Mass Movements and Suddenness

"It is a truism that many who join a rising revolutionary movement are attracted of the prospect of sudden and spectacular change in their conditions of life.  A revolutionary movement is a conspicuous instrument of change." 
-- Eric Hoffer

This is the beginning of a seven-essay series I'm writing from True Believer, the 1951 book written by Eric Hoffer, which drills down into mass movements and how various agenda groups 'stage' an event or two....to captivate an audience and drum up support for sudden change.

One of the odd features of mass movements is that they typically don't involve people over the age of fifty.  It's hard to convince older people of some event requiring you to stage a revolution for change.  This is the crowd with a skeptical nature....questioning the need for irrational behavior or the sudden arrival of some emergency.

A chief selling point of this mass movement strategy is that people are naive enough to think that sudden change (of any type) will bring about success or good fortune.  Statistically, you can't prove that statement though.

One of the great problems of this mass movement strategy is that you often find people who are in the midst of a great landscape, and they don't see a necessity to get hyped up for revolution.  These are the people least likely to buy into suddenness.  And on the other side of this....you have the group who are frustrated with disenchantment brewing.  This is the group that would like to doors opened and problems resolved.  Suddenness is easy to buy into with this group. 

Oddly enough, all of this attraction involves 'sudden-change'....not something that occurs in ten to twenty years.....but in a much shorter timespan.  This is usually where some individual is telling you that climate change is underway and unless you do something in ten years....the world will end.  A naive guy will buy into sudden change pretty easy at that point.  An older guy will be skeptical and ask questions. 

So when you are confronted with some agenda and it just seems to 'tingle' or swing back and forth....with urgentness and suddenness attached, ask yourself if this is real or fake.