Citizen Smash on Fellow traveler GILLIAN RUSSOM and friends.
June 5, 2004 (Video) Michael Berg Speaks.
Sept 16, 2004 Berg's father speaks for Kerry
It is incomprehensible to most of us that politics should be so pervasive to a human being that it trumps human decency. The problem with being a True Believer is that it becomes the purpose for living, a fantatical adherence to a cause, whether it is politics or religion.
A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves - and it does this by enfolding them and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole. - Eric Hoffer
This is why mass movements never achieve solutions. They aren't meant to solve problems. They exist to celebrate the disenchantment with society itself, to create a class of the disaffected who are powerless to achieve anything but serve as rabble to bolster the cause of those who organize them. Hoffer was a self-educated longshoreman. True Believer is a classic that helps the reader understand the mass movements that have convulsed Europe with communism, socialism, fascism in the 20th century. You can reread the book fifty times and walk away with new understanding every time.
OTHER BOOKS THAT ADD TO UNDERSTANDING
Psychologist and philosopher Victor Frankl experienced the horrors of national socialism in a concentration camp and came away with a philosophy for our times. Man's Search for Meaning is a slim volume that is readable and inspiring, a gift of life from a truly wonderful man.
Christopher Lasch was a keen observer of cultural. Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy was published after his death and suffers somewhat from lack of his precision editing. The online review by Caroline Miranda sums it up nicely, if Lasch can be summed up. He's more to be savored.
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