> Perhaps even revolution was the result. Russian revolutionary activity, in particular, was inextricably tied up with novels. Lenin wrote about Nikolay Chernys

> Perhaps even revolution was the result. Russian revolutionary activity, in particular, was inextricably tied up with novels. Lenin wrote about Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? that “before I came to know the works of Marx … only Chernyshevsky wielded a dominating influence over me, and it all began with What Is to Be Done?,” and that “under its influence hundreds of people became revolutionaries.” He later borrowed the novel’s title for his own 1902 revolutionary tract. In our day, the departure from consensus reality began in innocent fashion, and with a different genre of entertainment: with wizards and dice rolls in 1970s basements. As cultlike and dogmatic as the Communist party became, I don't think this is a very apt comparison. Pleasant revolutionaries we're starving and demanded land reform. Worker revolutionaries we're being burnt up like fuel and demanded relief. Whatever crank beliefs they had were not their primary motivator the way cultural political derangement seems to be the primary motivator of QAnon and hardcore MAGA.