Here the Leader comes about as close to deification as civilisation permits and, significantly, Nazism tried to set up rituals and institutions replacing orthodox religion. Move along to conservatism, and the leader-figure, although still prominent, starts to shrink. In conservatism impersonal institutions, things like law, tradition, parliament, the monarchy, start to attract the loyalty enjoyed in fascism by the Leader. In the more thoughtful movements, in liberalism, h umanism, freethought, socialism, atheism, communism, the leader shrinks movements all differ from religion, but they all carry forward the pattern of behaviour that religion introduced, offering something bigger than ourselves and urging us to join it. As they become more critical of present society the god, the hero, the personal se things occupy the position once held by God and later by the personal leader.
Anarchism retains the pattern of behaviour first introduced by religion.
Anarchists will sometimes go along with this far enough to agree that religion has had its uses, while arguing that now it has become a burden we would be better without. They would do away with it, explaining to people in the first place why it's better to go straight for anarchism. Their efforts in this direction have not met with overwhelming success,and the reason begins to appear when we compare the mass media with anarchist publications. On the one hand, pictures and personalities. Television, almost wholly pictorial and the supreme mass medium, is lso the one which comes closest to presenting actual people as we meet them in daily life, and this holds good especially for the programmes which draw the mass audiences.