23
The
reformers preached poverty and purity. They railed against the
corruption of money, fine palaces and showy clothes. And they
promised to sweep clean the holy places of leadership. Gathering
followers, the reformers frequently toppled the old rulers. Then a
strange thing invariably occurred. The ascetic leaders who had praised
the simple ways of the desert moved into the palaces of the materialists
they had driven out. Served by slaves and fattened on the fine food
and pleasant ways of the city, they, too, grew self-satisfied and
wealthy.42
Each of these zealots had made a mass of humanity hungry for
the goods of the folks on top. Each had justified that hunger as
saintliness. Each had pulled a social beast together with ideology.
And each had used the social momentum of a ravenous superorganism
as a crowbar to pry open the palaces of power.
Today the descendants of the Shiite Bedouins attack a new set of
city sophisticates, machine-gunning them in buses, torching their
shopping districts, or bombing them in cafes. This time, the vulnerable
city folk against whom the Shiites direct their rage are Egyptians,
Frenchmen, Germans, and Americans. The alleged motivation of
today's army of the faithful: religious idealism. The real goal: a bigger
piece of the action. Once again, ideology has become the device that
justifies a superorganism's need to nibble the flesh of its neighbors.
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