This last statement is what concerns me a great deal about the MAGA / Q movement. Absolute belief and almost deification of a movement/individual that will replace thought and reason.
I find it hard to take your comment seriously when you imply that unlike Communism, MAGA doesn’t have a saviour complex. The regard that many MAGA adherents hold Donald Trump could only be described as messianic.
EDITED to add that MAGA has its own canon of pseudo-theory based on the mythology of QAnon.
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements is a 1951 social psychology book by American writer Eric Hoffer that discusses the psychological causes of fanaticism.
The book analyzes and attempts to explain the motives of the various types of personalities that give rise to mass movements; why and how mass movements start, progress and end; and the similarities between them, whether religious, political, radical or reactionary. Hoffer argues that even when their stated goals or values differ mass movements are interchangeable, that adherents will often flip from one movement to another, and that the motivations for mass movements are interchangeable. Thus, religious, nationalist and social movements, whether radical or reactionary, tend to attract the same type of followers, behave in the same way and use the same tactics and rhetorical tools. As examples, the book often refers to Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Christianity, Protestantism, and Islam.
It's a core belief of progressivism; those who claim it isn't know it is but are interested in protecting a movement that gives them a means of attacking those they dislike.
I returned to this essay when I saw the photo of the Jake Angeli in the Capitol - a Q-supporter wearing an Indian buffalo mask and a tattoo of Odin, storming the capitol alongside evangelical Christians. Relevant quote:
This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.
As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.
[...]
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge—that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
One of the benefits of being cynical and jaded is that I see exactly where these kind of movements are going as soon as they get started. The new-atheism movement from a decade ago is one example, rationalist movement was another. The newest one is e/acc. While the movements themselves often die and fade away, their impact often does not.
Something strange happens when an idea becomes a movement and then it becomes an identity. Pretty soon the identity alters the movement which then subverts the idea. Next thing you know you see someone who claims the identity in a TED talk speaking ideas you would never personally support.
For that reason I don't just judge ideas on their own merits. I try to consider the movement that will arise around it. Then I try to consider the assumed identity of those caught up in the movement. Then I consider how a large number of individuals sharing an identity will reflect back onto the movement.
Also their congregation creates the conditions for other similar types of thinking and cross pollination of other niche ideas which explains Q-like, super-conspiracy groups that are like a rotating prix fixe menu of paranoid nativist memes and fit neatly adjacent to neo-nazi, sovereign citizen, and even incel movements.
I did not think they were. I do think the Q types are a moral-religious movement, or moral reference framework, of some kind in many ways. Perhaps sucked up by the void caused by the decline of mainstream Christianity in America. Just as the far-left progressive equality crowd (antifa, if you will) can be at times. That's why I made the comparisons.
I find it reminiscent of a religion in that adherents subscribe to certain ideals that can not be argued about ("it's the right thing to do" as the author says). My amateur psychologist analysis is that people need a higher cause, and in the absence of traditional religions they instead join political movements such as this one.
creep drew a difference between believing that there are absolute truths, and a "propensity to hold *their belief system as unquestionable absolute truth".
There's a difference between the two; the latter is basically one of the definitions of tyranny.
I agree with you that they are increasingly unified in those beliefs, but being unified doesn't make the beliefs true. Do you think that they are true, that their elders have in fact pulled up the ladder behind them?
In spirit, it reminds me of The True Believer [1], published about a decade later. Take Nazism and replace it with any other movement of discontent (just or unjust), and you have a general critique of mass movements a la Hoffer.
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