2
" Heath’s letter leaves the impression of someone with an apocalyptic worldview, someone who sees himself as part of a persecuted minority deserving justice and retribution, someone whose group identity is so strong he feels lost on his own, and someone with deep anxieties about his place within that group and a desperate need to prove his loyalty to its leader. It’s the mind-set of a fanatic, a man who harbors “such indignation against the enemy” that he can justify almost any crime as legitimate self-defense of his own people, who have been chosen by God for a sacred purpose. Not all Beaver Islanders held such beliefs, of course, but for an unknown number of hardened zealots, criminal activity had become a kind of sacrament. "
― Miles Harvey , The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch
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" Hollingsworth turns out to be a single-minded manipulator who plans to take over the colony for his own purposes. He is, in short, much like a number of real-life figures who succeeded in exploiting the utopian idealism of the era, “men of iron masquerading in Arcadian costume,” as one commentator has called them. Eventually the narrator comes to understand that such men “have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot.” In a time when, as Marx and Engels memorably put it, “all that is solid melts into air,” the Hollingsworths of the world—and the Strangs—offered firmness and strength; in a time when “all fixed, fast-frozen relations…are swept away,” they offered a sense of connection; and in a time of “everlasting uncertainty,” they offered absolute confidence. "
― Miles Harvey , The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch
The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch