With his characteristic style, as clear and lucid as suggestive and provocative, John Gray points to the extent to which the Western concept of progress and his linear vision of time and history are indebted to Christianity, however much in recent centuries have been wanted to invest with the privilege of the rational, the scientific. All revolutionary thought, utopian, has been deeply marked by the apocalyptic thought of primitive and medieval Christianity, which was summed up in waiting for the last days and the arrival of a saving event that brought revelation. And, at least since the French Terror, the revolutionary movements (whether they were the Russian anarchists, Bolshevism, Nazism ...) were almost always accompanied by a Jacobin furor: to bring the new kingdom had to be destroyed to its foundations the old world and annihilate all those who opposed the new order. Thus, according to Gray's thesis, the most recent heirs to that revolutionary and utopian fervor have been the Neocon hosts, with Bush's son (a well-known "reborn" Christian) leading the way. In a global crusade against Evil, George W. Bush and his allies decided that they had to save the world and that it was necessary to export to all corners of the Earth, even if it was based on bombs and lies, neoliberal democracy and the Free Market. Thus, the result of not wanting to understand the complexity of the context, and limiting itself to imposing the pure, violent and cutting lines of ideology, was a much greater chaos than the previous one, in each and every one of the places that it was intended to "save '. Black Mass is, like all of John Gray's essays, an informed and engaging reading, and also a lesson of wisdom and humility.