The True Believer summary

Have you ever considered what makes a mass of people – participants in a demonstration, for instance – so powerful? It’s certainly not a result of each person’s individuality, of each personal decision and doubt. It’s because these people act collectively. Accordingly, mass movements are strongest when many people function together, forming a single unit.

Why?

Have you ever been to a football game and, when booing the opposing team, felt totally united with the crowd of like-minded fans, each of whom is, like you, following every move of your team’s star player? Well, something similar plays out in mass movements.

Having a common enemy to unite against is a crucial part of mass movements. In fact, the more powerful their enemy, the more united the members of a movement will feel. Consider the Nazis. Rallying their followers against the Jews, who they perceived as wealthy and influential, was crucial to their success.

To build an IKEA shelf you of course need all the necessary materials. You also need a manual that tells you how to put them together. The same is true for mass movements: in order to start one, someone needs to put its goals and doctrines into language.

The best people for this task tend to be “men of words,” people like philosophers and scholars who are trusted for their knowledge. For instance, the French Enlightenment philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau set the ideological foundation for the unborn French Revolution. Even Jesus Christ was a man of words, and his teachings began one of history’s largest mass movements, Christianity.

Just as two plants can have a similar appearance, be related and yet have drastically different properties, so too can mass movements. For instance, tomatoes, a fruit loved by many, are in the same family as the nightshade, a lethally poisonous flower.

So the fact that two mass movements are of the same nature doesn’t mean they share the same goals. For example, fanatical belief in a doctrine is a common impulse that can have many different results, depending on what that specific doctrine says.