Applying Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer to Frank Meeink’s conversion to a racist ideology.
Option #1: In a 5-page research paper, analyze the conditions that made Frank Meeink ripe for racist brainwashing and the forces that unshackled him from the chains of his 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. He is so desperate to belong and find personal change that he questions nothing about the group's doctrine. Instead, he embraces everything with enthusiasm. As such, the TB is often called a "Kool-Aid Drinker," a colloquial term that comes from the Jim Jones mass suicide, which entailed the drinking of Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.
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. Sometimes you need to use a word or phrase for your reader that requires a definition.
A formal definition for an essay should include the following:
1. the term
2. the classification
3. distinguishing characteristics
Examples:
Debauchery is a condition of moral collapse.
Acedia is a form of depression caused from a prolonged lack of focus and purpose in life.
Gossip is a ritual that feeds our appetite for feeling morally superior to those who are the subject of our salacious whispers.
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.
Redemption is the process in which you turn your life around to atone for past sins and misdeeds.
The Fall is part of one's life journey in which one confuses false success with "the good life" resulting in a precipitous descent into blindness, delusion, and moral dissolution.
In one complete sentence, define ONE OF the following terms in ways that can be used in your research paper:
1. True Believer
2. Skinhead Theology
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