What we're reading: The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

When I was writing for a newspaper, I met a man who, in trying to memorize a complicated mathematical proof of his own concoction, wrote his equation on the inside of a paper bag, and walked around his attic apartment with the paper bag on his head for four days until he had it down pat.

He is what we call a wingnut. This is not the medical term. Nor is it, I imagine, the politically correct one.

I think of wingnuttery as working on a V-shaped spectrum. My paper-bag-wearing friend, strange but benign, might be the bottom point of the V. As we head up the right side, we get political wingnuts like George W. Bush and, further up, Joseph Stalin. Along the left side, we get pontificating wingnuts like Eric Hoffer and, further up, Noam Chomsky.

And pretty much anyone who blogs because they feel like they have something interesting to say. Hi, pot. Meet kettle. Anywho...

The story on Hoffer goes like this. When he was seven, his mom fell while carrying him downstairs, and young Eric went blind.

When he turned 15, his eyesight magically reappeared, and he began reading as much as he could as fast as he could, lest his eyesight go away again.

Hoffer never graduated high school, but he read. A lot.

His first and best-known book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements came out in 1951, when the world was reeling from World War II, Hitler, Stalin and the vague beginnings of the Cold War.

The True Believer reads like a how-to guide for any pretentious human who wishes to start and maintain a revolution, then oversee the final result when it's done being a revolution.

With the perspective of 50-plus years since the book's publication, the guide still holds up. To run a revolution, you need people who can write, people who can convince (oratorically and forcefully) and people who can organize.

To get people on board with your revolution, make sure the past looks glorious and the present looks bleak (but not desperate – people who spend their days hunting for scraps of food aren't going to get behind a cause). Also, people who are bored make great revolutionaries.

To keep people on board after you've reached critical mass, make sure they don't think too much.

To me, the most striking point makes a lot of sense: Someone prone to revolution will get behind pretty much any revolution; it doesn't matter what the cause is.

The book is going to appeal to a narrow cross-section of people: Those with a large vocabulary (words like religiofication and renascence pop up every other paragraph) who don't mind specious citations (the one source I was interested in exploring was in Section 8; when I got to the footnote, it told me to refer to Section 111 – not only is he using the current work as the source, he's using something 100 pages after what you're reading as the source).