insights about social movements seem just as relevant today as they were back in the mid twentieth century. It is written in the preface, "This book deals with some peculiarities common to all mass movements, be they religious movements, social revolutions or nationalists movements. It does not maintain that all movements are identical, but that they share certain essential characteristics which give them a family likeness."

What Hoffer is describing are social processes. The process of mass movements are very similar even though the content is different. Having always been interested in sociology, I want to know what these characteristics are that mass movements share.

Our modern media focuses on the content but rarely reports on the process and therefore the public is ill served by the reporting of the fourth estate. The media focuses on sensationalized aspects of current celebrity behavior and fails to highlight the social process which animates the content. For example, Donald Trump's and Marjorie Taylor Greene's antics are the symptoms not the cause of what ails us as a society. Who are the people and what is their mindset who support them and vote for them? Hoffer offers some ideas about the mindset of the people who support the leaders of these mass movements.

The characteristics of mass movements and the mindset of the people who create them and sustain them will be described. These series of articles might be described as “metacognition” which simply means how do we think about what we think. As the bumper sticker says, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

Everyone has their beliefs but not everyone understands where their beliefs come from and why they believe what they believe. In philosophy there is a sub discipline called “epistemology” which is the philosophy of knowledge. What are the different kinds of knowledge? How do we know what we know and to what extent are we consciously aware of how and why we know what we know?

In psychology there is the recognition of different kinds of intelligence such as cognitive, social, emotional, spiritual, musical, artistic, athletic, mechanical, mathematical, etc. These different kinds of intelligence was popularized by Howard Gardener when he named 8 different kinds of intelligence. Ken Wilber in describing Integral Theory calls these kinds of intelligence “lines” meaning lines of development.