    16

    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.

    <<  <  GO  >  >>