911 threads have been quiet, lately, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to move things here to Miscellany. I put forward the following out as a suggestion and solicit your response: In the interest of house keeping and as a courtesy to those of us who may not wish participate in these threads, I wonder what the board would think about restricting posts concerning the 911 conflict to a single thread. When and if the thread reaches say 90 posts, a continuation thread will be started, and no more posts will be made to the old thread. If we keep the thread short of 100 posts, we won't be stuck having to open two pages. Yes, Anna, with the server busy as it seems to be, all of us are native narrow band-widthers, now. .

end of the house keeping

It is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Eric Hoffer's topical "The True Believer," and the Wall Street Journal published some excerpts from it, today. The book presents the opportunity, as John McDonough writes, for a timely look at fanatacism:

The revulsion from an unwanted self and the impulse to forget it produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.

Those who fail in everyday affairs show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. There is less risk in being discredited when trying the impossible than when trying the possible.

To ripen a person for self-sacrifice, he must be stripped of his individual identity. When asked who he is, his automatic response is … "a German," "a Russian," "a Christian," "a Moslem," a member of a certain tribe or family. He has no purpose, worth and destiny apart from his collective body; and as long as that body lives, he cannot really die.

Dying and killing are easy when they are part of a ritual, ceremonial, dramatic performance or game. There is the need for make-believe in order to face death. It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn dramatic performance.

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience-or contemporaries or "of those who are to be."

All mass movements deprecate the present by depicting it as a mean preliminary to a glorious future.
We can be absolutely certain only about the things we do not understand. [Thus], the devout are always asked to seek truth with their hears and not their minds.

Self-sacrifice is an unreasonable act. The facts on which the true believer basis his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observation but from holy writ. To be in possession of an absolute truth is to have a net of familiarity spread over the whole of eternity. All questions have already been answered, all decisions made, all eventualities foreseen.

Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.

In time of peace, a democratic nation is an institutionalized association of more or less free individuals. On the other hand, in time of crisis, it almost always assumes in some degree the character of a mass movement.