The lessons of "Lonelyhearts".

The social significance of an idea is not necessarily proportional to its truth, its coherence, or even its comprehensibility. In his introduction to a new edition of Warrant for Genocide, which is the history of the concoction of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a clumsy forgery that even now has a certain political resonance for the susceptible and weak-minded in an important region of the globe, Norman Cohn writes:

 
   It is a great mistake to suppose that the only 
   writers who matter are those whom the educated 
   in their saner moments can take seriously. 
   There exists a subterranean world where 
   pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are 
   ...