ABSTRACT
The term beliefs is commonly defined as "matters taken to be true." In the context of movement studies it is shorthand for "challenging/ insurgent constructions of reality." The occasions on which Social Movement Organization (SMO) participants assemble face-to-face provide many opportunities for richer or poorer cultural enactment. This chapter places beliefs in the larger or encompassing context of culture, a different but closely related aspect of SMOs. It explains differing cultural magnitudes. The chapter reviews selected propositions about the causes and consequences of variations in magnitude. It also reviews that nihilism is a variable, a construction of reality that can be more or less present, and it is associated with some more than other of the variations in SMO beliefs. The chapter labels the five variations - "existential variations" that range along a master variation of being "less" to "more" radical in revising mundane, disjointed, situational human coping.
