Mass movements attract the highly cultured, not the culturally level average
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
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Resonates with how educated elites become ideological recruits, a pattern to carry into later Islamophobia and Orientalism readings on intellectuals’ role
Related
- Highly educated individuals are especially drawn to mass movements, not merely the backward (similarity 0.93)
- Elite intellectuals were drawn to totalitarian movements, not only mob elements. (similarity 0.82)
- Mass movements radicalize because masses grasp only simple shared ideas (similarity 0.80)
- Mass movements recruit isolated individuals, not brutal backward masses (similarity 0.79)
- Masses distill perverted attitudes shared across all classes (similarity 0.79)
- Masses accept mass culture as survival training, not out of stupidity (similarity 0.79)
- Popular masses adopt new world-views only as heterogeneous and bizarre combinations. (similarity 0.78)