    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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