Eric Hoffer

Turning into the people you hate the most

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Last month, Al Jazeera reported the following curious fact:

“Right-wing Israeli Jews dress as Muslims to enter the Al-Aqsa compound in efforts to change the status quo at Islam’s third holiest site.”

The Al-Aqsa compound, known by Jews as the Temple Mount, has been restricted since the year 2000 in the interest of public safety. Only Muslims are allowed to pray there.

Trouble is, while this 37-acre area is the third holiest site in Islam… it is also the number-one holiest site in Judaism.

Many Jews want the Temple Mount back. They want it back bad.

How bad? From the Al Jazeera article:

“The 26-year-old swaps his orthodox Jewish clothes with a thobe – a traditional garment also called a dishdasha or jalabiya, worn by many Palestinian men, and his black kippa for a white prayer skullcap. Peering into a mirror, he slicks his long, dark sidelocks back with hair gel to hide them under the cap, mumbling a few Arabic words to refresh his memory.”

It’s not just comsetic changes, either. The article says that the Jews sneaking into the Temple mount will take Arabic classes and study the Quran to be able to get past the security guards screening any non-Muslims from the Al-Aqsa compound.

So what?

So maybe you’ll say I’m taking an unwarranted leap here, but this brings to mind a quote from Eric Hoffer’s True Believer:

“Though hatred is a convenient instrument for mobilizing a community for defense, it does not, in the long run, come cheap. We pay for it by losing all or many of the values we have set out to defend.”

Hoffer’s argument is that in fighting the enemy, you often become the enemy.

I don’t know how universally true this is. Maybe it just sounds good because it’s shocking and counterintuitive. But I feel there’s definitely a kernel of truth there.

In any case, it brought something else to mind also. It’s the most valuable thing I got from Ben Settle’s Villains book (actually from Ben’s promo emails for that book):

Villains are proactive, and heroes are reactive.

In other words, Villains make the heroes and authorities react to them, while heroes wait for something to happen, always chasing after the fires set by the Villain to distract them as they carry out their machinations. (And notice when a hero does try to be proactive, you end up with Ultron…) If you look around at the most successful people in business and life, they may not be evil, but they are Villains, and do the same thing.

You might not like the idea of being evil… of being anybody’s enemy… of being a villain.

Fine.

Just remember Eric Hoffer and Ben Settle above. And at the very least, make sure you’re not cast as a hero.

​​Instead, set your own agenda, and then follow it.

Otherwise, you’ll end up playing catchup to other, more proactive people around you… and the shame of it is, in time, you will end up dressing, acting, and even thinking in ways that you hate the most.

On an unrelated note:

I have an email newsletter where I often write about persuasion, marketing, and psychology ideas. If that kind of thing fills you with religious fervor or at least some curiosity, you can sign up to my newsletter here.

Marketing to frustrated newlyweds and disgusted divorcees

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Last autumn, Reuters published an article about an Iraqi man named Aram Mehdi. Mehdi belongs to the persecuted Kurdish minority in Iraq. And though he grew up Muslim, Mehdi converted from Islam to Zoroastrianism.

He says it’s been a real struggle:

“We cannot even write a comment on a Facebook post as a Zoroastrian. Some people say it’s a taboo to dine with you, ugly animals are better than you. Others say, ‘Just let us know where you are if you dare.'”

Maybe your reaction to this is, “Wow that’s terrible. Poor born-again Iraqi Zoroastrians.”

Or maybe you’re heartless like me. And maybe your reaction was more like, “Seriously guy, you were kind of asking for it. After all, if you are a member of a persecuted minority in a war-torn country… why would you willingly make yourself a member of an even smaller, even more persecuted minority?”

Well, maybe because it’s fundamental human psychology.

Over the past few months, I’ve shared a lot of quotes from Eric Hoffer’s book True Believer. That’s because it’s so full of interesting ideas.

I’m gonna do it again in just a moment. But before you turn me off, I will tell you this idea has real, concrete, maybe even profitable direct marketing implications.

Ok, on to Hoffer and his quote:

“Since all mass movements draw their adherents from the same types of humanity and appeal to the same types of mind, it follows: (a) all mass movements are competitive, and the gain of one in adherents is the loss of all the others; (b) all mass movements are interchangeable. One mass movement readily transforms itself into another. A religious movement may develop into a social revolution or a nationalist movement; a social revolution, into militant nationalism or a religious movement; a nationalist movement into a social revolution or a religious movement.”

The starting point of Hoffer’s book is that people who join holy causes are fundamentally frustrated. And they look to the holy cause as a way of escaping their current, flawed selves, and being reborn in some new, cleansing identity.

For that, the actual holy cause doesn’t matter too much. Many potential ones will do.

For example, if for any reason you cannot be reborn as a freedom fighter (Kurdish minority in Iraq)… well, then there’s always some fringe religious movement that’s open to you (Zoroastrian minority in a dominantly Muslim country). And if that doesn’t work, then maybe you can become an anarchist or a communist or a pacifist.

So that’s the interesting psychology idea — or interesting to me at least. Now here’s the related direct marketing advice.

It’s based on the fact that direct response customers are also fundamentally frustrated. They share many traits with Hoffer’s true believers.

And that’s why if you run a DR business, your best prospects are either the newlyweds or the divorced. Either people who recently bought something from your competition for the first time… or people who recently walked away from your competition in disgust, and who claim they will never buy anything like that ever again.

Because those people are still frustrated. And because their holy cause — the product they are buying and identifying with — doesn’t matter all that much.

What does this mean practically?

Well, in the good old days of direct mail, you could actually buy lists of unsubscribers or new buyers.

But even today, with a bit of thought, I believe can apply this to your business.

For example, you might have your own list of fallen subscribers or customers. This might be your most valuable resource – if you sell it to your competition.

And vice versa. Your best leads might come from a joint venture with your competition. Just have them send you their disgusted ex-customers.

More broadly:

If you’re trying to position yourself in the market, you don’t have to be so unique, likeable, or even much of an expert. Just make it clear you are not that other guy — while still promising the same opportunity for blessed escape that the other guy was selling.

By the way, if you really hate Ben Settle, and his email marketing tips, you might like my daily email newsletter about marketing and copywriting. you can sign up for it here.

How to effectively divide and rule

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Legend says that in the early days of Rome, the city was made up of two races — the Romans and the Sabines.

The Sabines felt like second-class citizens, and hated the Romans.

The Romans didn’t trust the Sabines and worked hard to keep the Sabines down.

Tension threatened to tear the young city apart.

So the leading men of Rome — Romans and Sabines both — elected a new king in the hope of getting out of this crisis.

The new king’s name was Numa. He was a Sabine by birth. And he fixed the problem.

Numa eliminated Roman-Sabine strife. He united the two races into manageable citizens of Rome. He set the ground for what was the become the great Roman empire.

The question is how?

How do you take two groups that hate each other, and unite them into a cohesive, ruleable whole?

Well, here’s one thing Numa did:

He created new guilds based on occupation.

There was a guild for the musicians, one for goldsmiths, another for shoemakers. Each guild had special privileges, rituals, even their own unique patron god. And crucially, each guild cut across racial lines – each included both Romans and Sabines.

It worked.

This illustrates an idea from Eric Hoffer’s book True Believer. Writing about the idea of “divide to rule,” Hoffer had this to say:

“An effective division is one that fosters a multiplicity of compact bodies — racial, religious, or economic — vying with and suspicious of each other.”

Maybe you’re not sure exactly what this means. So let me give you another, more modern example.

Have you heard of Josh Wardle, the guy who made the viral game Wordle? Which, by the way, was so much fun to play until the failing New York Times ruined it?

Well, before making Wordle, Wardle worked at Reddit. And one project he had there was called Orangered vs Periwinkle.

As you might know, Reddit is a bunch of separate and sometimes antagonistic communities.

But on April Fool’s in 2013, every Reddit user was automatically assigned to one of two made-up teams. Team Orangered or team Periwinkle.

The outcome was a ton of engagement and activity on the site. New bonds being formed across subreddits. In Wardle’s words:

“Uniting people through difference is easy. Essentially what we did is we just put people on separate teams. And it turns out people are really really good at creating stuff when they say, ‘I’m part of this group, I’m not part of that group.'”

Wardle has a vision of using this “divide to unite” trick to stir creativity and create greater unity on a big scale.

But I’m not recommending anything like that to you. This email is not my call for the greater brotherhood of man, or for an ever-expanding union through the clever use of new divisions.

That’s because I believe that size is evil, or at least inhuman. After all, the Roman empire, like all other empires that came after it, crushed and destroyed to serve its own ends of growth. And Reddit is kind of a sewer on most days.

So I have no clear takeaway for you today. I just wanted to point out this curious technique of dividing to unite.

You will have to decide how you want to use it. Whether to unite people, hopefully in a good cause… or to be aware of it, so you can resit being co-opted into a new divisive group, because you don’t want to contribute to anybody else’s inhuman ends.

Not convinced?
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Well, maybe you want to read more about my idea that size is evil. If so, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/the-most-dangerous-idea-in-america/

Glorious past and a glorious future — but the present…

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After I finished high school, I worked in a bookstore for a year.

One night, while I was working the register, I noticed we had these chocolate-covered coffee beans for sale.

I grabbed a bag, ripped it open, and threw one of these suckers into my mouth.

Of course, it was sweet and smooth chocolate on the outside. But when I bit through it, I got to the bitter, chalky coffee bean in the middle.

It left a bad taste in my mouth.

Ok, no problem. I just had another chocolate-covered coffee bean — and the bad taste was instantly fixed.

The sweet chocolate on the outside took care of the bitterness left lingering from earlier.

But then again, I was left with that charcoal-like coffee bean in the middle.

The rest of the evening was a blur. When I came to, hours later, I noticed a half dozen empty bags of chocolate-covered coffee beans all around me. I was sweating, scratching my face, glancing furiously at customers who avoided making eye contact with me.

I hadn’t thought about this scene for years but for some reason it connected to a quote I read recently. It comes from Eric Hoffer who wrote:

“There is no more potent dwarfing of the present than by viewing it as a mere link between a glorious past and a glorious future.”

Hoffer was writing about how leaders of mass movements get people to make big sacrifices. We were great once, these leaders say, and we will great again one day. Whatever is happening right now is nothing in the cosmic scale of history.

This attitude is effective at the mass movement level because it is effective at the individual level. At least for the right profile of person.

For example, I personally had a big realization over the past year.

​​I realized I spend a lot of time daydreaming about how glorious life will be after I just achieve a few more things. And I wince when I think back on the times when I was more productive, successful, or happy than I am right now.

The fact is, that’s how I feel much of the time, regardless of what’s going on in my life externally.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not telling you that it’s not worthwhile working to achieve anything.

​​The fact is, working towards a goal is one of the sure-fire ways I’ve found to feel positive in life.

But what I am telling you is:

You’ve gotta learn to enjoy the present now, as much as you can. This includes the process of working to achieve anything.

Otherwise, you might come to, years later, with a half dozen completed projects all around you… and find yourself sweating, scratching your face, and thinking furiously of the next fix that can take the bad taste out of your mouth.

And now for business:

If you are working to achieve anything, you might find you need good marketing and writing ideas to help your project become a success. In that case, you might like my newsletter, because these are topics I write about on most days. You can sign up here.

The limits of persuasion and propaganda

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“We tend today to exaggerate the effectiveness of persuasion as a means of inculcating opinion and shaping behavior.”

Today I was planning to write a standard email about marketing and persuasion. But I checked the news this morning, and I saw that Russia invaded Ukraine by land, air, and sea.

It’s the biggest attack in Europe by one state against another since World War II.

I’m close to people who have families living in Ukraine, and for them this has real consequences.

So a warning: Today’s email is a persuasion downer.

Because I mostly write about persuasion tricks and manipulation strategies.

There have been plenty of those in the past few weeks from the EU and US both, in anticipation of the Russian invasion. But as a US diplomat put it:

“One of the shortcomings is the deterrence package that we’ve developed is kind of asymmetrical in that it’s mostly economic and we’re facing a military threat.”

Another way to put it is the quote I have up top, which is from Eric Hoffer’s True Believer.

​​Hoffer thinks that the fabulous power often ascribed to words has “no greater foundation in fact than the falls of Jericho ascribed to the blast of Joshua’s trumpets.”

So if not words, then what?
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Well, here’s a last Hoffer quote to wrap this emergency email up. It might be worth keeping in mind as we enter a new age of political black swans:

“The truth seems to be that propaganda on its own cannot force its way into unwilling minds; neither can it inculcate something wholly new; nor can it keep people persuaded once they have ceased to believe. So acknowledged a master of propaganda as Dr. Goebbels admits in an unguarded moment that ‘A sharp sword must always stand behind propaganda if it is to be really effective.'”

Better the devil they don’t know

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Bzzzzzzz bzzzzzz bzzzzzzzz – the front door buzzer kept ringing aggressively.

Pavel, barefoot and still in his underwear, patted over to check the security camera feed.

Six large men were standing outside his door.

“They had guns and they looked very serious,” Pavel said later. “They seemed to want to break the door.”

Pavel looked despairingly at his phone. If only he could call his brother and share just a few critical instructions.

But what could he say?

What kind of message could he send?

After all, the guys outside the door were from the secret service. And the secret service could read and hear anything.

“I realized I don’t have a safe means of communication with him,” Pavel said in an interview with the New York Times. “That’s how Telegram started.”

I just read a new Wired article about Pavel Durov.

In 2006, Durov founded VKontakte, a Russian Facebook clone.

VK eventually became a multi-billion-dollar company. Durov got rich.

Then in 2011, Durov drew the worst kind of heat upon himself.

He refused to cave to the Kremlin’s request to block opposition groups on VK. And he tweeted his “official” response to the government – a photo of a dog with its tongue hanging out.

That led to the visit at his home.

Durov survived that encounter. And he wasn’t cowed.

A short while later, he launched Telegram, the messaging app.

He positioned Telegram as a secure, decentralized, no-censorship alternative to corporate offers like WhatsApp.

That positioning went back to the origin story from 2011, with secret services thugs beating on Durov’s door.

The positioning has been reinforced by Durov’s actions since. As things got hotter for him in Russia, he picked up his small team and started moving around the world.

“I’m out of Russia and have no plans to go back,” he told TechCrunch in 2014. “Unfortunately, the country is incompatible with Internet business at the moment.”

Well, if you believe the Wired article, all that’s PR and marketing hype.

According to Wired, Durov wouldn’t be the CEO of Telegram today without powerful Kremlin connections yesterday.

And even after he supposedly left Russia with no plans to go back… he still kept his posh offices in St. Petersburg. He continued to visit there, and regularly spent entire days working in the office.

So what’s the truth?

I personally don’t care about Telegram or about Pavel Durov. But I do care about persuasion and influence.

And so the only truth I want to share with you is the following idea from the book True Believer:

“The ideal devil is a foreigner.”

Durov knew this instinctively. As one of his former business associate said,

“Pavel is a king of PR and marketing. Probably one of the best people in the world. I think he wanted to play the good guy with the West.”

It definitely worked.

Telegram grew steadily, and it became the world’s most downloaded app in 2021. It’s phenomenally popular in Asia, Latin America, and increasingly in Europe. To date, it’s been downloaded over 1 billion times.

In large part, that’s because Telegram is seen just as Durov wants it to be seen. As a decentralized, anti-establishment, freedom-fighters app.

How else could it be? The founder himself had to run away from the secret service of that foreign devil Putin… and the repressive state Putin represents.

So there you go:

If you want strong positioning for your product, create a good-vs-evil struggle between you and Vladimir Putin. Or at least some other foreign devil, relative to your target audience.

But what if you can’t get a good foreign devil?

In that case, keep an eye on Pavel Durov and the future of Telegram. Because as the Wired article says:

“As Durov’s run-ins with the Kremlin recede into the past, authoritarian surveillance has, in some ways, ceased to be the symbolic foil that it once was for Telegram. Instead, Durov has increasingly cast his platform in heroic opposition to Facebook, Apple, and Google.”

Will Apple and Google serve as well as Putin did?

Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t. Or maybe Durov has also read True Believer. And so maybe he’ll get some use from the full quote above:

“The ideal devil is a foreigner. To quality as a devil, a domestic enemy must be given a foreign ancestry.”

But maybe you’re wondering why I don’t take my own advice and talk about some foreign or domestic devils.

Don’t worry. I will. I just don’t want to draw attention to it by doing it today. If you’d like to keep an eye on me as I create some foreign devils, sign up for my email newsletter here.

The success secret that successful people won’t tell you

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Today I want to tell you about the quarter game. Hypnotist Mike Mandel wrote about it a few days ago:

You imagine you will find a quarter somewhere today, as though it’s been left deliberately for you. And Mike says, more often than not, it turns out to be true.

Now, as you might have noticed, I’m a sucker for magic and magical thinking.

I mean, over the past month alone, I’ve sent emails about blindsight… the illusory nature of reality… my own tendency to see mystical significance in trivial events… and even a religious epiphany I experienced at age 20.

And here I am today, telling you to manifest quarters into your life.

I wish I could control myself better so I could look a little more serious and professional… and stop myself from morphing into the male, copywriting version of Rhonda Byrne, the Australian TV producer who made that movie The Secret.

But what to do? Here’s my story:

Yesterday, I went out for a walk. And I played the quarter game for the first time. I told myself I’d find a quarter, as though it had been left deliberately for me.

After a few minutes of walking around, I didn’t find a single quarter.

But then I told myself, “You know what, quarters are fine. But what would be really great is if I found that missing license plate.”

Because this past Sunday, I went to my car — actually, my mom’s 20-year-old white Audi, which I have been using for past six months — and I found the front license plate was gone.

This is a huuuge hassle.

Where I am right now (Croatia), it means I have to go to the police, report the license plate as missing, apply to get a whole new set, then update documents, insurance, the vehicle inspection. It’s such a pain in the ass that I have been ignoring it and instead just not using the car for the past few days.

That’s why it would have been great to “manifest” that license plate back into my life.

It would save me hours or days of sitting around in government offices, filling out paperwork, driving around town… or alternately, stressing that cops will pull me over and fine me and harass me if I don’t do all that.

So there I was yesterday, with the sudden idea to play the license plate game. And the darnedest thing happened.

Within five minutes, I had the missing license plate in my hand. I found it over a wall and down a ditch, in some bushes, close to where my car — well, my mom’s car — had been parked.

I’m not sure how the license plate got there. And I’m not sure exactly how I had the idea to check there.

All I know is that, had I not read Mike Mandel’s email… and had I not half-jokingly played the quarter game… I would not have thought to play the license plate game, or search for the license plate where I did find it. As though somebody had deliberately left it there for me.

But let me wrap this up. Here’s a quote from Eric Hoffer’s book True Believer, about the psychology of revolutions, religions, and other mass movements:

“The remarkable thing is that the successful, too, however much they pride themselves on their foresight, fortitude, thrift and other ‘sterling qualities,’ are at bottom convinced that their success is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. The self-confidence of even the consistently successful is never absolute.”

Hoffer’s point is that people only attempt real change when they feel they have their hands on some “irresistible power.” And this irresistible power is almost always something outside themselves… or at least outside the limits they feel to be their own identity.

Such, it seems, is human psychology. You can fight it. Or you can work with it.

If you can work with it in a socially acceptable way, good for you.

But even if you end up at risk of looking like a male Rhonda Byrne, it’s still a pretty good deal to make.

Because if you just rely on your own “sterling qualities,” odds are you end up sitting around government offices for days… pulling your hair out… and cursing the stupidity and injustice of the world.

The alternative is to effect change in your life without all that stress. And all you have to do is believe — in magic if you have to — and play the game every day.

Last thing:

Every day, I write an email about copywriting, marketing, or woo-woo topics like manifesting quarters. If you’d like these emails to magically manifest themselves in your inbox each day, you can sign up here.