Prologue
"Do not be afraid; our fate Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift."
-Dante
Human beings have the quite natural, if usually unconscious, habit of believing that their lives play out more or less according to some sort of overarching story or plan. It might well be that it isn't a happy one, many aren't, but there is a general unspoken consensus that life is playing out according to some guiding principle, even if it's only the cold mechanisms of physics and chemistry. But on the opposite side of the coin from the view, so necessary to remain sane, that the various random coincidences and synchronicities which define our lives, so infinitesimally unlikely, might not be playing out according to some great divine script. Men and moments, it is true, always meet, but the terrifying thought is that perhaps the wrong man might have met the wrong moment and the world might already be spinning off its steady axis and into chaos."Do not be afraid; our fate Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift."
-Dante
The United States in 1947 looked to be a country firmly convinced of itself, its righteousness, and the ultimate historical destiny which, in the minds of its more ambitious admirers would eventually lead it to bestride the globe. It was the era of the post-war consensus, of the bi-partisan commitment to the managerial state, of a general confidence that the ideology which had started to coalesce during the great war against Hitler was true, right, and good.
There were doubts, of course, as there always had been, and in strange corners ideas of every kind bubbled, fizzed, and let off strange clouds of vapor as they birthed odd new species of thinking from the primordial stew of intellectual ferment. In the Birnham Wood beneath the Dunsinane of triumphant Cold War Liberalism, strange creatures milled around, waiting to storm the recently-finished castle above.
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