Right before Thanksgiving, social media’s latest viral star was born: a Cambridge academic named Ally Louks, who posted a photo of herself on X posing with her successful dissertation only to generate hundreds of thousands of comments mocking her work due to its title, “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose.” Having not read her opus, neither I nor the vast majority of commenters are in a position to judge its merit, but the text itself is really beside the point of why so many people were nonetheless primed to erupt so vehemently. Popular perceptions of academics at prestigious institutions, of the things they study and the ways they write and the politics they hold, are deeply divided for a reason. People reacting to Louks were really reacting to whatever earlier experiences they’ve had with other academics holding preposterous beliefs alongside overweening confidence that they’re the sort of meritocrats who know how to reorder society and deserve the right to rule over others.
It’s not entirely academics’ fault that so many are so prone to groupthink, naivete, and utopian fantasies. It’s hard to know what you don’t know, especially when your whole career and identity are wrapped up in notions of intellectual superiority. Just ask any starving postdoc or adjunct, or even their tenure-track colleagues: Trying to make a career in academia takes an obscene amount of time and sacrifice. Getting into the right schools and programs, impressing the right people, accruing the right credentials, furiously publishing enough not to perish, and hopefully someday winning tenure all add up to a grueling uphill slog that doesn’t leave much room for extracurricular explorations.
To finally somehow make it in that milieu is almost necessarily to have passed up on years of diverse life experience in favor of endless hours in libraries, classrooms, and conferences, interacting primarily with fellow self-selected strivers rather than a more representative cross-section of humanity. So, it’s little wonder that the ivory tower, and particularly its upper floors, has become ever more sequestered in recent decades. As a result, as I saw constantly during my years chronicling Columbia University, broad swaths of academic literature now rival the worst of medieval scholasticism for sheer irrelevance, going all but unread for good reason.
In the starkest of contrasts, the 1951 classic The True Believer, by the legendary Eric Hoffer, remains every bit as relevant as it was on its day of publication. The precise details of Hoffer’s exceedingly picaresque life story are hazy, but for whatever his probable embellishments, the proof positively radiates from the text that, in some way or other, he lived a far more varied and colorful life than most scholars of his time, or ours.
A voracious autodidact, Hoffer apparently didn’t attend college and purportedly spent his first few decades of adulthood — years most academics are socially and spiritually confined to campus — variously as a vagrant, a drifter, a migrant worker, a prospector for gold, and most verifiably as a longshoreman on the San Francisco docks before publishing his first and most famous volume around age 50 (and later becoming an adjunct at Berkeley). Whatever question marks in his biography, there’s no question he spent that half-century honing keen insights into human nature as it is rather than how ideologues would prefer it to be.
“The burning conviction that we have a holy duty towards others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft,” Hoffer writes in one passage. Elsewhere he expands the thought: “A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence … by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.”
Pithily delving into the histories and psychologies of dehumanizing mass movements spanning communism, fascism, and other spasms of revolutionary fervor, The True Believer’s core focus is exploring how ordinary and even upstanding citizens can be drawn to bloodthirsty madness, even when they have no history of violence. Hoffer’s explanations are, in short, restless boredom, a critical mass of comfort and free time, and above all, the persistent desire of human beings to slough off our fragile individual identities and petty concerns in favor of transcendent crusades.
Different factions have tapped The True Believer for different political purposes over the decades — a sign of a volume with universal pertinence, no doubt. Almost 20 years after Hoffer’s death in 1983, the book surged back into the popular discourse as thinkers struggled to understand the jihadism behind the 9/11 attacks, and it has remained a frequently cited touchstone as partisans have sought to smear their domestic opponents as an undifferentiated mass of dangerous lunatics. A typical liberal leafing through The True Believer might draw parallels with QAnon or the more gung-ho fringes of MAGA, for instance, but in my experience, the ideological derangements that have afflicted left-leaning institutions over the past 10 or 15 years offer at least as dramatic demonstration of Hoffer’s evergreen insights.
In the stampede to affirm Black Lives Matter, people who even now still consider themselves sober technocrats eagerly demonized police, sanctified rioters, and denounced such bedrock civic principles as equality under the law. And, during the surreal COVID regime, a lot of folks who’d always presented themselves as mild-mannered moderates grew intoxicated on punitive authoritarianism and actively called for the debanking, excommunication, and even outright starvation of the apostates who dared defy the holy word of Anthony Fauci and the public health establishment. Just as Hoffer might have expected, upscale professionals with impressive credentials and three-digit IQs proved no less susceptible to the lure of a mob mentality than the drunken rabble in a beer hall putsch.
For the moment, revolutionary fervor has subsided in America, and something closer to sanity has prevailed. But zealous embers still glow in every human heart, waiting for that next opportunity to be fanned into a bonfire of messianic fury. Eric Hoffer’s uniquely grounded, worldly, and interdisciplinary work provides a timeless reminder that academic scholarship is but a subset of the larger universe of human learnedness and wisdom. It’s why he’ll still be read, remembered, and revered well after almost every scholar with vastly more formal education has long since been forgotten.
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Jesse Adams is the writer and consultant behind The Ivy Exile on Substack.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
