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funct
ion well enough, it can trigger the growth of a superorganism of
massive size...even if its most basic prophecies prove dead wrong.
In the early 1840's, a wealthy American farmer named William
Miller claimed to have figured out the date of the world's end.  The
great time of reckoning, when fire would scourge the earth and usher
in a thousand years of peace and righteousness, would arrive, said
Miller, in 1843.  Miller's passionate preaching inspired 50,000 converts
to wait patiently for the moment when their belief in the agriculturist's
words would put them at the center of a new world order.  Many
closed their shops and gave away their farms in anticipation of the
happy day.  But 1843 came and went, and this earthly orb remained
intact, unsinged by any cosmic blowtorch.  Miller changed the date of
his prediction to October 22, 1844.  When the newly revised moment of
death and glory rolled around, Miller's claim once again proved
empty.  But none of that prevented Miller's ideas from welding
together a massive social group.  The creed his disciples founded is
best known today as Seventh Day Adventism.  As of 1981, the
movement could claim 3,668,000 adherents in 184 countries.22
Marxism also attracted its following with predictions that failed
to come true.  The dictatorship of the proletariat, believers said, would
be only a temporary phase.  Freed from the oppression of capitalism,
citizens would lose their greed, their aggression, and their desire to
lord it over their neighbors.23    The  New  Communist  Man  would
emerge--a creature of infinite good will, eager to work and help his
comrades.  Once the society consisted entirely of these blissfully
transformed mortals, government would simply melt away.
Unfortunately, when the shackles of capitalism were removed in the
Russian Revolution of 1917, men and women remained as selfish, lazy
and argumentative as ever.  And a rapidly bloating Soviet state was
bolstered by armies of secret police whose efforts were designed to re-
strain the foibles of those who had failed to undergo transformation.
But for generations the flaws of Marx's idealistic prophecies no more
stopped the march of his ideas than the failure of William Miller's
forecasts slowed the growth of Adventism.
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