The Higher Power

Currently reading David Horowitz's excellent "A Point in Time", the section given to Dostoevsky, where the beliefs and characters of the Russian radicals are explored. Though they don't believe in God, or a Divine purpose, they believe in the divinity of history and in the glorious future communism will bring forth: the heaven on earth. That's when it struck me - having been thinking about The State as an emergent order - that the attempt to produce heaven on earth is the key to the State's elevation to an almost divine status - to a position where the emotional compass of the population, instead of being fixed outside on an external divinity, is fixed on the State. And I suspect that the key to the creation of an emergent order from a group of people is emotional attachment rather than anything particularly intellectual.