David Brooks Plagiarism Watch: Brooks & Hoffer

Collation of text from Eric Hoffer 1951, The True Believer, and David Brooks column of December 8 2015.

Hoffer text from evelynbrooks.com; Brooks text from here. It's not anything like the worst case of Brooksian plagiarism; you're in no doubt that he basically has a single source, you just don't realize as you read how very much of the column (more than two thirds) comes from it. The interesting part would be how he misinterprets Hoffer's ideas in transmuting them into his own lifeless prose and makes them stupid, but I have no heart to work analytically through the thing.

Hoffer: chapter 2 §7

There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.

Brooks:

Hoffer distinguished between practical organizations and mass movements. The former, like a company or a school, offer opportunities for self-advancement. The central preoccupation of a mass movement, on the other hand, is self-sacrifice.  The purpose of an organization like ISIS is to get people to negate themselves for a larger cause.

Hoffer: chapter 5 §35
The milieu most favorable for the rise and propagation of mass movements is one in which a once compact corporate structure is, for one reason or another, in a state of disintegration. The age in which Christianity rose and spread “was one when large numbers of men were uprooted. The compact city states had been partly merged into one vast empire … and the old social and political groupings had been weakened or dissolved.” Christianity made its greatest headway in the large cities where lived “thousands of deracinated individuals, some of them slaves, some freedmen, and some merchants, who had been separated by force or voluntarily from their hereditary milieu.”

Brooks:
Mass movements, he argues, only arise in certain conditions, when a once sturdy social structure is in a state of decay or disintegration. This is a pretty good description of parts of the Arab world. To a lesser degree it is a good description of isolated pockets of our own segmenting, individualized society, where some people find themselves totally cut off.

Hoffer chapter 5 §31
The cause of revolution in a totalitarian society is usually a weakening of the totalitarian framework rather than resentment against oppression and distress.
chapter 2 §8:
Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.
chapter 10 §41
There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom.

Brooks:
The people who serve mass movements are not revolting against oppression. They are driven primarily by frustration. Their personal ambitions are unfulfilled. They have lost faith in their own abilities to realize their dreams. They sometimes live with an unrelieved boredom. Freedom aggravates their sense of frustration because they have no one to blame but themselves for their perceived mediocrity.

Hoffer chapter 5 §27:

The important point is that in forgetting or postponing individual liberty, the active mass movement does not run counter to the inclinations of a zealous following. Fanatics, says Renan, fear liberty more than they fear persecution. It is true that the adherents of a rising movement have a strong sense of liberation even though they live and breathe in an atmosphere of strict adherence to tenets and commands. This sense of liberation comes from having escaped the burdens, fears and hopelessness of an untenable individual existence. It is this escape which they feel as a deliverance and redemption...

Brooks:
Fanatics, the French philosopher Ernest Renan argued, fear liberty more than they fear persecution.

Brooks:
The successful mass movement tells such people that the cause of their frustration is outside themselves, and that the only way to alter their personal situation is to transform the world in some radical way.
(finding nothing close to this, on the contrary,
Hoffer:
chapter 5 §26 Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual. And as freedom encourages a multiplicity of attempts, it unavoidably multiplies failure and frustration. Freedom alleviates frustration by making available the palliatives of action, movement, change and protest.
chapter 13 §48 A mass movement’s call for action evokes an eager response in the frustrated. For the frustrated see in action a cure for all that ails them. It brings self-forgetting and it gives them a sense of purpose and worth. Indeed it seems that frustration stems chiefly from an inability to act, and that the most poignantly frustrated are those whose talents and temperament equip them ideally for a life of action but are condemned by circumstances to rust away in idleness.
and
chapter 1 §4 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. It matters not whether it be hope of a heavenly kingdom, of heaven on earth, of plunder and untold riches, of fabulous achievement or world dominion.

chapter 13 §48
At its inception a mass movement seems to champion the present against the past. It sees in the established institutions and privileges an encroachment of a senile, vile past on a virginal present. But, to pry loose the stranglehold of the past, there is need for utmost unity and unlimited self-sacri ce. This means that the people called upon to attack the past in order to liberate the present must be willing to give up enthusiastically any chance of ever tasting or inheriting the present. The absurdity of the proposition is obvious. Hence the inevitable shift in emphasis once the movement starts rolling. The present—the original objective—is shoved off the stage and its place taken by posterity—the future.

Brooks:To nurture this self-sacrificing attitude, the successful mass movement first denigrates the present. 

Hoffer, chapter 13 §50
there is no more potent dwar fing of the present than by viewing it as a mere link between a glorious past and a glorious future. Thus, though a mass movement at first turns its back on the past, it eventually develops a vivid awareness, often specious, of a distant glorious past.

Brooks:Its doctrine celebrates a glorious past and describes a utopian future, but the present is just an uninspiring pit. 

Hoffer, chapter 13 §49
All mass movements deprecate the present by depicting it as a mean preliminary to a glorious future; a mere doormat on the threshold of the millennium. To a religious movement the present is a place of exile, a vale of tears leading to the heavenly kingdom; to a social revolution it is a mean way station on the road to Utopia; to a nationalist movement it is an ignoble episode preceding the final triumph. It is true of course that the hope released by a vivid visualization of a glorious future is a most potent source of daring and self-forgetting—more potent than the implied deprecation of the present.

Hoffer, chapter 13 §56
All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a factproof 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.

Brooks:
The golden future begins to seem more vivid and real than the present, and in this way the true believer begins to dissociate herself from the everyday facts of her life: Her home, her town, even her new child. Self-sacrifice is an irrational act, so mass movements get their followers to believe that ultimate truth exists in another realm and cannot be derived from lived experience and direct observation.

Hoffer, chapter 6 §37
The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement. By renouncing individual will, judgment and ambition, and dedicating all their powers to the service of an eternal cause, they are at last lifted off the endless treadmill which can never lead them to fulfillment.

chapter 13 §44
The effacement of individual separateness must be thorough. In every act, however trivial, the individual must by some ritual associate himself with the congregation, the tribe, the party, etcetera. His joys and sorrows, his pride and confidence must spring from the fortunes and capacities of the group rather than from his individual prospects and abilities. Above all, he must never feel alone.

chapter 14 §65

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: “No…. We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.” 

Brooks:
Next mass movements denigrate the individual self. Everything that is unique about an individual is either criticized, forbidden or diminished. The individual’s identity is defined by the collective group identity, and fortified by a cultivated hatred for other groups.

Hoffer, chapter 2 §7
a practical concern cannot endure unless it can appeal to and satisfy self-interest, while the vigor and growth of a rising mass movement depend on its capacity to evoke and satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.
chapter 14 §77
Renan says that we have never, since the world began, heard of a merciful nation. Nor, one may add, have we heard of a merciful church or a merciful revolutionary party. The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.

Brooks:

There’s a lot of self-renunciation going on here. Ironically the true believer’s feeling that he is selfless can lead to arrogance and merciless cruelty. 

It can also be addictive. If the true believer permitted himself to lose faith in his creed then all that self-imposed suffering would have been for nothing.
(find nothing for this)

These movements generate a lot of hatred. 

Hoffer, chapter 1 §5 ...it does not seem to make any difference who it is that is seized with a wild hope—whether it be an enthusiastic intellectual, a land-hungry farmer, a get-rich-quick speculator, a sober merchant or industrialist, a plain workingman or a noble lord —they all proceed recklessly with the present, wreck it if necessary, and create a new world.

Brooks:
But ultimately, Hoffer argues, they are driven by a wild hope. They believe an imminent perfect future can be realized if they proceed recklessly to destroy the present. The glorious end times are just around the corner.

Brooks (tiring of paraphrase and turning now to the direct quotation, to maintain the illusion that he invented the passages he doesn't attribute to Hoffer):
This kind of thinking is fantastical. “In the practice of mass movements,” Hoffer continues, “make-believe plays perhaps a more enduring role than any other factor.” (chapter 13 §47)

Brooks (his own writing):
The fanatics stage acts of violent theatricality, acutely aware of their audience. They dress up in military costumes. They rent mysterious black SUVs. Shooting a bunch of unarmed innocents couldn’t be more pathetic, but they play it with all the theatrical dramaturgy of a Hollywood action movie. 
(he's talking about IS warriors, not Christian Identity militias)

(This last used in its entirety by Brooks as a properly attributed quotation)
Hoffer, chapter 1 §6:
For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.

And the rest is his own.
Brooks:
The big thing that has changed in the past 60 odd years is that you don’t actually have to join a mass movement any more. You can follow it online and participate remotely.

The correct response is still the same, however. First, try to heal the social disintegration that is the seedbed of these movements. Second, offer positive inspiring causes to replace the suicidal ones. Third, mass movements are conquered when their charisma is destroyed, when they are defeated militarily and humiliated. Then they can no longer offer hope, inspiration or a plausible way out for the disaffected.