The Illusion of Progress
How Modern Statism Parallels Historical Fanaticism Fanaticism is often mistakenly viewed as a vice unique to religious fervor. We tend to associate it exclusively with fundamentalist dogmas, holy wars, and ancient tribunals. Yet history demonstrates that fanaticism extends far beyond the altar. It manifests with equal virulence in the blind adoration of the state, absolute trust in bureaucratic institutions, and rigid adherence to militant atheism, ideological evolutionism, or socio-Darwinism. When measured by human cost, secular fanaticism has proven profoundly catastrophic. In just a few decades of the twentieth century, Nazi and Marxist regimes systematically killed more people than the Inquisition and the religious wars they so fervently condemned. These regimes operated under a utilitarian rationale famously echoed by Russian revolutionaries: to make an omellete, you have to break eggs . This logic met its sharpest critique in 1927 when the Romanian thinker Panait Istrati, u...