The Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson 1907, England
A book that almost no one has heard about, and I only heard about from some unlikely circumstances.
What would happen if materialism gained the day. And what if everything could be explained from human terms. And what if from that all nations banded together, removed war, removed poverty, and all the complaints we have about life on this Earth would be solved... and to achieve this bliss all people on Earth must swear, on pain of death, that the State is more important than the Individual, there is nothing more and nothing greater than what our senses and scientific instruments show us, that all life arose randomly from tiny atoms, and humans are the pinnacle of the entire Universe.
I know many of us would say, "well, that sounds a lot like our current world."
But in 1907 something like communist Russia or communist China, or a worldwide education curriculum that believes only in what our existing scientific instruments can register, these things were almost unthinkable to most all people of the West. To walk through the arguments, how it would happen, with Benson, is both enlightening and terrifying.
I know I still have a difficult time accepting what life is like now in communist China. Seems to me a nightmare dreamworld. Yet it is the avowed way to live for an ever growing number of millions across the globe. To see such horrors taking shape in the prophetic art of Benson gives one the chills.
It is not a great book - the plot & character development are unimpressive. But the premise and unfolding themselves are worth the read.