Mythic Stories 3: The Nature Of Ideological Thinking

In Eurozine: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-08-21-abraham-en.html Samuel Abrahám The end of illusions? Czechoslovakia 1968 and after ...In the West, a whole generation of admirers of the post-Khrushchev thaw were forced to commit intellectual suicide after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Some retreated into seclusion, others transformed themselves into Euro-communists, environmentalists or feminists. Some even jumped all the way to the far-right or neo-fascism. They made a virtue out of necessity, and one can add that many became more useful than they had been during their communist past... Is this not a sight filled with the most abject pathos? Yet, this is the nature of mythic thinking, to be continually brought up short by Reality. ( A good parallel would be the Lisbon earthquake and its effect on Voltaire and his contemporaries.) An note the variety of Ideological camps mentioned here, and how easily a mythic thinker may jump from one to the next. Indeed, a socialist may become a neo-fascist, given enough jolting. Why? Because the content of the belief system does not matter as greatly as the structural nature of the belief system; i.e., it is more important that there be order and compulsion rather than freaky freedom.