Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union is Wrong*

*In Foreign Policy, Leon Aron explains in great detail why Eric Hoffer has become my favorite explainer of The True Believer. At 168 pages this work displays a dense fluidity manifesting itself in the mind as a beacon of truth about Mass Movements. The blog post above offers an empirical capsule that gives His Supreme Holliness, Lord Eric Hoffer my admiriation. He is my Higher Power for July - he is my Birthday HP.


[prefuctory nod to Paco's 'science' of economics]"Certainly, there were plenty of structural reasons -- economic, political, social -- why the Soviet Union should have collapsed as it did, yet they fail to explain fully how it happened when it happened. How, that is, between 1985 and 1989, in the absence of sharply worsening economic, political, demographic, and other structural conditions, did the state and its economic system suddenly begin to be seen as shameful, illegitimate, and intolerable by enough men and women to become doomed?"

From The True Believer

• Mass movements begin when things start to improve
• When change is 'right around the corner' the individual in a community gives up her autonomy for the movement.
• Mass Movements are religions
• The individual identity is subsumed by the group
• Members of a movement despise themselves as unfulfilled or nullified agents without individual identity.
• Mass Movements collapse when the post-modernist intellegencia on the fringes take over.