Black Mass Quotes

“In intellectual terms the Cold War was a competition between two ideologies, Marxism and liberalism, that had a great deal in common. Though they saw one another as mortal enemies they differed chiefly on the question of which economic system was best suited to achieve goals they shared.”
― John N. Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

“Towards the end of the last century the pursuit of Utopia entered the political mainstream. In future only one kind of regime would be legitimate: American-style democratic capitalism – the final form of human government, as it was termed in the fleeting and now forgotten mood of hubris that followed the Soviet collapse. Led by the United States, western governments committed themselves to installing democracy throughout the world – an impossible dream that in many countries could only produce chaos. At the same time they launched a ‘war against terror’ that failed to distinguish between new threats and the normal conflicts of history. The Right was possessed by fantasies, and like the utopian visions of the last century – but far more quickly – its grandiose projects have crumbled into dust.

In the twentieth century it seemed utopian movements could come to power only in dictatorial regimes. Yet after 9/ 11 utopian thinking came to shape foreign policy in the world’s pre-eminent democracy. In many ways the Bush administration behaved like a revolutionary regime. It was prepared to engage in pre-emptive attacks on sovereign states in order to achieve its goals, while at the same time it has been ready to erode long-established American freedoms. It established a concentration camp in Guantánamo whose inmates are beyond the reach of normal legal protection, denied the protection of habeas corpus to terrorist suspects, set up an apparatus of surveillance to monitor the population and authorized American officials to practise what in any other country would be defined as torture. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, Britain suffered, in a more limited way, a similar transformation.”
― John N. Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

“When Schmitt and Shulsky rejected empirical inquiry they confused a critique of scientism with a rejection of evidence”
― John N. Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

“It is not so much that he is economical with the truth as that he lacks the normal understanding of it. For him truth is whatever serves the cause”
― John N. Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia