19
privil
eged class was the pyramid of dedicated Bolshevik bureaucrats,
who now had an absolute hold over the land, the factories, and the
food.
An ideology had been the tool a leader--Lenin--had used to unify
a group. Ideology had been the weapon with which that coagulation
of humanity then seized the resources of another. Ideology had been
the force that allowed one superorganism to coalesce from chaos and
swallow a neighbor.
Like Marxism, religions often tell the folks on the lowest rung
that it's morally imperative for them to grab the goods of the class on
top. In the 14th century, a group of groaning individuals wandered
from city to city in Europe, whipping themselves as they marched.
They generally came from poor homes. And their acts of self-punish-
ment were more than the exercises of self-denial that at first they
seemed. These flagellants had been told by their leaders that the end
was about to come. When it did, rich cardinals and bishops would be
tumbled from their lofty castles, tossed out of their comfortable beds
and torn away from their jewelry chests. The poor, the folks who had
mortified themselves in the name of God, would take over.
Meanwhile, these humble folk satisfied their sacred ambitions by
killing and robbing Jews.31
Mohammedanism, too, appealed at first to the poor and the
downtrodden. Even Christ's basic motto was "the meek shall inherit
the earth." The Savior was not promising some intangible piece of sky,
some heavenly wisp of cloud. He was offering real estate.
Ideology is not only the mechanism that allows a superorganism
to pounce, it is the indispensable armor with which one group inside a
society girds its loins for warfare against another. In the early years of
Islam, battles developed between two major Moslem sects, each
professing its own form of orthodoxy. But under the surface of the
ideological struggle was an entirely different kind of a fight. It was a
confrontation between subcultures for dominance of the Islamic
world.32
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