Motus Mentis

From The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer:

“When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.”

It is remarkable how seductive the kinds of passions now driving our civilization to ruin can be. This is not least because passion itself is seductive: the idea that one has got hold of something so potent that all rules of order can justifiably be discarded is an electrifying feeling. Ordinary life is often dull, and when not dull it often chafes; duty is often unpleasant; rules are by their nature restrictive. To be able to say that a holy cause gives one a license to chuck all of that out of the window is enormously liberating.

But for those to whom ordered liberty is so unsatisfying, real freedom can be a terrible, even an unbearable burden — and this is the appeal of the mass movement, of the mob. To stand before the Universe as a radically free individual can be far too much to bear, but to subsume one’s individual responsibility within the compact unity of a mass movement is to act, in essence, by proxy — with the mob, not the self, as the locus of agency. In this way one enjoys the ecstasy of destruction, of dancing around a great bonfire, without any of the terror of personal accountability.

History has shown us how this works time and time again. That is one of the reasons that history has to go.