Blurb: A
stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, Eric Hoffer wrote
philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer –the first
and most famous of his books – became a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited
it during one of the earliest televised press conferences. Completely relevant
and essential for understanding the world today, The True Believer is a
visionary, provocative look into the mind of the fanatic and a penetrating
study of how an individual becomes one.
The
author: Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) was self-educated and lived the life of a drifter
through the 1930s. After Pearl Harbor, he worked as a longshoreman in San
Francisco for twenty-five years. He is the author of ten books, including The
Passionate State of Mind, The Ordeal of Change, and The Temper of
Our Time. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983 and died
later that year.
This book
first came to my attention in 2010, after the failed IPCC summit on climate
change in Copenhagen in December 2009, followed by the “climategate” emails of
the preceding months, had all of a sudden cast doubt on what was arguably the
most significant mass movement of the age. The scare was not quite what is had
been hyped up to be, but certain people, even to this day, still cling doggedly
to the belief that the world is warming up and mankind is primarily to blame,
especially through our emission of carbon dioxide. Back in 2010, I noticed that
such people were being labelled as “true believers”, and the purport was that
such people’s faith never wavered in the slightest, regardless of the
ever-emerging cracks or even overwhelming evidence that what they had called
for and advocated no longer held up under scrutiny. For further details, one had to read Eric
Hoffer’s book, which was first published in 1951.
In
previous blog posts, it has been pointed out the truth is not something that
everyone is sincerely seeking, and the proof is that the majority of humanity
lives and dies upon other than Islam. Therefore, demonstrating that
something is undoubtedly true is not always enough to convince someone, because
it is not minds and intellects that are diseased; it is hearts. Furthermore, this
book was first mentioned on this blog in relation to a post about the
religiosity of the AGW movement, and the lady who appears in the debate with Viscount Monckton would fit the description of the “true believer” perfectly. Again,
one can see that the truth is not the primary motivator.
