Cohn shows how the adherence of lower-class masses, the phenomenon of crowds shut off from alternative sources of information and argument, helped drive these movements along their radical logic, to the point that their adepts became utterly closed to reality. We might say of them that they mixed and drank the Kool-Aid that killed them.

Note well: although these mobs, like all others, scattered the moment they faced firm resistance, once the elect had internalized their own propaganda, killing them was the only way of stopping them. Even as some who had come to believe themselves invincible were being executed, they would shout: “Earth, divide thyself!”

Weber’s fears for the future were soon realized. In the 1920s and ’30s, as the Nazi party’s intellectuals scoured German history for their movement’s roots, they came across one of the documents to which Norman Cohn refers, the “Book of a Hundred Chapters,” written circa 1510 by an unknown hermit somewhere by the upper Rhine. We don’t know whether anyone ever read that book a half-millennium ago. Nor need anyone have read it, because it summarized what had already become German revolutionaries’ standard critique of Christian civilization.