2023-01-31

I’ve just finished reading The True Believer by Eric Hoffer (pub. 1951). You can read an excellent summary here. To be honest, the summary is more understandable than the original book, although maybe if I’d read them in a different order I wouldn’t be saying that.

Hoffer was an interesting character. You can read more about him in Wikipedia. He lived in interesting times, being born in 1902, and worked in interesting places (a dockyard, rather than a university), so has a different perspective to people around today.

He tries to formulate a theory of the origin and growth of mass movements (such as Nazism). He identifies the sorts of individuals who are attracted to mass movements, which he says are rather like those who are attracted to religious cults. He puts great store in the idea that people join cults because they want to lose their individual identity.

He says that for a mass movement to get established, and last a long time, it must have a series of leaders with different distinctive abilities, for example, Lenin, the intellectual (‘man of words’) got the Bolshevik revolution going, but it took a ‘man of action’ (Stalin) to allow it to develop into something durable.

I liked the book better than The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s book spends too much time talking about why people dislike Jews to have any claim to be a unifying theory.

One insight which Hoffer has is that people join revolutionary movements when they feel a sense of loss. He makes the familiar point that the desperately poor are too busy trying to find their next meal to get tangled up in a revolution, but that middle class people who have lost something they (or their parents) enjoyed can be easily persuaded by a demagogue. The current strikes by public sector workers, many of whom have seen their living standards decline materially as inflation erodes their ability to buy the small luxuries they used to enjoy will form the vanguard of a more populous movement who will rise up against student loans, high taxes, terrible public services and increasing wealth inequality. Probably not.

Is the interest on US public sector debt sustainable?

Answer: probably, but maybe not for that long.