ABSTRACT
Countless ideas are perpetuated for reasons that have nothing to do with their intrinsic coherence and validity. Those which legitimize official and conventional wisdom are the most durable, and virtually every state has examples of them – nationalisms of various sorts, many of them being recent fictional inventions useful to those in power, are the most prominent but scarcely the only essentially mindless justifications that reinforce existing authorities. There are innumerable doctrines of cultural superiority in various guises; all religions and most nationalities have variations of them. These illusions, and the abstractions they spawn, are the source of much human folly and misery – of persecution and wars.
