The 500 & Common Sense.

[Rev. Rye]

If you’ve ever read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, one of the things he discovered when looking into the history of mass movements was how moving from one extreme to the other is actually far more common than one might think. In terms of eras whose politics I’m more conversant in, it’s more common for a Nazi to become a communist (or vice versa) than a moderate. Hoffer argues that this is because the extremists on either end are more similar to each other than the center, and I’m not 100% sure that’s accurate, but if you look long enough at Twitter, which I would not recommend because it’s such a toxic corner of the Internet, it’s easy to see where he’s coming from, even if it’s just because sometimes, people just want to watch the world burn and it’s depressingly easy to find examples of people who think like that.

“Where mass movements are in violent competition with each other, there are not infrequent instances of converts—even the most zealous—shifting their allegiance from one to the other. A Saul turning into Paul is neither a rarity nor a miracle. In our day, each proselytizing mass movement seems to regard the zealous adherents of its antagonist as its own potential converts. Hitler looked on the German Communists as potential National Socialists: “The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.” Captain Röhm boasted that he could turn the reddest Communist into a glowing nationalist in four weeks. On the other hand, Karl Radek looked on the Nazi Brown Shirts (S.A.) as a reserve for future Communist recruits.”

If the story of the 500 isn’t talked about very often, it may be because it’s roughly on par with the verses in the Gospel of Matthew where, once Jesus dies on the cross, a zombie apocalypse happens in Jerusalem. And, yes, this is actually in the Bible. Hell, it’s even in the St. Matthew Passion.





Sadly, Bach did not get Picander to write the text for an aria or chorale elaborating on what happened in Jerusalem when there was no more room in Hell, although “Mache dich mein Herze rein” is always a highlight of my Good Friday.