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Without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil
- ekianjo 3y agoThe current polarization is mainly due the social networks and the media in the digital age that lives on outrage. Any comparison with previous eras is moot.
- tchaffee 3y agoWhat was the cause in previous eras?
- totetsu 3y agoNewspapers and the radio
- bell-cot 3y agoI'm thinking that mass movements existed long before either of those technologies.
- tchaffee 3y agoThe French Revolution? USA Revolutionary War?
- watwut 3y agoThe press played a role in the French Revolution.
- tchaffee 3y agoThat's a fair point. However I think blaming media lacks evidence. If media were a primary cause rather than simply reporting on underlying frustration then I would expect even more revolutions as media becomes more widespread. That didn't happen with radio as far as I'm aware. Maybe it happened in some very oppressed areas with social media. But I think it would be very easy to confuse causation with reverse causation.
- watwut 3y agoAfaik, media before French revolution were not just reporting on existing frustrations. They were massively political, contained tons of completely made up lies for the sake of being sold or pushing agenda. There was no or not much expectation of objectivity or impartiality the way we project on media now. I do not mean to claim they were reason for the revolution, but more that the media as we know them now are basically tame compared to a lot that was written in the past. It takes more then just unhappiness and anger for revolution to happen anyway. The necessary condition is that the state must be weak and unable to suppress the threat to itself. You can hold people in arbitrary bad conditions for infinitely long time if you have enough power. And they won't do revolution, because you will make it impossible.
- tchaffee 3y agoThe parent claim is that polarization is so bad right now because of social media and the digital media. If the press is more tame now, wouldn't that result is in less polarization?
- watwut 3y agoI don't know. First of all, social media are not the press. Press overall being tame does not mean all of it is tame. Alex Jones is not a press, but he is media and definitely drives some of the polarization. Which leads to, polarization is not symmetrical. Some groups of society move toward extreme much faster then others. Also, we do have less polarization then France had before French revolution.
- tchaffee 3y agoAgreed - all good points. As far as comparing now to before the French Revolution though I hear an awful lot of folks threatening civil war these days in the US. I would never have predicted Jan 6th a decade ago. I kind of think the warning signs are almost always only accurately seen in hindsight.
- galdosdi 3y agoYes, perfect examples. Those all happened after the invention of the printing press and were fueled by newspapers and/or pamphlets, etc, to allow communication to flow much more quickly and efficiently. There was a time when the printing press was regarded as as scary a technology as radio would be later, TV would be later, and social media is today.
- tchaffee 3y agoThe claim was newspapers and radio. While the printing press may have played a role I don't think it's an accurate characterization to say the Revolutionary War was caused by newspapers fueling outrage. The causation is actually more likely reversed. The pamphlets were a result of outrage.
- josenyc 3y agoYou're not allowed to compare current polarization with past polarization? The article talks about the driving force behind the polarization which certainly could be compared.
- K0balt 3y agoI think you might have mean something like “ comparison with previous eras pales by comparison “ or something like that. Calling it moot is to say it’s meaningless. If you mean that it is on a whole different level, it would definitely not be moot.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thsksbd 3y agoOf course. It has nothing to do with a parasitical ruling class engineering an economy to flow resources in their direction and away from the economic future of the country. It has nothing to do with ballooning university tuitions that finance a bloated administration and fancy building while providing a much poorer education. It's all the ability of the proles to read uncensored news
- the-mitr 3y agopolarization always existed, social media has amplified it and not created it
- mattmanser 3y agoYou're wrong, all the digital age has done has amplify the speed. Outrage is a common theme of previous generations, you only have to take a casual glance at any decade to find a movement fuelled by outrage. The temperance movement that lead to prohibition. McCarthyism. Even the rise of Nazism.
- ekianjo 3y ago> You're wrong, all the digital age has done has amplify the speed. Of course not. Digital age has made measuring what works better to get clicks possible, and this has completely changed the incentives of the news industry.
- tchaffee 3y agoWhat were the incentives in the past and what are they now?
- sangnoir 3y agoAre you completely ignoring cable news networks and their decades-old rating mechanisms. Mass-media polarization started decades ago, what the internet made possible was to target the long tail of niches. 40 years ago, a conspiracy theory targeting Jordanian bakers[1] would have fizzled out after the first print-run of flyers in a small town, but today, it can be a self-sustaining forum with members all around the world egging each other on in their echo chamber. 1. As a random example
- mattmanser 3y agoEven mass media wasn't the beginning of it. There's lots of examples to look at in history of "outrage" that spread through a huge part of the world, for example inquisitions or witch trials. Slower, but I'm sure if you thought harder or had better knowledge of history than me you could come up with examples of things that happened before even the printing press was invented. There's probably plenty of examples in Roman history that spread out from Rome to its conquests.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoWe have such a divide due to the difference in education. It's primarily the uneducated who fall for nonsense arguments and don't see how they are being misled and used. There is no easy way to fix this, because they are resistant to education and wish to indoctrinate their children into their same nonsense beliefs. The only hope is that with access to the internet the kids will be able to teach themselves and break free.
- acdanger 3y agoSorry, do you mean the “un-educated” in your first paragraph? I’m having trouble understanding how the educated are the ones who resist education.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoYes, fixed.
- totetsu 3y agoI think they do
- CrzyLngPwd 3y agoOften people think they knw things they don't. Their cup is full already.
- tekla 3y agoLook at HN. People who are good at programming who know nothing about anything else, but post like they do.
- cykotic 3y agoIt's primarily the educated who fall for nonsense arguments and don't see how they are being misled and used. Are you able to justify this belief with anything more concrete than selective memory of anecdotal encounters?
- CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
- janwillemb 3y agoRadical organizations are indeed often very much alike. I've been part of a cult during 15 years, and I do recognize patterns in all other radical organizations and movements. One of the most striking is having a common enemy, often a fictitious one on closer inspection.
- jl6 3y agoDo you mean to say you were in a cult for 15 years and found a way out? Can you share which cult, and how you escaped?
- sgregnt 3y ago[flagged]
- janwillemb 3y agoYes, I have been part of one from age 17 to in my 30s. I don't want to appear in search results by mentioning the name literally, but it is a Scandinavian-based religious cult. I found a way out very slowly by connecting to other people with different ideas. It started with coaching from a psychologist and, funny enough, volunteering in a homeless community. Homeless people don't really care about me or what I think, which was very liberating. My wife grew up in the cult, and her father was one of the leaders. This made it difficult for her, but she shared my doubts and we were lucky we could do this process of leaving together. Other couples divorced on these things. We lost nearly all contact with her family, but we were again lucky to being able to build a new network around us. Leaving the cult had so much impact on our lives, we could never foresee it. Which was good, because we may never have done it is we knew beforehand. It has been 10-11 years now and the dust is finally settling. I am convinced that this was the right step for us, but I can never bear the responsibility of recommending others to go this same painful path. Sorry, there is way more to this story than this paragraph. If I can help someone by sharing more, we could communicate in some other way. Also, I'm not native English, so don't read nuances where they're not intended :)
- _thisdot 3y agoDon’t most groups have a common enemy as a bonding factor?
- jl6 3y agoQuite a similar line of thinking to the Unabomber’s “feelings of inferiority” analysis of “leftism”.
- photochemsyn 3y agoThe American Revolution against British colonial rule was a 'populist mass movement' that the vast majority of American citizens would agree was a good thing. This article reads a bit it was written by a British servant of the Crown giving advice to imperial administers on how to keep their colonists under control and head off any movement towards independence. More generally, mass movements often arise in situations where a small group with elite privileges (e.g. the French aristocratic class before 1790) rules over a much larger relatively impoverished group lacking any such privileges. A similar situation arose in the American South at the height of the plantation slavery system in the first half of the 19th century (of 10 million people in the US Confederacy, around 3.5 million were enslaved, and the majority of the wealth was held by a small group of plantation owner elites). Clearly, the author believes that mass movements are undesirable (since the author only references Mao and Hitler as examples of outcomes), but the French and American Revolution ushered in democracy on a large scale, which are generally good things. I suppose people who've been indoctrinated into belief in the superiority of the Ivy League elite schools system might think that democracy itself is unwise, and that rule by a small educated elite is preferable. Sometimes they'll even admit this in private, though rarely in public.
- pbj1968 3y agoAh yes, someone else noticed that the only personal example the author could provide was his time at Yale.
- stonetrw 3y ago>The American Revolution against British colonial rule was a 'populist mass movement' that the vast majority of American citizens would agree was a good thing. A lot of citations needed. The American revolution was a revolt of the upper class of the colonies against the upper class of England. The average colonist didn't particularly care one way or the other as can be seen by post war migration over the boarder into Canada and vice versa.
- ModernMech 3y agoI don’t think OP was talking about colonists, but American citizens of today.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoI may be reading it a bit defensively, but the article seems to be trivializing mass movements; "Oh it's just the middle class griping because they don't have a private jet." That mass movements coincide with a period of "betterment" is an interesting way to try to understand the civil rights and equal rights movements in the 50's and 60's. When the classes are no longer merely struggling to put food on the table they can rise up and demand something better than separate but equal education. And the comfortable and educated middle class white population had nothing to lose by joining those causes. At the same time if there is a growing frustration among the masses now I have no doubt it is being fueled by a wealth inequity that seems to shower all the accolades of life on a very select few. And not just private jets and private islands but exemption as well from the laws that govern the rest of us. Unlike many of my progressive friends, I understand the root frustration of the MAGA crowd and see something there that we are all frustrated about — those of us on both (all) sides. (As an aside, I discourage friends and family (and any who will listen) from having anything to do with any movement that embraces violence — whether on the "right" or "left". Because I believe any successful movement that relies on violence to succeed will then rule with violence. Not cool.)
- Michelangelo11 3y ago> That mass movements coincide with a period of "betterment" is an interesting way to try to understand the civil rights and equal rights movements in the 50's and 60's. These are specifically not what the author was talking about, since they had clearly defined goals that were achieved, as per: > The True Believer advises against supporting organizations without clear, attainable objectives. The dockyard philosopher reminds us that we should be skeptical of mass movements without clearly defined goals.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoI don't have a history background but I assume that the desegregation of schools for blacks and equal pay for women (and reproductive freedom since it just popped into my mind) seem pretty clearly defined.
- tetrep 3y ago> “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.” I think the elephant missed here is the focus on what we have or do not have instead of a focus on what we can attain. Mass movements are created and accelerated by the thought that things can be achieved through them. Regardless of how much you currently have, a mass movement is appealing if it offers you hope to get things you otherwise couldn't. If you think violent revolution will bring you immortality, that's a "pretty good deal" and you might want to take it. It's no surprise that many religions heavily depend on this for controlling and gaining followers. Being limited by your imagination, I think, is the driving force behind "your situation improves and then you revolt." Your situation improving can transition you from a hopeless "this is always how it will be (suffering)" to a "hey, things can change" mindset, which allows you to hope for and potentially even fight and die for a better future. It doesn't matter what you have, it matters what you can get.
- brutusborn 3y agoI think both ideas are consistent: movements gain momentum when you seem to lack one thing because the psychology is “we have good things A B and C, why can’t we have D?” People who don’t have anything just dream for A, so a movement promising them D isn’t effective.
- llm_nerd 3y agoThis is an extraordinary piece, and many of the quotes from this book are tremendous. Somehow I had never read it. It is shocking how so many replies are hostile or defensive. The author (or the author the author is citing) isn't even claiming that movements are bad, or giving any qualitative judgment (e.g. citations about equal rights or the American revolution as if they're counterpoints somehow seem off the mark), just noting the qualities of most movements and the environments in which they occur. If you're looking to engineer a group for some cause, even if the cause is ostensibly good, this is a good how to guide.
- louwrentius 3y ago[flagged]
- tonmoy 3y agoSpeaking a left leaning foreigner living in US, the left employs devil concept aplenty too
- adamsb6 3y agoThis comment is evidence of how successful the left has been in demonizing the right.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoHaving been raised on the right then switching to a more left-center view, I don't see how it's demonizing. The right of my youth and today idolize some imagined past that never existed and fixates on threats to reaching that ideal. 'Good' changes are almost always a return to something old and 'trustworthy'. Occasionally the left does get stuck on defeating some right-wing figure, settling for mediocre or even poorly suited candidates (cough Biden cough). Though more often I read/hear more about changes toward progressive goals than fear mongering.
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoWould the 2008 Obama campaign be a counter argument to this? So yes his schtick was “change from Bush”, but was it really hatred from the mass movement? I don’t recall feeling that back then, but definitely feeling a more inspirational vibe.
- philwelch 3y agoObama 2008 was a personality cult. Many successful presidential campaigns are.
- xNeil 3y ago*every successful presidential campaign is a personality cult.
- lamp_book 3y agoJoe Biden? Pretty much the quintessential Not the Other Guy vote.
- Nevermark 3y agoSometimes "Not the other Guy" has a charisma all of its own!
- memling 3y agoPerhaps every modern campaign. James Garfield is a counterexample from history...but of course he was shot and subsequently killed by the doctors.
- tootie 3y agoI don't think the Obama campaign really maps to being a "movement" in the sense of the author. Presidential elections happen whether or not there's a movement. A lot of his most ardent supporters may have been motivated by similar feelings, but not most people who voted for him and it's not like he exploited their devotion for anything beyond the normal responsibilities of being president.
- userabchn 3y agoIt reminds me of works by Adam Curtis, especially The Power of Nightmares.
- eduction 3y agoCasting all mass movements as essentially dysfunctional, as this piece does, only works for “bad” movements like those that produced Naziism in Germany or communism as it was practiced in the USSR. Or perhaps prohibition of alcohol in the US in the early 20th century. But the US Civil Rights Movement that ended official and systematized racial discrimination against minorities was also a mass movement. The labor movement that gave us the 8 hour workday and weekends was also a mass movement. Women’s suffrage, abolition of slavery, and US independence from Britain also came out of mass movements. It’s silly to say that all these were manifestations of emotional dysfunction by participants.
- tootie 3y agoSome movements actually have an enemy.
- brutusborn 3y agoI think he would argue that those movements effectively ended when they achieved their goals. I don’t know the history well but I think you could look at the civil rights movement as ending due to progress, then restarting a long time those gains were made and frustration has rebuilt. I’ve heard a lot of talk from US political commentators about reparations and Black Lives Matter, but both groups seem to fit his definition of a mass movement without explicit goals.
- jscipione 3y agoWhy did you lowercase God? It is uppercase in the linked article: “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without a belief in a devil.”
- praash 3y agoA cult leader, a saint, a god. A devil, a scapegoat, a convenient category of people who are "wrong". Why'd a god be special over any other one?
- jscipione 3y agoThis is the kind of confusion that could have been avoided by Bostonian using Bob Henderson’s capitalization of God. The author was referring to the almighty creator of Heaven and Earth. Whether you believe in such a concept or not doesn’t matter, what matters is that the link text was intentionally changed by Bostonian confusing the Hacker News reader as to the author’s intended meaning.
- cubefox 3y agoIf it's "a god" (with article), "god" is a general term, like "chair" in "a chair". If it's just "God" (without article), then "God" is a name, and names are, for some reason, uppercase in English. General terms are almost never upper case, apart from beginnings of sentences, and some confusing exceptions like "American" (country / language adjective). (I'm not a native speaker though)
- nofashsmash 3y agoThis site (HN) is a fascist-infested cesspit. It is by far the worst “tech” site in existence. Burn it down.
- jocaal 3y agoIf you hate it so much, why are you here?
- Aerbil313 3y agoIslamic mass movements in modern day are unlike these described in the article. They stop once the objective (bringing Sharia to the country) is achieved. This may be due to that Islam already gives people's lives meaning without revolting.
- slotrans 3y agoSee also this piece from 2017, of the same title and commenting on the same book https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-never-without-belief-in-a-devil/ https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-n... This is part of a series of articles called "Uruk Machines" -- https://samzdat.com/the-uruk-series/ https://samzdat.com/the-uruk-series/ -- which profoundly changed how I see the world. Use caution.
- akomtu 3y agoThe author describes in academic terms what books less academic call an egregore - a collective charge of negative emotions, with an equivalent of conscioussness, that encourages its members to treat others with suspicion and hatred so they would produce more of those negative emotions that feed the egregore. The name itself is apparently a mix of words "egregious", "ogre" and "gore" - a spot on description of an egregore. Without an organized faith, without a belief in a greater good, in the idea of unity in particular, the average masses would fall to nihilism - a midpoint between a god worship and a devil worship. But any movement, no matter how good it is initially, is made of people that aren't perfect, and their selfish feelings eventually create that egregore.
- tamimio 3y agoIt’s very simple, who’s the entity that benefits from such polarization? That’s your enemy, not the other side of the spectrum.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- everybodyknows 3y agoI've read Hoffer's book. One aspect of it the article neglects is that all the movements studied were cults of an individual personality: Martin Luther, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, a few others. This perspective does not fit the Soviet Union entirely well -- I forget how Hoffer addresses that objection. The book is not long, and a lively read, highly recommended. Sample: Hoffer quotes a low-level "true believer" as exclaiming "We Nazis are the happiest people in the world!"
- jl2718 3y agoWhen we study ants, we do not begin with a belief that their behavior is wrong or improper. We assume that they act in a way that is required for their survival and proliferation. It would be ‘nice’ to say that such things are just a social dysfunction that we can safely avoid. They may not be. A lemming that follows the herd may find that it has led them off a cliff, but a lemming that doesn’t will certainly die. We may now have better options to opt out. I’m mostly speaking to the relatively wealthy, skilled, and able. But I’m not sure. Opting out of one hysteria may also require membership in another such mass movement, complete with an obvious enemy, and a ridiculous but necessary set of rituals to convince others that we are not a threat. I’ve believed throughout most of my life that communications and especially privacy technology would give us better options. I’m not sure it’s ending up that way. I see great technological developments in that direction, but almost all social developments in their use going the opposite way. I think what these things come down to is each individual assessing a practical threat to themselves and reacting accordingly. I don’t generally accept explanations that assume entire populations acting wholly irrationally. It can also probably be seen as arising from material conditions such as increased resource scarcity, which is a tautological result of economic cycles, regardless of how the economists may measure their positive effect. This view requires extraordinary sociological imagination, to consider what type of situation that you could find yourself in, which would lead you to switch sides on your most ardent beliefs. That situation is therefore the threat, not the people, but it may be unavoidable. I believe that people are smart and compassionate and empathetic and do realize this, but it doesn’t affect their best option for actions, posturing, and espoused beliefs.
- cm277 3y agoI like the analogy with ants; we can observe ants, understand that their own individual needs / programming create emergent group behaviors and say "oh, that's why that colony behaves as it does" (making the colony of millions of ants into an individual somehow). But when it comes to humans, we waste too much intellectual effort on the individuals and not on the group, i.e. on why and how the social group / team emerges and behaves as it does. For example, it's pretty clear to me that whether you are talking about a startup team, or a cult, or a religious group, or a political party (the smaller the party, the truer this is) one of the core aspects of social organization is recruiting: i.e. why can you attract people to your group. That messaging is important and has to work and it has to address some core human/individual need, but after you make it work, adding people to your group becomes easier. Now, conversely, if that startup is not doing very well, or that political party doesn't look like it will get power, the messaging / recruiting mechanism becomes much more important: it's how the group is tied together and how it survives (by attracting more people / replacing attrition). At that point, for the people in the group that need the group to continue, recruiting becomes a primary goal; more so than even the actual operative / paper goal of the group (profit, political power, whatever). That's where niche marketing / issue of the day becomes more important than ever: join our startup/party to provide alternative food sources to the world; to shift the world's consciousness; to provide justice to those wronged; whatever. To me that's a core failure point, where the startup/party/group should just fold up tents and do something else. They are wasting energy just to keep being a group rather than achieve an end result (their original goal). But we, as social animals (ants as per the OP) can't/won't see that far. We just keep on grinding.