Almoner Puppeteers

Lihope, the principal character, embarks on a journey to explore if the intellectuals have found a remedy to rid humanity of its evil part, as pronounced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s statement: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it was necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Who are the intellectuals? Paul Johnson, author of Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (HarperCollins, 2007), sees them as a phenomenon emerging from the late-eighteenth century—secular thinkers who took the place of the priests, scribes, and soothsayers who had guided society in more religious ages. But the intellectual is not a servant or interpreter of the gods; he is a substitute, asserting that he can diagnose the ills of society and cure them with his own unaided intellect. By following his precepts, mankind will be fundamentally transformed for the better.