"Ideologies call on history as well, but in their hands the past becomes a prophecy. The faithful may have suffered, and may be suffering still, but history is moving toward a preordained end. Whether secular like Marxism or Fascism, or religious like the fundamentalisms of various faiths, the story they tell is at once breathtakingly simple and all-encompassing. Every event is fitted into the grand account and all is explained. The writer Arthur Koestler remembered the great relief and delight he felt when he discovered Marxism in the troubled years when the Weimar Republic was failing and the Nazis were reaching out for power. Past, present, and future all became comprehensible: “The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled at one stroke.”"