Major Hasan — A True Believer
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Here’s a quiz that may appear some day on history
tests:
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in
November 2009, was:
a) Part of a terror network that
had planned attacks on the United States since the
1990s;
b) A deranged psychotic who
snapped under the pressure of treating soldiers returning from
Iraq and who happened to be a Muslim;
c) A prime example of “The
True Believer,” the lonely, frustrated individual who attaches
himself to an overarching cause as a way of compensating for
personal disappointments.
The answer, of course, is “c,” the true believer.
There is no sense in searching his computer for ties to al Qaeda,
or combing the psychology textbooks for a diagnosis, or listening
to the journalistic sages such as Newsweek
editor Evan Thomas, who says he “cringed” to discover that
such an obvious lunatic as Major Hasan also happened to be a
Muslim. The text for understanding Major Hasan’s actions is Eric
Hoffer’s 1951 classic, The True Believer,
written as an explanation of the appeal of secular
religions in the 20th century. Hoffer’s
book also explains why there will be many, many more Major
Hasans.
Almost completely forgotten now and rarely encountered in
the college curriculum, The True Believer
was a dazzling explanation of why 20th century totalitarian
creeds appealed to so many seemingly ordinary and non-descript
individuals, particularly among the intelligentsia. A
self-educated migrant worker who spent many years living on skid
row, Hoffer had been endowed with a love of reading after losing
his eyesight temporarily as a child and then regaining it again
as a teenager. It was only after spending a winter cooped up in a
mountain cabin with a copy of Montaigne’s Essays
while prospecting for gold in Alaska, however, that he
became convinced he could write. Hoffer eventually settled in as
a longshoreman on the San Francisco docks, publishing The
True Believer at age 49 and following with
several more classics. A blue-collar worker all his life, Hoffer
was probably the original Reagan Democrat — and indeed was
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Reagan in
1983.
Writing just as Americans were trying to fathom the causes
of the Cold War, Hoffer provided an astute, sometimes brutal,
explanation of why millennial sects of communism and fascism
appealed to seemingly ordinary individuals:
A mass movement attracts and holds a following not
because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but
because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.…
Their innermost craving is for a new life — a rebirth — or,
failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride,
confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an
identification with a holy cause.… To the frustrated, a mass
movement offers substitutes either for the whole self or for
the elements which make life bearable and which they cannot
evoke out of their individual resources.
To Hoffer, this dissatisfaction with the personal life was
the only thing that could lead to the level of self-renunciation
–and even self-destruction — that mass movements often required
of their followers:
All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to
die and a proclivity for united action: all of them,
irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they
project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and
intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful
flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them
demand blind faith and single-hearted allegiance.
Mass movements taught people to aspire a perfect world
rather than the profane one around them, a glorious future rather
than the sordid present, an ideal and perfect community rather
than the uncertain company of their fellow men. In many ways they
resembled religions — and indeed, Hoffer said all the major
religions were mass movement in their earliest stages. “Though
ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious,”
he noted. And while the secular religions of communism and
fascism had disposed of God, they certainly had not abandoned the
Devil. Unbridled hatred of an enemy, real or imagined, was the
core of every fanatical creed.
Mass movements thrived amidst unanticipated poverty and in
the disruptions of war, Hoffer wrote. But their core appeal was
to the personal failings of individuals. Moreover, “a
proselytizing mass movement deliberately fosters in its adherents
a frustrated state of mind,” disrupting wherever it could the
ordinary satisfactions of normal life:
Almost all our contemporary movements showed in their early
stages a hostile attitude toward the family, and did all they
could to discredit and disrupt it. They did it by undermine the
authority of the parents; by facilitating divorce; by taking
over the responsibility for feeding, education and entertaining
the children; and by fostering illegitimacy. [Any resemblance
to the contemporary Democratic Party's social agenda, by the
way, is purely coincidental.]
The core of mass movement, then, was a hatred of the
present. And of course Western democratic societies, which had
succeeded in raising the comforts and conveniences of everyday
life to the highest levels in history, were always the object of
the greatest scorn:
All the true believers of our time — whether Communist, Nazi,
Fascist, Japanese or Catholic — declaimed volubly (and the
Communist still do) on the decadence of Western democracies.
The burden of their talk is that in the democracies people are
too soft, too pleasure-loving and too selfish to die for a
nation, a God or a holy cause. Thus lack of readiness to die,
we are told, is indicative of our inner rot — a moral and
biological decay. The democracies are old, corrupt and
decadent. They are no match for the virile congregations of the
faithful who are about to inherit the earth.
Contemporary Fundamentalist Islam, then, is just the latest
in a long line of fanaticisms that has challenged the mettle of
Western values. But Islam is also a pure religion that is
complete with a doctrine of Heaven and Hell. Unlike Communism and
Fascism, it does not just challenge the outcome of history but
the entire meaning of life. “We love death” is something no
secular religion would say. While ordinary American communists
may have been willing to spy for the Russians and betray their
country in the belief that the Soviet Union represented a perfect
society, they never engaged in random mass murder.
And while all religions may at times solicit the fanaticism
of mass movements, their doctrines are not all interchangeable.
Martyrdom is a concept common to all, for example, but its
purposes are different. Christian martyrdom involves being
persecuted or killed while spreading the gospel or witnessing for
the faith. Buddhist monks immolated themselves in the streets in
South Vietnam in protest of the repressive Diem government. But
for Islam, “martyrdom” means not only killing yourself but
taking others with you.
Suicide bombers do not blow themselves up in
private.
In addition, while other religions may have gone through
fanatical early stages, most have become institutionalized, often
serving as the backbone for a civilization. Islam, on the other
hand, never seems to have settled down to the point where it
could foster a stable society. Jihad is forever. Even the fabled
caliphs, rulers of Islam’s idealized past, were constantly being
overthrown by outsiders who decreed that what being was practiced
in the palaces of elite was not the “true Islam.” None of them
died in bed.
Probably this is because, unlike all the other major
religions, Islam embraces polygamy. Allowing the most powerful
males to take multiple wives produces a shortage of eligible
females, which in turn leads to the purchase of wives (the
“brideprice,”), the hoarding and sequestering of females as
valuable commodities, arranged marriages with girls that have not
even reached puberty, and — most important of all — the
creation of a large cohort of unattached adult males who serve as
the fertile breeding ground for religious fanaticism.
Major Hasan was one of them. Unmarried, isolated in a
foreign culture (even though he grew up here), he was obviously
prime material to become a foot soldier in a higher cause. Jihad
offered a better life, in this world or the next.
So the Fort Hood massacre will likely produce no “smoking
gun,” no bank transfers or detailed instructions from a worldwide
network of radical imams. Islamic fundamentalism is no secret
conspiracy. It is something much more obvious — an open doctrine
appealing to frustrated men in a culture that specializes in
producing men with frustrations. To such a cohort, the stable,
satisfied — even happy — lives of people living in a successful
culture can only be the objects of venomous hatred.
Major Hasan was only one. There will be more to
come.
