ABSTRACT
One of the prevailing beliefs of the twentieth century, despite the horrors of two world wars and the horrors of the intervals of "peace", is the belief in "progress". The conviction that mankind was moving steadily forward with the aid of science and education to a world of peace, democracy, and leisure. This was to be accomplished by the spread of education, therefore of literacy, hence of reason. The secularism bred in man by the gross betrayals of the church and the destruction by science and education of the stupid mythology have led to strange cults flourishing with millennial promises, more satisfying fantasies or dubious pseudo-scientific premises. Such cults as Jehovah's Witnesses, the flying-saucer watchers, Scientology, witchcraft, and followers of J. R. R. Tolkein are all symptoms of a sick society. It may be thought that this catalogue of man's irrationality and lack of real progress is a death-knell for anarchism.
