Essay Database

Why do people join social movements? Why do people join political, professional, or social movements, of whatever size, and surrender so completely, giving up, in the extreme, everything; their fortunes, their critical thinking, their political freedom, their friends, families, even their own lives? What causes people to create a system or perhaps follow a system that creates such things as “ethnic cleansing” and the killing fields of Cambodia? “That anyone who opposes this system of …

…source of evil must be found who helps create and sustain the special feeling so necessary for the formation of the followers and the leader into a social movement. All of these weigh in on whether or not people will or will not join a social movement. The movement must seem appealing to them. The movement must erase a fear. The promise of erasing a fear will lead to followers needed for a social movement.