- Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute
for the lost faith in ourselves.
- The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his
own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his
nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause.
- A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding.
When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless
affairs by minding other people's business.
- One of the most potent attractions of a mass movement is its
offering of a substitute for individual hope.
- When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth
living for, we are in desperate need of something apart from us
to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and
self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something
which might give worth and meaning to our futile spoiled lives.
- Emigration offers some of the things the frustrated hope to find
when they join a mass movement, namely, change and a chance
for a new beginning.
- Some of the poor stagnating in the slums of the cities are
smug in their decay. They shudder at the thought of life
outside their familiar cesspool. Even the respectable poor,
when their poverty is of long standing, remain inert.
- It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the "new"
poor, who throb with the ferment of frustration. The memory of
better things is as fire in their veins.
- The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives.
To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to
be wholly free from a sense of futility. The goals are concrete
and immediate. Every meal is a fulfillment; to go to sleep on
a full stomach is a triumph and every windfall a miracle.
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Where people toil from sunrise to sunset for a bare living, they
nurse no grievances and dream no dreams. One of the reasons for the
unrebelliousness of the masses in China is the inordinate effort
required there to scrape together the means of the scantiest
subsistence.
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Misery does not automatically generate discontent, nor is the intensity
of discontent directly proportionate to the degree of misery.
Discontent is likely to be highest when misery is bearable; when
conditions have so improved that an ideal state seems almost within
reach.
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Our frustration is greater when we have so much and want more than
when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we
lack many things than when we lack but one thing.
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Slaves are poor, yet where slavery is widespread and long-established,
there is little likelihood for the rise of a mass movement. The
absolute equality among the slaves and the intimate communal life
in slave quarters, preclude individual frustration. In a society
with an institution of slavery, the trouble makers are the newly
enslaved and the freed slaves. In the case of the latter, it is the
burden of freedom which is at the root of discontent.
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Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is
an irksome burden.
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The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity; to be
one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not
distinguishable from the others. No one can point us out, measure us
against others and expose our inferiority.
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Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves
as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop
under our own hand, day in, day out.
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The ideal potential convert is the individual who stands alone, who
has no collective body he can blend with and lose himself in and so
mask the pettiness, meaninglessness and shabbiness of his individual
existence.
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In the industrialized Western world, the family is weakened and
disrupted mainly by economic factors. Economic independence for
women facilitates divorce. Economic independence for the young
weakens parental authority and also hastens an early splitting up
of the family group.
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The discontent generated in backward countries by their contact with
Western civilization is not primarily resentment against exploitation
by domineering foreigners. It is rather the result of a crumbling or
weakening of tribal solidarity and communal life. The ideal of
self-advancement which the civilizing West offers to backward
populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All
the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the
sheltering and soothing anonymity of a communal existence. Even when
the Westernized native attains personal success, becomes rich, or
masters a respected profession, he is not happy. He feels naked and
orphaned. The nationalist movements in the colonial countries are
partly a striving after group existence and an escape from Western
individualism. The Western colonizing powers offer the native the
gift of individual freedom and independence. They try to teach him
self-reliance. What it actually amounts to is individual isolation.
It means the cutting off of an immature and poorly furnished individual
from the corporate whole and releasing him, in the words of Khomiakov,
"to the freedom of his own impotence". The feverish desire to band
together and coalesce into marching masses so manifest both in our
homelands and in the countries we colonize is the expression of a
desperate effort to escape this ineffectual, purposeless individual
existence.
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A rising mass movement can never go too far in advocating and promoting
collective cohesion. Hitler knew that the chief passion of the
frustrated is "to belong", and that there cannot be too much cementing
and binding to satisfy this passion.
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We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.
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Among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for
creative work.
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A minority which preserves its identity is inevitably a compact whole
which shelters the individual, gives him a sense of belonging and
immunizes him against frustration. The segregated Negro in the South
is less frustrated than the non-segregated Negro in the North.
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Crime is to some extent a substitute for a mass movement. Where public
opinion and law enforcement are not too stringent, and poverty not
absolute, the underground pressure of malcontents and misfits often
leaks out into crime. It has been observed that in the exaltation of
mass movements (whether patriotic, religious, or revolutionary), common
crime declines.
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The capacities for united action and self-sacrifice seem almost always
to go together. When we hear of a group that is particularly
contemptuous of death, we are usually justified in concluding that the
group is closely knit and thouroughly unified.
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To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that
matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he
clings to it with shameless despair.
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The thirty thousand hopeless people in the concentration camp of
Buchenwald did not develop any form of united action, nor did they
manifest any readiness for self-sacrifice. There was there more greed
and ruthless selfishness than in the greediest and most corrupt of free
societies. Instead of studying the way in which they could best help
each other, they used all their ingenuity to dominate and oppress each
other.
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All active mass movements strive, therefore to interpose a fact-proof
screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. They do
this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already
embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude
outside it. The facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions
must not be derived from his experience or observations, but from holy
writ.
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To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and
treason.
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It is the true believer's ability to "shut his eyes and stop his ears"
to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the
source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He cannot be
frightened by danger nor disheartened by obstacle nor baffled by
contradictions because he denies their existence.
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It is obvious that in order to be effective, a doctrine must not be
understood, but has to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain
only about things we do not understand.
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The devout are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts
and not their minds.
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One was well-minded to understand holy writ when one hated oneself.
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He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and
coalesce with his like into one flaming mass.
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Common hatred unifies the most heterogenenous elements.
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Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt
within us.
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The deindividualization which is a prerequisite for thorough integration
and selfless dedication is also, to a considerable extent, a process of
dehumanization.
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Every device is used to cut off the faithful from intercourse with
non-believers.
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The total surrender of a distinct self is a pre-requisite for the
attainment of both unity and self-sacrifice; and there is probably no
more direct way of realizing this surrender than by inculcating and
extolling the habit of blind obedience.
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