A prescient parable on the fragile illusion of human progress, the seductive pull of authoritarian demagoguery in times of crisis, stagnation, and fear, and the terrifying emergence of Hobbes’s Leviathan: summoned by the crowd itself, only to consume it whole.

“… the continuous and hopeless expenditure of energy in the attempt to suggest that there might be some point to all this rather than be faced by the unyielding, indifferent, universal incomprehensibility of things; intolerable too the inexplicable ground-rules of human conduct. No amount of screaming would have helped us find a chink in the enormous armour of silence that slowly descended on us, so we proceeded without a word, hearing only the scrape and rumble of our own progress over the crisp and brilliant sharp frost, unstoppable and tense to the point of snapping, down those dark airless streets, seeing no one else, never stopping to look at each other, or if we did, only to note a hand or a foot, before we were a single body with one single pair of eyes, art for one single act of destruction, one single fatal impulse, impervious to entreaty. And there really was nothing to oppose us…”