The Popes' Children

One of the funniest--and a very prevalent--notion is that only revolutionaries may hold radical beliefs, a prejudice akin to the idea that only the only true believers are missionaries, or perhaps missionaries and renunciates.  These sorts of ideas are really just the remnants of an insufficiently expurgated Western religious mind, the remnants of an inadequately examined monotheism.  Well I for one am no revolutionary, in part because despite my affect of bombast I am in fact modest, unlike those who, under the affect of modesty, would dictate to others the nature and direction of the right path.  In  large part, it's because I'm a determinist; I believe that social orders and movements, the arrangements of societies and the dispositions of civilizations, the rise and fall of economic systems, governments, and regimes are all determined by historical forces that take place on a scale infinitely larger in scope and duration than any human mind or personality can understand or endure.  If not Caesar, then Caesar, in other words.  We don't make history, but are made by it.