Once again, a selection from a book that is on Mrs. Batard’s recommended list, Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951), a work praised by Dwight Eisenhower. The author happened to have also been given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1983. Reagan also was an admirer of Ayn Rand, thus proving that senility came early, as many have previously speculated.

The genuine man of words himself can get along without faith in absolutes. He values the search for truth as much as truth itself. He delights in the clash of thought and in the give-and-take of controversy. If he formulates a philosophy and a doctrine, they are more an exhibition of brilliance and an exercise in dialectics than a program of action and the tenets of a faith. His vanity, it is true, often prompts him to defend his speculations with savagery and even venom; but his appeal is usually to reason and not to faith. The fanatics and the faith-hungry masses, however, are likely to invest such speculations with the certitude of a holy writ, and make them the fountainhead of a new faith. Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.