Why such death?

Eric Hoffer’s hypothesis was that it was caused by a lack of self-esteem.

It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world.

The True Believer was his famous inquiry into the nature of the mass movement. They, the cultists, hate themselves so completely, that their only recourse is to be subsumed into the mob, so that their last vestige of their own despised individuality can be banished. If you lose yourself, there is nothing left to be ashamed of.

Are they spurned on by righteous desperation? No.

The weak are not a noble breed. Their sublime deeds of faith, daring, and self-sacrifice usually spring from questionable motives. The weak hate not wickedness but weakness; and one instance of their hatred of weakness is hatred of self. All the passionate pursuits of the weak are in some degree a striving to escape, blur, or disguise an unwanted self. It is a striving shot through with malice, envy, self-deception, and a host of petty impulses; yet it often culminates in superb achievements.

God?

Religion is not a matter of God, church, holy cause, etc. These are but accessories. The source of religious preoccupation is in the self, or rather the rejection of the self. Dedication is the obverse side of self-rejection. Man alone is a religious animal because, as Montaigne points out, ‘it is a malady confined to man, and not seen in any other creature, to hate and despise ourselves.’

Then what?

There are many who find the burdens, the anxiety, and the isolation of an individual existence unbearable. This is particularly true when the opportunities for self-advancement are relatively meager, and one's individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for. Such persons sooner or later turn their backs on an individual existence and strive to acquire a sense of worth and a purpose by an identification with a holy cause, a leader, or a movement. The faith and pride they derive from such an identification serve them as substitutes for the unattainable self-confidence and self-respect.

Could the danger be a lack of self-esteem, a mad parody of the neoclassical economist’s assumption: rational self-disinterest?

Hoffer watched the totalitarian empires rise, watched the horrors of Stalinism and Nazism. His conclusions were unorthodox, even if careful and humble. Could it be, he thought, that it was something more than—or entirely different from—mere greed that was rotting the world?

The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power. How naive the cliché that money is the root of evil!

The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.

It’s a subtle thing he’s pointing out, but an interesting one. To Hoffer, mass movements were not the sickness, but rather, the symptom. It is true that they were often terrible, but the terror was simply the expression of the real cause, the terrible hatred of the self.

Perhaps the two variables are mutually causative: self-loathing drives the masses to eject their own individuality and let themselves be absorbed into the herd, and in turn, the mass movement seeks to destroy the individuality of others who have persevered, malignant cells perverting the still healthy tissue into oncologic disaster.

The prescription seems clear enough. Preserve the individual. View the collectivist ideals with the sharpest of skepticisms. When given the chance between respecting humanity too much and too little, err on the side of too much.

Once men become livestock, they are simply waiting for the slaughter.

In fact, we have some empirical evidence supporting that point.