Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious to his weal and future, frees him of jelousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous partical quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. [...] Mass movements can rise and spread without a belief in God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he thought that the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: “No… we should then have to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.” F. A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member what he thought of the movement. He replied: “It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can’t, because we haven’t got any Jews.”
When we renouce the self and become part of a compact whole, we not only renoucne personal advantage, but are also rid of personal responsiblity. There is no telling what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go to when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgement. When we loose our individual independence into the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom—freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame or remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of mass movements. We find the “right to dishonor”, which according to Dostoyevsky has an irrisistible fascination. Hitler had a contemptuous opinion of the brutality of an autonomous indivisual: “Any violence which does not spring from a firm spiritual base will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.”
Thus, hatred is not only a means of unification, but also its product. Renan says that we have never, since the world began, heard of a merciful nation. Nor have we heard of a merciful church or a merciful revolutionary party. The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared to the venom and ruthlessness that is born of selflessness.
When we see bloodshed, terror and destruction born from such generous enthusiasms as the love of God, love of Christ, love of nation, compassion for the oppressed and so on, we usually blame this shameful perversion on a cynical, power-hungry leadership. Actually, it is the unification set in motion by these enthusiasms, rather than the manipulation of scheming leaders that transmutes noble impulses into a reality of hatred and violence.
-- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
-- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer