Applying Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer to Frank Meeink’s conversion to a racist ideology
Part
One. The Qualities of the True Believer
1. The true believer is someone who suffers protracted
(ongoing) frustration and is seeking mass change through joining a radical,
extremist movement.
2. The true believer hungers for revolutionary and
spectacular change; gradual change will not do; sadly, of course, real change
in life is gradual.
3. The movement must allow opportunity for
self-advancement since the true believer is someone who constantly strains for
significance.
4. The true believer is too cowardly to look inward to
locate his problems so instead he looks outside himself, at the world, and
proclaims all is wrong with the world and he is going to change it—radically.
5. The true believer is not intimidated by external
forces because he believes he possesses colossal power and he is entitled to
exercise power to change the world he sees fit. The TB’s power must come from a
potent doctrine, an infallible leader or some new technique.
6. The true believer has strong faith in the future that embodies
his version of a future paradise.
7. The true believer suffers from “extravagant” or
excessive hope and this results in reckless behavior.
8. The TB must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties and
complexities involved in his vast undertaking.
9. The TB loses himself in a vast undertaking because a
huge part of his motive is to lose or erase himself. Why? Because he hates who
he is and the only way he can relieve himself of this self-loathing is through
self-erasure. The more he loses himself in his radical movement, the more he
can run away from who he is. The TB must have an unlimited capacity for
self-renunciation.
10.
The TB joins an extreme
group because he hopes that in doing so he will get a new life, rebirth, the
chance to acquire pride, confidence, purpose, and identity, things that he life
has been woefully lacking in.
11.
The TB needs to find
faith in a “holy cause” because he has lost faith in himself. In other words,
his intensity for his cause is in proportion to his low self-esteem.
12.
The less a TB has reason to claim
excellence for himself, the more he will find reason to claim excellence for
his cause or ideology.
13.
The TB is fed up with
himself and wishes to distract himself from his self-loathing by snooping and
nosing and butting-in to the business of others. He is therefore a meddler and
an obnoxious do-gooder.
14.
The TB’s conviction that
he has found a higher calling that emancipates him from the Self and makes him
selfless afflicts him with a most noxious and unbearable vanity.
15.
The more the TB’s life
is full of despair and self-loathing, the more fanatical and passionate he is
in our backing his ideology.
16.
TBs are society’s least
worthy members. They are the undesirables and, sadly, because they join
extremist groups, they often afford more change than stable, productive people
who are content with being inert.
17.
TBs tend to be failures,
misfits, outcast, criminals, and all manner of throwaways and undesirables.
18.
The TB is NOT motivated
by altruism but by selfishness: the need to make his hated self disappear by
becoming obsessed and fanatical about his ideology.
Part
Two. Looking at the Imbecilities of Meeink’s Racist Ideology
1. The question is never asked: Is race biological or a
social invention, objective or subjective? There is a scene where some guy
talks about how Italians aren’t “really white.” Meeink, who is half Italian,
and whose daughter is mostly Italian, has a confrontation with the skinhead.
Questions of racial purity are arbitrary, subjective and unscientific. Look at
the scientific community and they’ll tell you THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC DEFINITION
OF RACE. RACE IS A MATTER OF PERCEPTION AND CHANGES FROM CULTURE TO CULTURE.
2. Skinhead theology is just that, a theology that
explains the world by breaking it into two simple racial groups, the pure and
the impure. Such an absurd over simplification is rooted in an infantile
fantasy.
3. Skinhead theology attracts failures and the
discontented who are too cowardly to blame themselves for their own failings.
Unable to take responsibility for their own failings, they create scapegoats,
the “racially impure” to “explain” their problems.
4. Skinhead theology is little more than a façade for a
violent gang that needs to justify its existence by relying on pseudo
intellectual claptrap.
5. A lot of people “grow out” of their skinhead phase.
They get a job, get married, grow up, have children, and looking back they see
their skinhead phase as a bad dream, a passing fever, an embarrassment to their
existence. Thousands of young men go to laser surgery tables to have their
skinhead tattoos removed so they can get their old life behind them.
6. The place where skinhead ideology thrives the most is
in prison because belonging to this gang is a business; it makes money for its
top gang leaders and it provides protection for inmates.
7. Meeink later said in an interview that his view of the
people he hated was based on theories, not reality. When he met blacks and
Latinos in prison, they were not at all like the representations he had read
about them. Much to his chagrin, blacks and Latinos accepted this guy with a
swastika tattoo in their athletic games and religious prayer meetings. Then a
Jew was kind to him when he got a job and he was shocked that the Jew was so
generous, contrary to all the propaganda he had read.
Part
Three: Reviewing the Causes of Meeink’s Conversion to a Racist Ideology
1. Looking to substitute basic needs with a fanatical
adherence to a perverse ideology
2. Looking for an easy explanation for one’s misery:
finding a scapegoat
3. Misguided search for love
4. Misguided search for power
5. Nihilism
6. Having the psychological profile of a True Believer,
as defined by Eric Hoffer
Terms
to Define in Groups for Your Paper
Learn
to write one-sentence definitions of important words for your paper. Example:
“Impoverishment through substitution”:
Impoverishment
through substitution is a trap in which the person tries feebly to replace
basic human needs like love and belonging with grotesque counterfeits such as
consumerism, fanatical ideologies, gluttony, text messaging addiction, etc.
Breakdown:
Subject followed by classification followed by distinguishing characteristics.
Subject
and verb: Impoverishment through substitution is
Classification:
a trap in which
Distinguishing
characteristics: the person tries feebly to replace basic human needs like love
and belonging with grotesque counterfeits such as consumerism, fanatical
ideologies, gluttony, text messaging addiction, etc.
In
one complete sentence, define the following terms in ways that can be used in
your research paper:
1. nihilism
2. True Believer
3. Skinhead Theology
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