3 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. for - mass movements - how they fail - The Ecologist

      Summary - A good article exploring why mass movements fail, work for a journalist who has spent years writing about such movements. - In a nutshell, his observations are that modern history shows that leaderless movements are destined to fail because (social) nature abhors a vacuum.

  2. Dec 2023
    1. If I might attempt a sweeping generali-zation about the general course of hu-man history in the eighteen years thathave followed the War, I would describeit as a series of £lounderings, violent ill-directed mass movements, slack driftinghere and convulsive action there.

      How much did these movements inform @Hoffer1951 (2002)?

      Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Perennial Classics, 2002. https://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Movements-Perennial/dp/0060505915

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  3. Dec 2022
    1. to the success of Christianity’s victory over paganism, which hadtraditionally championed the pursuit of happiness and denouncedpain as evil. The triumph of suffering over pleasure had its mostextreme expression in the early monasteries.

      People clung to the promise of salvation. The idea that the more you suffered here on earth, the better your time would be in the afterlife was a potent shield against the desperate realities of everyday life in the fifth and sixth centuries. This doctrine was central

      Relationship to Eric Hoffer's thesis in The True Believer and mass movements' "hope for the future" even if the hope is for one's afterlife? This sort of hope can be seen in both Islam and Christianity