The frustrated favor radical change

I recently came across a beat up old copy of Eric Hoffer's classic, The True Believer. Still early days in reading it. I can see why it attracts such acclaim. He is a master of eloquent and reasoned argument. I keep reading sentences with my head nodding in agreement. I am unsettled by the absence of empirical evidence but that is my personal bete noire. Several passages from the first chapter.

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

Those who are awed by their surroundings do not think of change, no matter how miserable their condition. When our mode of life is so precarious as to make it patent that we cannot control the circumstances of our existence, we tend to stick to the proven and the familiar.

The powerful can be as timid as the weak… Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo.

Fear of the future causes us to lean against and cling to the present, while faith in the future renders us receptive to change.

For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intently discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.

"The frustrated favor radical change." That description sounds like it covers a lot of the noisiest members of academia and the punditry.