gat

Because of the predictable greed embedded in this culture, some overarching "guardian" vision,
one indifferent to material gain, seems necessary to prevent marketplace chaos. True believers
referee the school game, establishing its goals, rules, penalties; they negotiate and compromise
with other stakeholders. And strangely enough, above all else, they can be trusted to continue
being their predictable, dedicated, selfless selves. Pragmatic stakeholders need them to keep the
game alive; true believers need pragmatists as cover. Consider this impossibly melodramatic if you
must. I know myself that parts of my story sound like leaves torn from Ragtime. But from start to
finish this is a tale of true believers and how by playing on their pipes they took all the children
away.
1 Forced medical inspection had been a prominent social theme in northern Germany since at least 1750.
The Prototype Is A Schoolteacher
One dependable signal of a true believer’s presence is a strong passion for everyone’s children.
Find nonstop, abstract interest in the collective noun "children," the kind of love Pestalozzi or
Froebel had, and you’ve flushed the priesthood from its lair. Eric Hoffer tells us the prototype
true believer is a schoolteacher. Mao was a schoolteacher, so was Mussolini, so were many other
prominent warlike leaders of our time, including Lyndon Johnson. In Hoffer’s characterization,
the true believer is identified by inner fire, "a burning conviction we have a holy duty to others."
Lack of humor is one touchstone of true belief.
The expression "true believer" is from a fifth-century book, The City of God, occurring in a
passage where St. Augustine urges holy men and women to abandon fear and embrace their
sacred work fervently. True Belief is a psychological frame you’ll find useful to explain individuals
who relentlessly pursue a cause indifferent to personal discomfort, indifferent to the discomfort of
others. 1 All of us show a tiny element of true belief in our makeup, usually just enough to
recognize the lunatic gleam in the eye of some purer zealot when we meet face to face. But in an
age which distances us from hand-to-hand encounters with authority—removing us electronically,
bureaucratically, and institutionally—the truly fanatical among us have been granted the luxury of
full anonymity. We have to judge their presence by the fallout.
Horace Mann exemplifies the type. From start to finish he had a mission. He spoke passionately at
all times. He wrote notes to himself about "breaking the bond of association among workingmen."
In a commencement harangue at Antioch College in 1859, he said, "Be ashamed to die until you
have won some victory for humanity." A few cynical critics snipe at Mann for lying about his
imaginary school tour of Prussia (which led to the adoption of Prussian schooling methodologies
in America), but those cynics miss the point. For the great ones, the goal is everything; the end
justifies any means. Mann lived and died a social crusader. His second wife, Mary Peabody, paid
him this posthumous tribute: "He was all afire with Purpose."
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