Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book The True Believer has always been important for understanding how sensible people are drawn to movements and cults that require them to shut off their minds and simply become followers who are ready to do whatever they’re called to do. These days, it has a special relevance.
In his latest Bastiat’s Window post, Bob Graboyes dives into Hoffer and his work. If you’re interested in knowing how so many American college students could have become rabidly pro-Hamas, it offers a lot of insight.
This paragraph jumps out at you:
Hoffer maps out the necessary elements for a fanatical movement, including whom it recruits, how it recruits them, and how it holds them. In short, a fanatical movement seeks bored underachievers, offers purpose for their aimless lives, and discourages questioning. In many ways, an alarming proportion of Generation Z, which includes today’s college cohort, has been primed since infancy for such recruitment—by professors, by K-12 teachers, and by their parents.
That’s a good description of many college students — bored underachievers who lead aimless lives. Professors step in and give them something to grasp, such as rectifying America’s “institutional racism,” saving the world from climate apocalypse, or helping to put an end to an oppressive, apartheid state in the Middle East.
Graboyes continues:
Their putative educators instill in them a hatred of dissent and a predilection for shaming those who stray from received doctrine. In the name of “equity” and other assorted buzzwords, professors train these perpetual tabulæ rasæ to despise others on the basis of immutable characteristics—race, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion. They are involuntarily celibate and view marriage and family as unreachable (and perhaps undesirable) goals. Their aimless mediocrity is fueled by the vast financial resources of their parents and of taxpayers.
Read the whole thing.