The 18th century in France saw blind faith in State Authority seriously challenged for perhaps the first time in human history, rooted in recent discoveries in science.
But it didn't turn out too well in the short term though, with the idealistic aspiration of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity quickly turning to the Terror of Madame Guillotine, only repeating the crudities of the Crusades and setting the scene for even worse atrocities in Nazi Germany and American Imperial adventures in the oil-rich Middle East.
In the former case, the great unwashed German public were persuaded to meekly go along with it, whatever private reservations they may have harboured, swayed by the unscientific argument that one race was superior to another, and that they, the blond-haired blue-eyed ones, were God's own Chosen People.
The inanity of this unenlightened argument should have been laughed at by the hoi-polloi, if for no other reason that it's public face belonged to a failed painter with black hair, brown eyes and a Charlie Chaplin moustache.
But it wasn't.
When God made Man, He must have done it on a Friday afternoon, because He made so many basic mistakes in the design of the human brain that it's a bloody miracle we haven't already let ourselves be blown to Kingdom Come by Dr Strangelove.
For Heaven's Sake, only a nation of halfwits could vote in a Billy Bunter buffoon as their own Great Leader!
This year, in September, it will be the 21st birthday of an even more egregious transgression of Common Sense, so egregious that one can only conclude that Sense is anything but Common, for every schoolkid in the physics block should have been marching in the streets demanding that f = ma be given a hearing.
But they didn't, and it wasn't, and it still isn't.
