When you feel like your life is a failure, when you feel there is nothing you can do to fix it, then you will be attracted to a mass movement.
It doesn’t matter what the mass movement might be. All that matters is that can immerse yourself into the mob. All that matters is that you can separate yourself from your own sense of personal failure.
This is one reason why mass movements attract younger people. They do not have a well-developed sense of self. Belonging to a movement gives them a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives.
This reality is a feature of the human operating system. It is not a bug. We cannot remove it. It’s part of the hardware, a malevolent part at that.
Think back to the circumstances that surrounded the rise of Nazi Germany. The Germans had just lost WWI. The Treaty of Versailles mandated that Germany repay the costs of the war. Not just their own costs, but the costs all other nations incurred because of fighting the war.
The German economy is already in terrible shape as a result of losing the war. In addition, they’ve lost an entire generation of young men. THen, layer the treaty conditions on top of the poor economic conditions. It creates an impossible situation. The German nation is doomed to decades of perpetual servitude.
Imagine you are a young person coming of age during the Weimar Republic. You are a citizen of Germany, a nation that was once one of the greatest civilizations in history. Your nation gave birth to Goethe and Einstein, to Martin Luther and Leibniz and Immaneul Kant and Johann Sebastian Bach. Geniuses who created the modern world.
And now, your nation is reduced to perpetual bare-subsistence living. You are subject to ruinous inflation. Your economy is in shambles. Your cities are in shambles. Cultural life is in shambles. The political sphere is a mess. It is the very definition of institutional hopelessness.
Someone who offered the chance to escape the misery of that situation would find a willing audience, wouldn’t they? People anxious to shed their miserable lives in exchange for a sense of purpose and meaning would be open to such an offer.
It happened to be Nazism. But it just as easily could’ve been Marxism or Fascism or even religious revivalism. Those things happened in Russia and Italy. They happened in China and Cambodia. They happened – to a lesser extent – in North America during the 1820s.
You and I are subject to the same sorts of hysteria. Our young people are even more subject to it. The crushing burden of student debt cannot be relieved. The value of college educations has been inflated into worthlessness.
The self-esteem movement has spawned a generation of people who lack resilience. Young adults were never given the tools for dealing with difficulty, let alone conflict.
So of course, they are attracted by the siren song of radical socialists and intersectional identitarians.
How do we inoculate them against such madness? The answer is not discipline. The answer is not education. The answer is not jobs.
The answer is “meaning.” We must train our children how to build a meaningful life for themselves.
A person who finds individual meaning in their own life will be immune to the lures of crazy mass movements.