Highly educated individuals are especially drawn to mass movements, not merely the backward

Evidence

The masses, contrary to prediction, did not result from growing equality of condition, from the spread of general education and its inevitable lowering of standards and popularization of content. (America, the classical land of equality of condition and of general education with all its shortcomings, knows less of the modern psychology of masses than perhaps any other country in the world.) It soon became apparent that highly cultured people were particularly attracted to mass movements and that, generally, highly differentiated individualism and sophistication did not prevent, indeed sometimes encouraged, the self-abandonment into the mass for which mass movements provided. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 758

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s toolkit on mass mobilization and the psychology of totalitarian movements; parallel to Hoffer’s ‘True Believer’ treatment of the frustrated intelligentsia.