A Compact Mass

Men united by error constitute a compact mass.  The compactness of this mass is the evil of the world.  All the intellectual activity of humanity is directly destroying the cohesive power of deception. ...

Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth.  Only deeds of truth, by introducing light into the conscience of each individual, can dissolve the cohesion of error, and detach men one by one from the mass united together by the cohesion of error.

-- Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy (9 September 1828 - 20 November 1910), Russian writer, philosopher, and social activist, My Religion (1884), Ch. 12