The Devil and Karl Marx | Dr. Paul Kengor | EP 455

the only part of the end of the Communist Manifesto anybody remembers is workers of the World Unite yeah we have nothing to lose but our chance but but if you just go back one paragraph at the end right the Communists uh support every revolutionary movement the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions I mean those lines are in the the next two final paragraphs and that’s what really the manifesto is all about [Music] hi everybody I have the privilege of speaking with Paul kengor today he’s written a book many books one of them is for example the Crusader Ronald Reagan and the fall of Communism this is going to be made in a into a movie I just interviewed the lead actor for that movie couple of weeks ago um denn Quaid and so that’ll be releasing a movie will be releasing at the end of August Paul is also the editor of the American spectator and this month’s V version has a list of the best conservative colleges in the United States and so that could be a very helpful list for those of you who are thinking about going to college or who have children who are thinking about going to college so that’s the American spectator and so but what we’re concentrating on today is actually a different book The devil and Karl Marx and I really like this book not least because it delves into Karl Marx’s work as a poet and a playwright and it sheds light I think on the underlying structure of his motivation for the so-called economic theories that he developed later and so we discuss the meph mephistophelian nature of the fantasies the poetic fantasies that Karl Marx developed as a young man and how that ethos that F fian ethos uh what would you say shaped and crafted the murderous doctrine that he developed as a pist and a so-called Economist so join us for that so welcome Paul I just read your book The Devil and Karl Marx recently and uh there was a lot of it was striking to me for a couple of reasons I suppose reasons that are more idiosyncratic to me there are many reasons that it’s of general interest but so the first one was one of the things I noticed about my students especially the ones that were really searching is that if I gave them free reign to write an essay they’d often either they’d include or want to show me a poem that was relevant to that Pursuit and then my first book maps of meaning actually started as about a 40-page poem wow well and so so I know where you’re going with this okay okay so well so I studied yung’s analysis of creative thought a lot and Yung had this notion which I think is right that when we first investigate something that we don’t understand we fantasize about it right which in some ways seems so obvious that it hardly needs to be said but it does need to be said because you fantasize about it or you dream about it or you daydream about it and what you’re doing is you’re using what you already have a grip on to get a new grip on this indeterminate object and that’s fantasy and and so you have it’s like you have the dream and then you have the drama no you have the drama and then you have the dream and then you have something like the poem because the a poem is where the dream meets the verbal and then you can you can differentiate that further so it becomes more and more semantic and more explicit now this is a long way of asking you this question one of the things you took pains to do in this book was to concentrate on some of Marx’s work before he was an economist because he wrote drama and he wrote poetry and so um and your claim in the book is that well we should really be paying attention to some of that early work because it does something like set the frame it sheds light on his motivation and it also sheds light on the story that he was imagining or acting out so do you can you make some comments about that yeah so this is quite fascinating I think you should write the next forward the forward for this one was written by Michael nolles a colleague colleague of yours a daily wire um yeah yeah so Marx fancied himself a poet I I I mean Marx’s secret love was poetry in fact um one of his I think is the most important biographer and this guy has been it’s kind of Fallen people just don’t know about him today no one had anything against him really but his name was Robert uh Robert Payne so he was a British academic man of letters the Arts a translator drama I mean he was no right-winger he was probably probably slightly left of center he did a couple um did several works on marks late 60s late 60s early 1970s uh published by New York University press Simon and Schuster so you know very in and uh he was really the first one to mine Marx’s poetry to go through and and figure it out how much of it is there how much po well there’s quite a bit and and it’s it’s deeply disturbing stuff all right it a lot of it is about the devil you know quite literally about the devil it’s chilling right U you thus Heaven I forfeited I Know It full well my heart once true to God is chosen for hell right 18 straight Lucifer from from Milton yeah 1837 that one was it was one of his first published writings he would have only been 19 years old at that time um another one so it’s called the player and it was 1841 and here he puts himself it appears in uh in the form of this kind of mad violinist who’s like frenetically maniacally sawing away at the violin and he’s summoning up the powers of Darkness and he’s doing this in front of his love interest and the love interest yeah right and the love interest um Robert Payne says appears to be um his girl at the time Jenny the girl that he would that he would end up marrying and he’s summoning up the powers of darkness and she’s saying why are you doing this to to him it’s like a fian bargain Mor and f and g mephistophiles in a moment but just to sort of set the table for people who are shocked by what I I said about him writing about the devil so here’s what he says in the player here’s just one stands up he tells the girl look now my blood Dark Sword shall stab unerringly within thy Soul the hellish Vapors rise and fill the brain till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed see the sword the Prince of Darkness sold it to me for he beats the time and gives the signs ever more boldly I play the dance of death and then he he plays this sort of fian bargain and the but but but but to back up a little bit that’s his poetry from from an early age and Robert Payne so who wrote um the book The Simon and Schuster book The the New York University press said Marx’s First Love was poetry and he fancied himself as aspiring to be nothing less than the Gerta of his age to write the faou of his age and Gus F of course the the famous character is the mephistophiles character the devil demon character M and um as you saw in the book many times and mephistophiles and Fa that’s a character I’ve done a fair bit of study about because well there’s there’s there’s a lot there’s a a motif that’s repeated both in f one and f 2 so mephistophiles in faou is a variant of the ad the Heavenly adversary right so he’s he opposes being itself he’s and his ethos which Gira has him state twice is that the suffering that existence the suffering that’s a necessary consequence of existence in its finite and limited manifestation so our mortal frames let’s say that suffering is so unbearable and so unconscionable that it would be better if existence itself did not exist yeah that’s so well so what what what Satan does in in girth’s conceptualization is make the case that life is so unfair in its fundament he’s like the antinatalists the modern antinatalist that anyone ethical would act in order to bring being itself to a sensation right now the problem with that seems to be as far as I can tell and this is the problem with anti-natalism one of many problems is that the reason that mephistophiles is antibe hypothetically is because of the suffering but the problem is is if you turn that into a political Doctrine right all you do is multiply the suffering yes right because you become anti-life and so you might say well I’m working for the cessation of suffering because I’m working for the extinction of Consciousness but if the price you pay for that is the endless multiplication of suffering then Marxism well well that’s the that’s the horri well that’s partly why I found your book so horrifying is that because all that’s in principle lurking beneath the surface okay so what what do you what do you make of this conceptually now Marx proclaimed himself an a M okay so the first question you might ask is well what the hell does an atheist have to do with Satan right right well so what so what do you think about that and and and by the way he he had a favorite line from mephistophiles which was uh in fact they said this was Marx’s favorite quote everything that exists deserves perish exactly that’s exactly the line everything that exists deserves to perish and that’s repeated it’s in F to too that’s that’s his favorite line so if someone were to ask me do you have a favorite quote do you have a favorite line I might give a scripture verse I might be Not Afraid something like that but Mark said ah yes yes mephistophiles you know gea’s f everything that exists deserves to perish that’s terrifying perish well it’s terrifying because it truly is the case that as the character of mephistophiles is revealed in FA in FA 1 and two that’s the apotheosis of his philosophy right when you really start to understand who mephistophiles is that’s the final Revelation he’s the the foe of everything that exists now the rationalization is because of the suffering or it isn’t just the suffering he because there’s a luciferian pride element mephistophiles is opposed to the structure of being also because it doesn’t meet his standard right right in one of the in one of the poems Mark shouts in the form of Satan right I shall howl gigantic curses at Mankind and and and Robert Payne says picture Mark standing there in the middle of like a burned down Village yeah a burnt down house right the raised Rez building and Flames all around him you know everything that exists deserves to perish and as if to say now we can begin right he wants to take everything down he wants to completely level it and yet all of this going back to your original point this is what he was writing before he was doing anything on economics before he was doing and and and also yet at the same time uh because I know there might be some Marx biographers who’ve ignored this I know they’ve ignored it and they might say well it’s so early he did this as one of his first published writings 1837 he was 19 years old that’s not the real marks well the one I just read to you the player that’s 1841 that was the same year that he started with Bruno Bower at the University of bond as professor of the archives of atheism the annals of atheism Journal that he started his his peak of writing was really in the 1840s I mean they were writing the Communist Manifesto 1846 1847 released February 1848 so he’s it’s not that long it’s not that long well the other thing too is that if the if the hypothesis that we described at the beginning of this discussion is true and I truly believe it is the like a complex set of ideas comes out of a dreamlike matrix and you could make the case that someone radically shifts their view away from that initial Revelation but that isn’t generally how things work and I think you need very strong evidence of discontinuity not to accept the default proposition that continui is the much more likely occurrence I mean one of the things I do in in my interviews with the people that I’m fortunate enough to interview all of whom are accomplished people is an autobiographical analysis and it’s invariably the case that you can trace the seeds of you can trace who they are to two seeds that made themselves manifest very early now you might say well that’s all retrospective memory but I don’t believe that because one of the things I’ve noticed in doing that kind of interviewing is that the people who tell the story are shocked themselves at how much of what they still do was there in inent form right like even when they were children and so now my sense Marx’s father saw that yeah right Mark’s father Heinrich Mars in the letter that he wrote to him in 1837 and that was uh not long probably well in that letter he talks about the disorder in Marx’s life and I know and I know you write a lot about order including in your most recent book and the Marx was all about tearing down the traditional order in fact in fact um he he said he and Eng Les wrote In The Communist Manifesto communism represents the most radical rupture in traditional relations the most radical conceivable disruption right so the most radical right and and the one word that was the goal yeah that was the goal and the one word well two words that jump out of the Communist Manifesto all of Marx and engle’s writings to criticism and Marx wrote to Arnold Rouge in 1843 called for the ruthless criticism of everything that exists right right same thing and by the way not just you know people thinking about this not just for the ruthless criticism of you know the bad things in society right of of that malady or this ill the ruthless criticism of everything that exists yeah and the other word that they that they use all the time is abolition abolish they want to abolish everything right um communism communism calls for the abolition of the present state of things they said in the manifesto so after they talk about the entire theory of the Communist may be summed up in the single sentence abolition of private property all right so that’s gone abolition of capital yeah in the manifesto they write abolition of the family exclamation mark right even the most radical flare up of this Infamous proposal of the Communists so we’ve got Capital Property family um present state of things entire societies I mean just it it’s complete so one person said to me it’s nihilism right but in a sense he has kind of a go it’s worship of Destruction exactly that’s different care right right right right no no this is way different no no that if if he’s an avid devote of mephistophiles it’s active destruction you don’t want to underestimate the the the fact that a poetic line takes root in someone’s Soul especially when it’s produced by someone as profound as F like that that’s not nothing that that really means that Marx identified the central Spirit of mephistophiles he pulled out the Central message and that’s stuck in his memory right and then okay so let’s stuck in his memory and integrated into his worldview right into into what he loved doing the most writing poetry so so it’s really fully deeply a part of him and um yeah it’s it’s uh well you also you also talk in the book a fair bit about the sorted details of his private life I mean Marx was also by all accounts a person who was filthy in every way essentially that you could be filthy like literally because his personal hygiene habits were detestable to say the least but he also lived in an well you’re better you’re better at explaining this than me so do you want to walk people through that and I would I would Circle this back to the point of disorder right exactly so it is a totally disordered personal lifestyle um the his father noticed it when Marx was in college and then when Marx got married his life was a wreck and and both his mother and his wife both Express the wish that Carl would Carl would start earning some Capital right rather than just writing about it they the family had to beg for money all the time everywhere that they went that so first they got the money from Carl’s father all right and then when he died and by the way marks didn’t attend the funeral of his father some biographers have said that’s because it was out of spite against his father another biographer says biographer says he just couldn’t make it there maybe because of the weather I don’t know but but he didn’t go to the funeral of his father he was interested in his father’s money and the the one letter that I quote from his father the father’s like okay here’s what you really want I will give you the money for whatever whatever whatever so he clearly knows that the son wants money after the father died he went to visit his mother who he wasn’t close to at all he was at least a little close to the father and the goal was to get money from from the old lady and he writes a letter back to Jenny his wife ahead of time basically reporting that well I really didn’t get much money out of the old lady but she did agree to burn up the IUS so in other words success right I at least got her to do that and then Jenny would go begging to her relatives and in one case well she was from a rich family correct yeah fairly well-off family and that family eventually got to the point of tough love they had to cut her off as well and both um her family and also Marx’s wider family all knew that when Jenny or Marx came knocking on the door it was because they wanted money so they lived in economic disarray economic disarray and to the point where Jenny’s family got to the point where they said okay look we know that you and Carl have all these kids we know that you need money these are our grandchildren we feel bad for you Jenny we can’t give you any more money we we just we just we can’t do it so the family lends to the Marx family the family nursaid now this is a woman named Helen deuth who was called Lenin so the nickname was Lenin she grew up with j so Jenny’s parents say okay we will we will lend you Lenton to help the family out rather than giving you more money so lenon basically here’s KL Marx champion of the proletariat the working class right doesn’t pay her a dime never gives her any money yeah well that sets the stage for the later communist revolutions that’s right in fact really what big tech companies enrich 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belongs to you then expressvpn is the answer protect your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com Jordan expressvpn.com Jord Jordan and you can get an extra 3 months free that’s expressvpn.com [Music] Jordan that’s right in fact really what he’s developing is kind of the ideal world that he wants for himself which is that other people will pay for him to do whatever he does in the library the writing the research so at one point Marx has sex with Lenin behind Jenny’s back and she got pregnant now Robert Payne says that he thinks that the sex might have been non-consensual that it could have been rape but I don’t know how he would know that but either way Lenin got pregnant Marx refused to admit that the child was his everybody knew the child was his Jenny knew it in fact Jenny was crushed I mean her heart was broken she never really forgave her husband for this the um the child friederick Engles steps up now the Marx family gets most of their money at this point from Engles Engles becomes the Marx family’s sugar daddy I mean he’s not just just a partner with Marx Engles inherited all this money from his from his wealthy industrialist father’s inheritance and so he subsidizes not just Carl but the Marx family so Engles who doesn’t believe in marriage all right these guys were against marriage long before anybody else was Engles has various women that he Shacks up with which in that day is really unusual I mean that was scandalous you didn’t live with a woman that you weren’t married to and a lot of these women wanted Eng Les you know Friedrich to marry them make honest women out of them one of them um one of them died and uh Engles was really crushed by it really brokenhearted Marx writes him a letter and he kind of acknowledges Eng Les loss in the first couple sentences and then he gets straight to the point of asking for for more money Eng Les just raged back in a letter even my bour bourgeois friend showed more compassion and and interest than you did but uh but the point of Lenin so Eng Les um doesn’t care about his reputation everyone knows he doesn’t believe in marriage so he steps forward Helen deuth lynchin gives birth to this baby boy and Engles says I’ll accept paternity let’s let’s give him the name friederick so the son is known as Freddy Marx never acknowledges his existence never acknowledges that it’s his kid of course never gives him a penny just like he never gave a penny to lenon um and by the way that poor kid Freddy ended up Surviving all the Marx family um Marx of the six kids he and Jenny had four of them died before they did he and Jenny and then the two girls that survived both committed suicide in suicide packs with their husbands and by drinking poison and as you noticed in the Mark’s poetry a recurring theme in all of his poetry is about the couples coming together the one the pale Maiden which sounds like a late night be movie horror flick this pale Maiden you know she drinks Hemlock she commits Comm suicide lovers committing suicide and suicide packs that’s how Marx’s two daughters died but uh but the but the family it was a complete wreck the household the house was in complete disarray there are German police reports from 1848 1849 on how one of them says uh trying to take a seat in the in the Marx household is a dangerous Enterprise or something like that because the chair could break from under you um it was it was dirty the landlords kick them out the landlords would would cut off the heat Marx um suffered from boils car bunes which um Paul Johnson the late British historian said you know people don’t consider this but dos capitel is kind of this long agonizing painful to read work Marx’s carbunkle on his bottom were at their worst when he was writing dos capitel um he had them on his uh on his private parts on his penis to the point where they would sometimes set him in you know into these uh outbursts of Rage he wrote one letter to Eng Les he said I have this boil between my upper lip and my nose it’s like the devil has been hurling excrement at me use the word t uh but but he suffered and the doctors triy to figure out boy why is why does Marx have all these boils and carb buckles no one else in that home seems to have them well the answer is he wouldn’t bathe the guy refused to bathe ma tongue refused to bathe um a lot of some of the these Communists were like this but he was a very disordered individual at so many different areas of his life even his research and we could probably talk about this later you and I are both phds we’ve done academic social science research markx never went into the field or the factory I mean he wrote about the proletariat from you know from the Vantage from the from the library from a from a desk from a desk in the library in London or or at his home he never actually did real field research and if you read The Communist Manifesto it is not the work of an economist it is more like a pmic it’s more like a philosophical statement um he said once the the revolution that began in the brain of the monk that would be Martin Luther he says this in opium of the masses essay um will now begin in the brain of the philosopher so he really fancies himself a philosopher and a poet a poet above all he’s really not an economist if he is yeah well that was well that was probably an accurate self-characterization because yeah his work really I know there are economists who’ve Fallen under his sway let’s say but his work really served the purpose of motivational Doctrine right so the typical writings of an economist aren’t taken up by the masses as a rallying point right but poetry and philosophy can be taken up as a rallying point and so and that’s what this book does right I mean if you read if you actually read The Communist Manifesto which most young people who say well if you read The Communist Manifesto It’s a pretty good book it talks about sharing they haven’t read it they haven’t read it it’s it’s about that thick okay the one I have in mind the 1998 penguin Classics Edition edited by Martin Malia is 56 Pages yeah with in my Marxism course at Grove City College every every spring semester we read it it’s only 56 Pages it’s not long but but it is a um you’re right if it was an economics uh work or track I mean it would have data it had information it wouldn’t be anything that could rally anybody right but but this is more like um uh like like a Jefferson Declaration of Independence right and except it same that the Mephisto mephistophelian aim right polar opposite but in the sense of in the sense of Adams and Franklin saying you know we need a kind of statement here to Rally everybody for this who can write that Jefferson’s a great writer right 33 years old fantastic writer you know one of the course of human events just puts it out and of course in his case it’s truth and it’s inspiring but what Mark sits down to write is just kind of this pmic the the the Communist Manifesto is kind of a DI tribe it’s it’s really um there’s a lot of anger in there there’s a lot of um catchphrases kind of revolutionary catchphrases a guy who could really turn a phrase y I mean that was Mark radical leftists are very good at turning phrases they really are yeah gender affirming care there a stroke of Genius diversity equity and inclusivity right seriously like there like once those slogans slogan you know what the derivation word slogan is right this is so funny what’s that it comes from the Welsh two words SLU and GM slag is s l u a g H and gam is g h a i r m slag garam battlecry of the dead that’s what a slogan is oh it’s so perfect right because it it it it conjures up images of armies of the Dead fighting against the living yeah yeah that’s what slogan is oh yes no kidding yeah yeah he was really good at sloganeering in fact to the point where the only part of the end of the Communist Manifesto anybody remembers is workers of the World Unite yeah we have nothing to lose but our but you know people just back according to their need is pretty damn good that’s a good one too that’s a good one but but if you just go back one paragraph at the end right the Communists uh support every revolutionary movement um uh the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions I mean those lines are in the the next two final paragraphs and that’s what really the manifesto is all about okay so let’s I want to go get back to a question that we touched on but didn’t fully address what in the world is an AE absolutely why is an atheist toying with not toying with centered on what would you say analysis of and identification with religious tropes yeah right now he claims atheism but you don’t write a FTI poem being in League with mephistophiles is not technically atheism now you might ask about the relationship between the two but that’s a question but so what do you make of the fact that he was obsessed with these fian Notions and with ideas of conjuring up the underworld despite his professed atheism yeah by the way even the phrase from each according to his ability to according to his needs that’s a that’s a twisting of the scripture right of the New Testament right right right but in his case so uh yeah and people have asked me this they say well if he had this fascination with the devil um it must have only been in a kind of rebellious sort of way like like M yeah right like mle bakunin um sa Alinsky in the intro to Rules for Radicals right Les we forget at least an overthe shoulder acknowledgement to that first of all Rebels who won himself his own kingdom yeah lest we forget yeah no kidding yeah you you don’t walk by that sort of statement accidentally no definitely not and a lot of people on the left do they’re like well he’s just being right while those are the same people who think that Milton’s Lucifer is a hero lots of people thought that and give their magazines names like the Jacobin of absolutely why the hell would you name your magazine after a group that gillotin 40,000 people in France in 1793 1794 absolutely well I’ve also noticed that I’ve read a lot of comments by online Anonymous trolls a lot and I’ve looked at their names and there’s a sizable minority of the really vicious online trolls who adopt satanic names absolutely more than far more than you’d expect and it’s not cute or funny no and not in the least and it sums up the manner in which they deal with the world with much more accuracy than they might imagine yeah when they’ve had the what would you call it unmitigated goal to DARE such a thing right right in fact in fact one one of them and I won’t say who it is because she could end up watching this but um it’s somebody I know the name of the magazine and her pen name I won’t give the first name but the last name is diavo right right a v o l o which is Italian for devil right and um I mean what does that tell you n plume of all things Dio it is the question what does it tell you because the people who well the people who pick that would say well Lucifer is misunderstood because he’s just a rebel against tyranny sure right and so that’s their that’s their standard uh the devil is misunderstood he’s just a rebel against tyranny that’s how mle bakunin who was one of Marx’s Associates God in the state he wrote about Lucifer in this heroic way and he was an atheist now in Marx’s case all right um so he he wasn’t an atheist in 1837 when he wrote that first poem okay uh even in by 1841 was he an atheist probably let me back up well the question is was he ever an atheist you know what I mean because if he’s stated his allegiance to mephistophiles True when he’s 19 or 20 and that’s actually the motif of his writings he’s never an atheist he might not be very pleased with the idea of God but that’s not exactly the same thing as being an atheist and and they also end up putting their faith in Marxism leninism in an almost religious like way Ronald Reagan well Marxism leninism that religion of theirs yeah the Opium of the intellectuals is what Raymond Aron Aaron called it yeah but but in Marx’s case s me back up a little bit so he’s born May 5th 1818 in uh in Trier Germany Trier is spelled like tribe t r i e r a a very religious city right right I mean like 90% Roman Catholic the great Cathedral of TR was found founded around the year 320 330 it was paid for by um St Helena the mother of Constantine of all people right oh really so it’s that early yeah yeah exactly that early and so um and by the way it is also the birth town of St Ambrose who was the the Bishop of Milan later who brought Augustine into the faith so Ambrose and Mars are both from Trier Germany of all things so you have this Cathedral and Trier St Helena is the one that goes to the the holy land and brings back all kinds of relics all right in fact she believes that she found the holy Lance which is um pierce the side of Christ and that is at the Vatican today she found she believes the crown of thorns which is in notredam mhm she believed that found the holy robe that Jesus wore at the crucifixion that the Roman soldiers cast lots for at the foot of the cross the holy robe is in that cathedral in Trier by the way Marx in his 1841 um poem the player right which is actually a play because you you mention drama a lot of these plays are actually dramas as well uh his his demonic violinist who’s summoning up the powers of Darkness Marx not only wrote the character and the word he also wrote um the uh the stage the production the furniture on the stage the clothes people would wear the violinist is wearing the holy robe of Christ from the cathedral and Tra while he’s summoning up I mean chilling chilling of all things and there’s a letter between Marx and Jenny whose wife who’s an atheist and at one point when everyone’s coming to town for like the annual sort of Festival where people come in to venerate the robe yeah Jenny’s making fun of them like oh these silly people right uh but but but so in Marx’s case he’s born May 5th 1818 in Trier he was baptized in 1824 now he’s he’s a Jew the family he comes from a very Jewish Family not just in terms of of ethnicity but Judaism they are religious Jews they’re Orthodox Jews uh a bunch of rabbis in the family uh his father had converted to Christianity to Lutheranism specifically Heinrich marks and some say that he did because of social pressers in Germany in the day anti-Semitism and perhaps so maybe um he had an uncle who converted to Roman Catholicism which most people there did because it was like 90% Roman Catholic but Marx’s father converted to Lutheranism and Marx’s father died a Believer right it’s probably kind of a more liberal Christian but he was a Christian so Marx converts uh Marx is baptized 1824 he would have been five or six years old um his mother really didn’t want him to the mother really didn’t want to convert but Marx is a fairly dedicated Christian through his teenage years and he really doesn’t start to change until college and he came in particular any idea what happened well he came under the influence it’s hard I had a hard time pinning this down and I don’t think there’s enough good information and um you’ll appreciate this as a fellow academic so many academics don’t give a damn about faith at all I mean the the the first biography that I set out to do on Ronald Reagan um and I’ve written I think eight books on Reagan was going to be about him and the end of the Cold War and um I ended up writing a book called God and Ronald Reagan because I found all this stuff on Reagan’s faith that no one had talked oh yeah yeah I thought look at all this look at all this look at all these letters he well that’s particularly relevant in the context of this conversation yeah yeah he wow look in this letter to this Methodist Minister who’s having doubts about Christ Divinity Reagan’s Lew it using the liar Lord or lunatic argument of CS Lewis right picked up on that but but so many of these biographers ignore Faith so Marx’s case I’m one of the only ones that really cared right a lot of the Marx biographers are leftists so they so they ignore all of this stuff um I’m getting off track no no that’s the um the first main Marx biographer fron Maring this would have been over a hundred years ago was the first to discover the demonic poetry and plays and he presented them to Marx’s daughter and he said you know we should this stuff shouldn’t see the light of day I mean this is this is bad I mean this is really damning and a communist with some Integrity is it David renov with a Marx Engles Institute in the 1920s found all of it and said no for the sake of you know we we need to put this stuff out there so people know what what marks believed so so he actually found it first published it it it’s untouched until Robert Payne mentions it late 1960s early 1970s Paul Johnson wrote about it and intellectuals uh Pastor Richard warron who was uh tortured in the Romanian prison of pesti wrote a books called Marx and Satan he wrote about it but all the other Marx biographers they just ignore it they completely ignore it it’s a long way of saying um how how and why exactly did he become an atheist what happened between those teenage years and college Years that really flipped him the best that I can determine he came under the influence of a professor in college named Dr fancy that yeah right exactly imagine that named Dr Bruno Bower University of bond and he was a professor of theology who was an atheist right imagine that just like the colleges say he’s eventually run out of the University but he and Marx became very tight very close interestingly too Bruno Bower was intensely anti-semitic um so close that they together um so Bower influences Marx’s atheism they start a journal together called anals of atheism which never gets off the ground partly because they don’t have money to support it I guess they couldn’t find a wealthy atheist socialists who could who could help him out so they start this archives of uh an this anals of atheism and then Bow’s eventually fired from the University he’s pushed out of the university and he and marks pulled a couple stunts in one case they went to a nearby Village on um for Palm Sunday and rode in on donkeys together kind of mocking the entrance of Christ into Jerusalem on on Palm mocking or imitating right well you have the same weird dichotomy there with the character in the play that you described is like you know are you are mocking or usurping that’s a better that’s a better metaphor yes absolutely well because Lucifer I don’t like the word channeling that people use today but usurping usurping is good because Lucifer is a usurper right I mean he’s the spirit that wants to over throw everything and put himself at the top and not just himself but his intellect specifically yes and that’s very reminiscent of the way Marx conducted himself in his life right everything around him including his family his wife his friends everything was sacrificed to the glorification of his intellect right in this and and like well and this is exactly what happens in the fan bargain right I mean faou essentially sells his soul to for what would you say intellectual Supremacy right well there’s a good diagnosis for the universities for today too but it is the it’s the fundamental temp temptation of the intellect right because it’s it is the highest angel in God’s Heavenly Kingdom most capable of going bitterly wrong right and Marx is a great example of that and finding his own kingdom which is what Alinsky liked about him starting a business can be tough but thanks to Shopify running your online storefront is easier than ever Shopify is the global Commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of of your business from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage Shopify is there to help you grow our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise and we love how easy it is to add more items ship products and track conversions Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet’s best converting checkout up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms no matter how big you want to grow Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level sign up for a $ per month trial period at shopify.com jbp go to shopify.com jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you’re in that’s shopify.com [Music] jbp think of the um arrogance that it requires to be a Critic like a devastating critic of everything not in the not in the um not in the manner that deart questioned that’s not the same thing right questioning is more an admission of your own inadequacy but that damning critique of everything like the question is who the hell do you think you you know the the kids who shot up the Coline high school that’s the position they put themselves in like they’re writing which no one pays any attention to is absolutely bone chilling like there there’s no difference between the writing of the more literate of the two and something that you would expect from someone who’s manifesting signs of for lack of a better word possession it’s really chilling stuff this is independent of your religious belief like you can’t read what he wrote without the hairs on the back of your neck standing up and he literally positioned himself as the judge of everything he believed human life was inadequate he believed everything should be destroyed him and his friend were planning a much more destructive Rampage than they managed and they had fantasies and wrote and wrote about destroying entire cities they wanted to lay everything waste exactly in that mephistophelian manner and you see that in Mark’s poetry as well I I mean Mark says I mean in one case he’s like jury and executioner right again I shall how J curses at Mankind and and um in the mockery it’s a good point I mean because uh the devil hates to be mocked but the devil mocks Christ the devil mocks God right and um in Marx’s case so they’re imitating or mocking the the Christ entering Jerusalem they would go into churches together he and Bruno Bower and laugh and kind of make noise in the Pew just to be disrespectful so he’s um you know he he’s he’s an angry and throughout his life no one liked him I I mean he I can’t imagine why he got along with his own family uh you know his wife I mean his family tolerated him some biographers say that his that he had a great relationship with his daughters other that he didn’t it’s amazing to complete completely diametrically different takes on that but all the different people who worked with him described him in this like this dictatorial kind of way and he eventually split with everybody mckyle bikunin um forbach I mean all these different guys they would eventually get to the point where Marx is calling him an ape or a baboon and they’re saying oh this is Mark’s typical filth and vitriol and bile this is what he does to everybody so he eventually got to that point with just about everybody um but but but on your point right so when did he become an atheist so he’s there by 1841 at that point and he’s 26 at at that point he would have been 23 years old 23 23 and I’d love to really see some sort of documentation of exactly how it began to slip away some although you said that this Association he had with the professor well that’s that’s right that’s in some ways a sufficient explanation like not exactly because it doesn’t explain why he would have been attracted to that Professor but you could it’s easy to imagine that well maybe that Professor paid a lot of attention to him I I think so and the professor is anti-Semitic and and which is odd of and Marx is Jewish and markx ends up with some very anti-semitic statements he said the Israelite faith is repulsive to me and he has this one statement where he talks about in the end the final emancipation the emancipation of the it sounds like something Hitler could have said I mean some really disturbing statements about so the tell me about the Emancipation yeah I should get I’ll get that exact quote okay okay okay I’ll get I’ll get that exact quote okay okay so so we don’t know ex okay so we have this sense that he identified with mephistophiles which is you not not great and and that he has a luciferian intellect which is also not exactly what you’d hope for by the way Ju Just for the cameras I did a piece called um Mark uh marks on Judaism Christianity and Evolution race if you look that up it has it has that quote on the Jewish okay okay okay okay so we don’t know we don’t know why he turned to atheism these poems that he wrote that were pans to to mephistophiles is that after he becomes an atheist no he’s writing so the first one was 1837 wrote another in 1841 he wrote a bunch of them and he did um he did a just a chilling play called Ulan yes um o u l a n m and people that are watching this if they now type into their computer ULM even in Google it’ll pop up played by KL Marx it even has a Wikipedia entry and uh let me warn people you might not want to do this but if you click the images button you will see I mean you will there’s some satanic stuff up there from like not heavy metal but like black metal groups so ULM is an anagram for Emanuel or uelo so Marx takes Emmanuel which is the name given to Christ or manuelo and he flips it into this anagram called ulam and it’s this chilling play the main character is lendo lucindo Lu u c i n d o and uh you just can’t believe what what what you’re reading with uh with with with this play so that that was written later in the 1840s so really the prime of his writing including the de when he wrote The Communist Manifesto is also the same decade uh when he was writing these these these these poems um and plays and plays and plays and throughout his life his kids and others would say uh yeah he had a favorite line always from Mephisto everything that exists deserves to perish so that remains a part of him uh through throughout his life um his son Edgar has a letter where he addresses his father as my dear devil which I don’t know maybe it’s playful I don’t know although I would never you know call my dad my dear devil his wife called him uh uh my Wicked Nave I I quote uh Henrik hinen uh referring to him as a goblin who try to get take me un under under his spell um other cases of of where of where he’s using that kind of language um when Eng Les first met him he describes him as this dark man from prer um who Hops and leaps and springs on his heels the um the the monster of 10,000 Devils he describes him and the and the letter from his father is um which was written in 1837 a year a year before before his before his father died so his father writes to him March 2nd 1837 Carl at times my heart Delights in thinking of you and your fortune and yet at times I cannot rid myself of ideas which arouse in me sad for boings and fear when I am struck as if by lightning by the thought is your heart in accord with your head your talents has it room for the Earthly but gentler sediments which in this veil of Sorrow it’s a beautiful letter in many ways are essentially consoling for a man of feeling and then this question from the father of Carl Marx to his to his at this point 18-year-old son and since that heart Carl is obviously animated and governed by a demon not granted to all men is that demon Heavenly or fian will you ever and that is not the least painful doubt of my heart will you ever be capable of truly human domestic happiness will and this doubt has no less tortured me since I have come to love a certain person like my own child will you ever be capable of imparting Happiness to those immediately around you by the way the answer was no rightly the father had intimations of that yeah and since that heart is obviously animated and governed by a demon not granted to all men is that demon Heavenly or fian that’s his dad yeah and and there’s always so many of those things I think that a sympathetic uh Marxist or Marxist biographer can shrug off I mean there’s just so many statements like that from him and people about him and people who knew him and loved ones and uh a wife a son a best friend from Engles and then the different writings okay so let’s let’s let’s attack this now was he a Satanist right well that is a whole different thing that I can’t personally answer well it seems not unreasonable to presuppose that he was a devote of the Mephisto ethos yeah I think that’s right so the question is you know what constitutes a Satanist well someone who generates a murderous doctrine that that raises questions I mean dead serious about that like the most murderous Doctrine ever promoted in the in the roughly judeo-christian context by by a large margin so I would say it’s incumbent on those who would defend him to describe why we wouldn’t just assume that but the like the part of the reason that I was so interested in talking to you was because I felt that what you documented in your book was extraordinarily telling from the psychological perspective because I know how these things work and it it is not something that can be overlooked that that that that was his favorite quote right I mean not especially not when you understand girth’s centrality yeah in the German intellectual tradition that’s like having a favorite quote from Shakespeare right and it’s it’s not any old quote it’s the central Credo of mephistophiles so that’s extraordinar telling now okay now I do have another can can I give you a so Robert Payne the very serious academic no right-winger British man of letters the guy who really broke this first in his 1968 biography of Marx all right his chapter where he talks about this stuff is called is called the demons and his Mark’s biography now he wrote this and I’m not saying that I endorse this as an academic I can’t say if this is correct there were times when Mark seemed to be possessed by demons that’s what Payne wrote and now this I would at least more endorse Marx had the devil’s view of the world and the devil’s malignity sometimes he seemed to know that he was accomplishing works of evil I think that gets closer to it now uh Pastor Richard worm brand who wrote the famous book tortured for Christ and was tortured for Christ in Romanian prisons by uh communist captors who were shouting I am the devil while they were torturing him he did a book called marks and Satan he’s convinced that Marx was a Satanist and did some things ritualistically that it might have even been satanic but I can’t I can’t say that I can’t Endor you see evidence of that in I’ve never SE in terms of at least his fantasies that’s right that’s right in fact pain even goes so far as to say Vladimir Lenin right there’s a statement from Lennon which said um when I was a teen I broke from all religion I took the cross from my neck and I threw it in the rubbish bin and and pain has a quote where not pay uh Richard worm brand where I think um I think he believes that lenon even stomped on it he says well that’s a Satanic ritual I don’t know I don’t know if it is or not but there’s another case of lennin who at least did the work of the devil I mean lennin had according to Robert Conquest wh Chamberlain the first historian of the Russian Revolution 500,000 people were killed from 1917 to 1923 under Lenin not even including the Russian Civil War if that’s not the devil’s work I don’t know what the hell is right but but I think uh what Payne said in the latter quote the devil’s view of the world the devil’s malignity and at the very least this identification with kind of devilish like um destruction right tearing everything down rebelling against the world everything that exists deserves to perish um that at least and then the ideology that he created that just happened to be responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people in the 20th century you know more than World War I and World War II combined so that ideology was pretty hellacious yeah to yeah to say the least okay so and I I think it’s very naive not to assume that the events that we described in Marx’s life are not connected right yeah right corre that that that his economic pmics Were Somehow independent of his poetic imagination it’s like obviously they weren’t because they wouldn’t have had that motivational Force so they they were calling on Dark Forces obviously so because otherwise they wouldn’t have compelled people in that manner especially not toward the that sort of immense sadistic murderousness and utter destructiveness and of course get to the hatred of God which all the Communists did so all the Communists thereafter seek to ban religion right right atheists they’re not exactly atheists because they’re trying to stomp something out that’s right it’s not just it’s not just it’s not a neutrality that’s right it’s not a neutrality toward religion it’s not ear religion it’s not separation of church and state it is militant aggressive atheism trosky and lendon create the league of the militant Godless right they ban religion they have the Moscow Church trials they blow up churches they jail priests right um you know the the sols init and rights in the gulag archipelago they put nuns in special sections of the gag with prostitutes right right deem them hor to Christ AB Lennon said all worship of a Divinity is a necrofilia there is nothing more abominable than religion so they they don’t just try to stop religion they they want um ppot the Buddhist monks in Cambodia yeah to renounce their vows to marry it’s not enough for them to be quiet and so after years I don’t know how you can separate a militantly anti-religious atheism from from especially say within a Christian context from something approximating satanic ideology because I don’t see how I don’t see how conceptually that separation is possible it’s one thing to be atheist in the manner that leaves people to go to hell in a hand basket in their own way but to be actually an enemy of the religious Enterprise that’s a whole different thing it is so and and that obviously Marx and the Communists were obviously that clearly obviously and and and and and Satan might say I don’t care if you believe in me or not you’re doing my work man sh down churches blowing up churches it also also touches on the issue of what it means to believe right and I mean you could imagine someone comparatively harmless Who toys with ritualistic satanic activities in a sort of dramatic Manner and then you can imagine someone who tortures nuns and Priests and burns down churches but foros any technical affiliation with Satan I would say that the latter is the Satanist in a much deeper sense than the former not that what the former is doing is excusable yeah or Le satanic yes right but but to to to to do what the Communists did to the religious Enterprise is evidence of something far more militant than a mere atheism yeah so okay okay now here’s something that was bothering me too when I was reading your book so one of the things that the radical leftists do that especially and this is sort of in proportion to their what would you say their intellectual um arrogance is Elevate themselves on moral grounds above the great figures of the past so I can hardly stand going into art museums anymore because a typical Art Museum now and this is true even of the greatest museums in the west is a great painting with a a little polemic off to the side written by some art critic who is basically claiming moral superiority over the artist because of their adherence to whatever the current ideological Doctrine is it’s sickening even though that work of art has has has survived for six centuries we’re still looking at well but you imagine what a what a great Advantage it is to the art critic to be able to claim moral superiority to a truly great man of the past without having to actually have accomplished anything I mean what a deal right okay so but but there but but I would like to be very careful in our conceptualization here because I’ve thought the same way about um Fuko yeah so Fuko was uh a person rather unpleasant you might say in his personal habits like seriously unpleasant and so but but here here’s here’s our conundrum in the in the story of Noah Noah is described as a man who’s good in his generation and it it seems to mean something like for his time and place he was a good man and there might be men that are so good that their goodness transcends their time and place and I think we remember men like that but the typical amount of goodness that you could expect from someone is that for their time and place they’re good okay so now the Temptation would be for us to look back into history to Great figures of the past and to say we understand what wasn’t good even if we misunderstand it about their time and place and then to say well those people weren’t good and we should we are now morally Superior to them and we can remove the detrus from our past we can tear down the statues for example it’s happening in we’re going to tear down the statues of joh a McDonald who was the founding prime minister of Canada and we point to his inadequacies as a person okay so Churchill sure absolutely chur Churchill is a great example and that sort of thing is happening all over the US now how do you know that the leftist criticism of your critique would be something like has to be something like you have to separate the man the work from the man okay and I have some sympathy for that because there are like Picasso is a good example and Picasso by any measure was a remarkable artist and unbelievably productive he produced three pieces of art a day for 65 years right I can’t remember how many tens of thousands of pieces it’s some insane number and and was revolutionary in that manner but but wait but by the way the left will not separate um the accomplishments of the man from the personal life of the man when it comes to people they don’t like yes I know I know but how do you they’re very selective okay but but but how do you how do you as an academic you can imagine that there should be some separation between the products of thought and the personality of the person right okay so are you concerned about that in relationship to your critique of of Marx and Marxism no it’s a great question and and and and and by the way in case we we don’t get to it um people should know Marx’s views on Race especially toward black people I mean he he had hideous views toward black people all stuff that should get him cancelled I don’t believe in cancelling anybody but the things that the left is willing to cancel this or that American figure on because of maybe a statement about race or somebody owned slaves I mean what Mark said about black people’s unbelievable you’ll be reading letters in German between Marx and Eng Les and all of a sudden the nword pops up you know the American you know English racial epithet you know g g it’s not like the German word for negro or black it’s like whoa look at that and and they were um in fact U his daughter was married to to yeah to a guy named Paul lefar who was who was I guess partly Cuban to some degree and Marx and Eng Les are sitting there trying to figure out in a letter deducing with scientific accuracy how much nword blood is in his veins is it 1/8 it 112 and they they called him nillo the gorilla and they made fun of him because he was black and there’s a letter from mles to Marx’s daughter say something like oh here he’s running for office in this District in Paris well it contains a zoo uh as as somebody who’s um that should he should be a perfect representative of that District being somebody who’s just want uh closer to closer to the Apes and the monkeys than we are uh they they U Ferdinand Lal who they refer to as the Jew nword they’re looking at his at his cranial capacity and all kinds of so I mean very very racist if if Patrice CER is one of the founders of black lives matter who calls herself a Marxist knew what Marx said about race she’d probably call herself I don’t know maybe a communist but she probably shouldn’t call herself a Marxist uh but in Marx’s case to get to get to your question the the the personal um what he believed in his writings and his ideas and the world the world that he wanted is in fact an extension of his his personal life so it’s a fascinating example of where um what he wanted in public um very much is reflective of what he believed in private yeah be because communism again people read actually sit down and read the manifesto okay I mean you they they actually call for you know the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions that’s an actual phrase that’s in the that’s in the next to the last par the problem is is that for many people that wouldn’t be shocking it would actually be admirable right well seriously because you know what what we tend to think is that that if the excesses of the real revolutionaries were revealed that people would be less attracted to them and I’m less optimistic about that because if people can regard Lucifer himself as an admirable Rebel the overreach of the revolutionaries is actually an attractive part of their fervor right cuz you’re cuz you’re hypothesizing something like an overarching reason that you could just appeal to by by contrast and that that would do the trick it’s like it isn’t OB it isn’t uh I think that the degree to which for example the real radical protesters that are burning down cities aren’t aiming at Burning Down the cities is Highly Questionable yeah right yeah so to actually go down and to go down into the Village Square and just rip down the statue right to go up and down the California coast to all the missions that were founded by St hanip o Sarah who by the way was canonized by Pope Francis of all people right to go to every single Mission and tear them down right every it’s so what are you tearing down yeah right do you even know who this guy and what are you trying to put in place that’s right certainly you sleep is a foundation for our mental and physical health in other words you’ve got to have a consistent nighttime routine to function at your best but if you’re struggling with sleep then you’ve got to check out Beam Beam isn’t your run-ofthe-mill sleep aid it’s a concoction carefully crafted to help you rest without the grogginess that often accompanies other sleep remedies a bunch of us here at the daily wire count on beam’s dream powder to knock us out and sleep better through the night so we can show up ready for work the next day just mix beam dream into hot water or milk stir or froth and then enjoy before bedtime then wake up feeling refreshed without the next day grogginess caused by other Sleep Products dream contains a powerful allnatural blend of Rishi magnesium eleanine 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me a leftist Who wants to overthrow absolutely everything I mean certainly that you know you can name some things you’d like to keep right this this guy wanted everything to be well well it’s worse than that so this isn’t just about spreading the wealth and redistribu this is about forcibly overthrowing everything well there’s two elements of that three elements of that are that are appalling right it’s difficult to differentiate the one that’s most appalling first that it’s everything so it’s it’s it’s it’s like a parody of omniscience and omnip omnipresence and omnipotence it’s everything okay second it’s so it’s everything two let’s go for two it’s also not a consequence of a critique right and it’s not Invitational right it’s forcible right right so so not only do you have the worship of destru utter destruction you have the worship of power right now you remember in in uh when Christ is out in the desert and tempted by Satan after the 40 days of of isolation after the baptism that the third Temptation Of Satan which is I would say the ultimate temptation is one of power right now it’s very have all of this right right it’s it’s straightforward power and that’s the Temptation that Moses Falls pray to continually in his work as The Exodus leader as well it’s why he doesn’t get into the Promised Land like there’s a very strict and it’s something that Christ himself forars utterly no Force no Force regardless of the provocation yeah now what you have here in this doctrine that you just described is not only the desire for Universal destruction which as you pointed out is part and parcel of Marx’s celebration of gira’s Mephisto me mephistophelian Doctrine but also allied with worship of itself because otherwise why the forcible because he could have written the overthrow of everything and that could happen at the level of idea and of course or even the phrase the end right uh can only be attained with um with the end of all yeah but no they want the force overthrow which which B the question so so what is it that you want do you want the end state where everything’s raised to the ground so that you have a new beginning or do you want all the absolutely satanic pleasure of the act of forcible destruction and I would say if you spend any time at all analyzing the history of stalinist Soviet Union including the leninist period for for for that matter what you see fundamentally is a celebration of sadistic Devastation right that’s the fundamental ethos that’s the fundamental goal now the flag waving about the new Utopia that’s going to be created in the future that’s all cover that’s all caml the actual worship is because the things that happened in those communist countries are so appalling that unbeliev well that people won’t pay any attention to them because they’re too much to even contemplate right and so no one wants to know anything about them but it seems to me that the point of dancing naked and triumphantly in the smoking runes yeah that’s fundamentally the point and if you happen to be jumping up on down on the bodies of your enemies and this and the toppled statues of your culture so much the better and and wondering how it goes how the personal matters with like the public right okay the he the end of his Manifesto calls for the forcible overthrow of everything that exists so that’s an actual policy prescription at the end right we’re going to forcibly overthrow everything that exists and as we saw in the private that’s what he believes in his life in the poetry so you see in the Poetry so you see one one directly leads to the other his um his hatred of religion right communism begins where atheism Begins the the the famous line the opiate of the masses right that full quote a lot of people I’ve heard people say from time to time well I kind of see what he’s getting out there I religion can be like a sort of drug for people right maybe like a placebo maybe like a crutch but if you read that whole line um religion is the sigh of the depressed creature it is um it is the heart of a heartless world it is the soul of soulless conditions it is the Opium of the people and then lenon picked that up and said yeah like Mark said uh religion is the Opium of the masses it is a kind of spiritual booze it is Medieval mildew there is nothing more abominable than religion and so what does that mean damn it that means we’re going to shut down the churches right and we’re going to put them in jail and we’re going to be an officially atheistic country we’re going to create a league of the militant Godless you’re not going to be allowed to to be a religious person so so the private thoughts are actually being implemented and and acted and acted out well the other thing too about that phrase is it’s actually a lie and it’s a lie in two ways so there’s a Canadian philosopher Taylor who wrote about this in a book he wrote on identity and he pointed out that the medieval fear of hell was at least the equal of the medieval fear of death okay so that begs a question is like if your religion is an opium then why isn’t it just all smiley faces and and fun yeah right why why well hell is a really good start it’s like and you know the cynics might say well hell is a convenient place to put those you hate but that’s you have to be cynical and naive and stupid to come up with that theory because you’re a fool if you think that the fear of hell was anything but real among the Believers in those periods of time where the reality of hell was Amplified they were terrified of that right and so what do you going to do you’re going to do something convoluted like well you have to leave the Opium with a bit of Terror so that it becomes believable enough to be a soporific it’s like hey man your theory is getting a little convoluted at that point it’s like why bother with hell and so that to me and it’s the same with the Freudian critique you know that it’s a form of immaturity and over Reliance on a benevolent father it’s like well the father isn’t all benevolent there’s hell and so you better watch your step and and part of that is implemented by Terror and then there’s more to it than that and Jesus said you want to follow me pick up your cross well that’s the next thing it’s like okay so we have Christ the happy face God who asks people only to believe that everything is good and there’s no price to be paid for that no that’s not that’s exactly that that couldn’t be a bigger lie because there isn’t a larger sacrifice that is possible than the one that the founder of Christianity required of himself and his followers there’s nothing in that in the least that’s opiate now you might say well the happy thought that you go to heaven when you die is the opiate it’s like well wait a second first of all that only happens if you’ve actually lived a good life and the cost of not doing that is well now we’re back to the hell problem so I don’t buy the the Freudian interpretation that it’s all you know immature dependence on the heavenly father so to speak and I certainly don’t buy the Marxist doctrine that there’s anything about it that’s opiate now you could say any any naive person and any person looking for unearned security could take any Doctrine and use it as a security blanket and I think there’s some truth in that but boy if you don’t think that applies to radical leftism as much as it applies to Christianity far more than it applies to Christianity you’re not thinking in the least I mean what you see with the radical leftists on campus now is that they make the presumption that all the leftist theorizing is predicated on an admirable compassion it’s like well if you want an opiate there’s one right hypers simplification pathological hyper simplification that’s morally self-serving and and dangerous beyond belief right right so and and and Mark said I was just looking for the quote right now and I couldn’t find it but but one of his criticisms of Christianity later was he said it preaches um cowardice uh self-contempt self-abasement self sacrifice it’s like well yeah I don’t know if the preach is cowardice but but it but it pre those things don’t go in the same category right exactly no they certainly don’t I know but Christ did didn’t lack courage right right and but but for Mark it was about the self selfishness and and in fact that that moment where uh the devil is tempting Christ right and and and Christ says them man does not live on bread alone yes um the marxists actually acts as if man does live on bread precisely they they believe that if you solve the economic problem if you solve the class problem I mean that’s the key to your Utopia right there it it’s it’s if you Augustine said we have a god-shaped vacuum in in each of us right but he didn’t say we have a dollar shaped vacuum in each of us but the Communist they act as if we have a dollar yeah I know that’s that’s one of the other things that’s so perverse about the Communists is that although hypothetically they’re anti- capitalist they believe that there’s an economic solution to every problema perverse so yeah so the Communists and the leftists will say all the time oh you capitalists all you guys care about money no KL Marx all you care about is money yeah I mean all you care about is the m is the material world it’s like they’re fashioning their golden calf out of money and capital they just think that if you redistribute wealth If You Can level the classes if everybody has equal income right that that uh that’s your key to Utopia right they think man does live by bread alone yes definitely uh but but we don’t right so their Alpha and Omega is the economic problem um U pop Benedict the 16th said the uh you know the the the the problem with the Communists is not the communism failed even so much economically though it did philosophically though it did but anthropologically they fail to understand human nature yeah they fail to understand people and to just think that and they put it this simp this simplistically in the Communist Manifesto people say all the time give me a give me a one- sentence definition of communism okay that’s easy cuz Marx and Engles did it they said the entire communist Theory or program maybe some up in the single sentence four words abolition of private property abolition of private property they think that you if if you could abolish private property you this is the beginning of the key to your Utopia of all things and that the utopian Utopia is entirely materialistic right so one of the things that I found particularly striking about dovi especially in Notes from Underground is he speak of devils and demons yeah yeah well right absolutely he um he put his finger on the fundamental flaw in the Communist Doctrine before I think it was probably even expressed by Marx at least popularly expressed I don’t exactly know when Notes from Underground was written but I don’t believe that Mark that dovi had any direct knowledge of marks at that point now I’m not certain of that doesn’t matter because the ideas were in the air anyways right they were so so but but one of the things that doeski points out in the Notes from Underground which is so brilliant is that like he has this bitter resentful underground character point out that if you did provide human beings with the materialist Utopia that marks promoted so that dovi says so that they had nothing to do but lie in warm pools of bubbling water and eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species that the people so benefited would promptly go insane enough to smash it all to bits just to have something interesting to do now he phrases it more bitterly because he he phrases it as a form of ingratitude but there’s a point there then the point is that it is the point that man does not live right by bread alone that dos every word from from the mouth of God right well dovi understood that we were built for something more than infantile satiation right and more than more for more than hedonistic satiation and I would say the marxists Ally very nicely with the infantile hedonists because both of them presume that the mere satiation of Desire yeah would suffice to bring about the Utopia that’s exactly right right right right that’s exactly right and um maybe this is a kind of sharp departure look where the marxists today are right a lot of the marxists today are not even bothering with class or economics but they’ve gone into the area of culture they’ve gone into gender they they’ve they’ve gone into race right yeah and they a lot of the marxists today if you go to the website of uh people’s World which is the successor to the Daily worker the and you go to the about section they have a call there not for factory workers not for coal miners I mean the West Virginia coal miners voting for Trump right not for steel workers you know my hometown of Pittsburgh steel workers are probably large like Maga people a lot of those guys are blue collar Union guys they have a call for culture workers so they’re looking they’ve gone from the factory floor to the classroom Y and and so the modern marxists knowing that the world of the Communist Manifesto in the industrial revolution of the 1840s is just completely gone I that book by the way um is archaic I mean it it it’s written for 1840s France Germany satanic and and Britain yeah I me that world doesn’t even exist anymore so a lot of today’s marxists have taken the Marxist superstructure of oppressed versus oppressor right and they said okay it’s no longer uh the the the oppressive Bourgeois and the oppressed proletariat and the proletariat would be the oppressed group that would be the victim class and also the Redeemer class right by the stripes of the proletariat you were healed right they would usher in the revolution so instead people don’t I mean what young people today even know what the word proletariat or bourgeois mean they’ve taken the oppressed oppressor model and they’ve applied it to issues like race y it’s exactly right and and so the so the oppressor and this is the most simplistic infantile thing anybody could do the race-based critical race theorists to take human beings who are I mean you know do I’ve done my DNA ancestry.com my family is just they’re all over the place in terms of their DNA right U to boil people down in America in the 2020s as okay two categories black white right how do you do that I mean my youngest son who’s adopted is is black um actually his mother’s white his father’s black um so is Obama so he’s he’d be considered black right but if you do his DNA test he’s all over the place but the modern critical race theorist is going to say white oppressor black oppress and they’re going to hammer you into one of those two categories which Martin Luther King Jr said no we’re to be judged by the content of our character not the color of our skin um CRT which I I interviewed David gero the king biographer about this and he said um CRT predates King King was shot in April 1968 so he didn’t talk about CRT but he would have been totally against any kind of race based classification of human beings so the modern group is is hammering you into one of these two categories oppressed versus oppressor so the new oppressed group will be blacks and they need to have their Consciousness raised they need to know that they are the oppressed group uh they will Usher in the Redemption they’re also the Redeemer class and try telling somebody like Oprah Winfrey or Kobe Bryant that they’re oppressed just because they’re black I mean how racist is that whereas the white homeless guy that he’s the oppressor because he’s white is an un unbelievably ridiculous infantile absurd racist separation of human beings into opposing hostile camp and by the way it divides people and back to Marx this is what Marx and Engles did with with CLA well so you that took us a field and I don’t think it did because tell me what you think about this because this ties maybe the close of our discussion to the beginning because we talked about essentially theological matters in relationship to Marx’s fantasizing okay so imagine that there’s there’s a theological element to Marks that can be traced all the way back to the story of Kan and Abel because Kan and Abel is the first victim victimizer narrative right and Cain feels that he’s the victim of Abel yeah and he is driven by a bitter resentment by way Envy which is what Marxism is all about absolutely and he becomes extremely hostile okay so imagine that Marxism is essentially a retelling of the story of Cain and Abel with Cain as the protagonist okay so now so once you get that then you can see what’s happened with the modern metam marxists because we might think being slightly older we might think that the core doctrine of Marxism is economic inequality but it’s not the core Doctrine is victim victimizer right now what Marx said was the Prime dimension of victim victimizer is economic now I think and this is partly why Marxism was powerful if you have to pick a victim victimizer narrative the most powerful one is economic let’s just leave that aside now you said well we no longer have the dark satanic Mills so the economic story isn’t playing out as wellb but the victim victimizer narrative that’s still alive and what the I think of the new postmodern leftism as a metastasized Marxism yeah because it’s the victim victimizer narrative that’s now multi-dimensional you can take any way you can possibly categorize human beings that divides them into groups and you can take that dichotomous Dimension and you can say victim victimizer right so now you explain everything right then you can say so you can explain everything you got no more work to do cognitively and you can learn that in 10 minutes right but then there’s an additional advantage and this is also endemic to Marxism imagine that you have two problems to solve in the world is one is to understand it and the other is to figure out how to conduct yourself in it okay well the victim victimizer narrative gives you both because not only have you now a complete causal explanation everything can be understood in terms of power because that’s the victim victimizer story but goodness merely requires that you identify with the victim right right right so it’s solves your moral problem too right and so exactly and so what we have is the spectacle of the modern universities uh what would you say promulgating this meta Marxism metastic Marxism where they’ve fragmented The oppressor oppressor Narrative into multiple Dimensions even if they don’t know it’s Marxist and exactly exactly well and it’s not if it’s a retelling of the can and abble story it’s deeper than Marxism right Marxism would then become a variant of something even deeper and I I think what is deeper is the victim victimizer narrative that way of construing the world and that is a way of like the postmodernist especially people like fuk Cole it’s all about power life can be unpredictable but a good life insurance plan gives your family a financial safety net to protect against some of the unknowns policy genius is the country’s leading online insurance Market place it makes choosing the right policy for your family easy and quick with policy genius you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage some options offer same day approval and avoid unnecessary medical exams maybe you already have a life insurance policy through work but that might not offer enough protection for your family’s needs and it may not follow you if you leave your job you need a backup plan policy genius has licensed agents who can help you find the best fit for your needs when they make it this easy there’s no excuse not not to do it policy genius works for you not the insurance companies that means they’re not incentivized to recommend one insurer over another so you can trust their guidance get Peace of Mind by finding the right life insurance with policy genius head to policygenius.com Jordan or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save that’s policy genius.com Jordan and they’re and they’re always in search um this kind of modern post Market whatever they’re always in search for the next victim group y right that that that’s the key who’s the next victim class and once you’re in that group you that group has to be taught to hate the other group I I I mean to to for them to know that they are a victim because of that group that’s right that’s and and and if you don’t get that if you don’t understand that you need your Consciousness this is where the university TR to teach that’s right and and if you’re in the oppressor group and you don’t realize you’re an oppressor right um You might be in that class you say well you know I was brought up actually in a multi-racial family with we’ve got adopted kids and we uh it’s like no no no no no you’ve got to understand your skin color defines you and put you in that camp right the oppressor or your sexuality or your gender I mean what could be worse than as simple as you know male female right gender marxists yeah uh but but that that’s unfortunately that allows you to multiply the dimensions of Oppression too which is very convenient if you want to rationalize the power narrative and you also want to claim Mor moral virtue without doing any work that’s right I’m on the side of the victims it’s like really are you really now you’re really on the side of the victims and you’re sure you’ve got the victims properly identified and they’re only victims and they’re in a power position too they’re in the they’re in the position to Define who’s the victim and who’s not and those are always the people during the revolution that are going to be in charge this what lenon called the Vanguard right and in what is to be done in 1902 he he said what’s needed here is a Cadre of revolutionaries kind of educated Elites who can run this whole thing who can who can who can run the project and tell you when you’ve gone from feudalism to capitalism to socialism to Communism right they’re the same ones that tell you when it’s new time time for a new pride flag now that’s right that’s right seems to be about every week that’s right they’re the managers and and and and we stop and say you know I don’t get this everybody’s supposed to be equal in wealth but Castro I mean doctors janitors baseball players custodians all get $120 a year in Cuba Castro is worth a billion dollars right look at the doas on the Black Sea that all the Communist apparat have in the S Soviet Union look at the Kims look how look how much money they well you have to understand for them they’re the rulers right the Marxism the communism is for the ruled not the rulers it’s for the masses not the Masters right it’s for all of you idiots well there’s also no evidence technically from the economic perspective that the Communist Communist governments had any impact whatsoever on inequality oh yeah no other than making everybody equally well well that’s the thing is there was less to go around right so they were very good at suppressing the benefits of capital but were able to address inequality not at all yes by well and by destruction but they were not able to address inequality at all no right they nationalize everything including uh poverty yeah yeah yeah yeah okay so what let’s close with this a more personal reflection your book about Marx is a rather personal analysis of marks and that makes it as you pointed out somewhat unique especially in its concentration on his motivations let’s say in his poetic motivations his revelatory motivations what has that done to you personally in your understanding of Marx and let’s also your understanding of the world because there’s a very strange theological Dimension to your analysis of marks okay so so was that theological dimens mention there before you wrote this book partly I suppose well yeah I think I think it probably was already there I mean I’ve always thought Jordan that um when people ask me uh how did Communism catch on right even well F first of all it’s never voted into power and if it is they they don’t stand for another election right I mean Fidel Castro called for democracy and free and fair elections in 1959 right and it never actually had them right the Kims don’t put them themselves themselves up for for for election but the the what’s the rational reason why anybody if you just read The Communist Manifesto It’s so clear that this is completely impractical it can’t possibly work U I think there I think there’s almost a kind of a diabolical explanation for this you know Ronald Reagan said um in you in in the in the grand Destiny of humanity we are not matters of mere material computation right when great for are are on the foot in the world we learn that we are spirits not animals right um the that and I think there’s almost a spiritual explanation behind this so you it doesn’t it doesn’t make mere rational sense that this idea could have ever been fostered or caught on I I think there’s a diabolical explanation right so you basically you basically believe that the Marxist phenomena cannot be underst stood outside an overarching religious interpret frame so and and I think that’s right and we haven’t mentioned the very opening words of the manifesto a spectre is haunting Europe the Spectre of Communism no kidding yeah and it says all the old allies of Europe um Pope and Zar metnick and gizo German and French uh French radicals and German spies have entered into a holy Alliance to exercise the Spectre marks and Eng Les open the book with with paragraph describing it as a spectre a demonic Spectre that needs exercise now again like well they’re being playful with words yeah right no there’s too much of this there’s too much of this there’s something deeper and dark good J contains his a seed of the truth well in in my experience for what it’s worth it was the horrors of Communism that motivated me to think much more deeply about religious matters because if you if you familiar iiz yourself with the hell of the Communist regimes you end up at a level of analysis I think that you you can’t avoid at a level of analysis that demands that you account for an evil that profound right yeah I was at I was in agnostic in college and close to being an atheist and studying this stuff in the end of the Cold War is part of what pulled me out of that pit uh because you really do look at it and you say this is this seems demonic this seems diabolical uh you another quote from Reagan uh this isn’t a matter of rockets and economics this this is a something of the spiritual order you know there’s something deeper darker going on here yeah no I think I I I can’t see how you can be I also think that that’s a motif that found which is Carl Marx yeah right right right I think that there’s a reflection in that of the Dragon treasure dichotomy you know we know from time in Memorial that you go searching for Treasure where the dragons are and there isn’t a dragon that’s more terrifying than the dragon that’s the spirit of malevolence itself and you cannot study communism without encountering the spirit of malevolence and then the treasure that lurks there is something like a recognition that the overarching religious framework is actually necessary to conceptualize the problem properly and probably to offer something approximating a solution like an genuine solution yeah I I think I think that’s exactly right yeah there’s um there’s a church in cyclical Divinity redemptor from 19 uh 37 by Pas I 11 and and they described it as a satanic Scourge orchestr orchestrated by the sons of Darkness I mean the the the church then came to that conclusion that they believe that everything that the Communists wanted and said and wrote in their books can only be interpreted in this really dark demonic sense what do The Liberation theologists think of that oh yeah they’re they’re nuts I mean they’re um yeah they’re powerful nuts they are still and um even someone like Pope Francis U said in December 2013 he said the Marxist ideology is wrong uh but have that having been said he’s not a very good anti-communist right I mean well it’s a it’s a very powerfully contaminating force and its tendrils are everywhere and not necessarily that easy to identify that’s exactly especially if you don’t really want to look yeah and if you tell somebody you know what you’re engaging in there could be a form of Marxism applied to culture Frankfurt School Antonio gry cultural hemony founders of the Frankfurt School Max Simer Theodore adorno wrote about the culture industry and the dialectic of Enlightenment you know this is a kind of Marxism applied to culture they look up cultural Marxism it pops up anti-semitic conspiracy theory so well what’s that right but but but you know it’s it it’s it’s to the point where it’s infiltrated things where people engaging in the framework or meta narrative or Marxist superstructure on gender race culture whatever often don’t even know that they’re guilty of it which they’re you know credit to them they don’t know it but it’s it’s so seeped in to the culture at large that yeah this what we’re dealing with y y y all right sir hey this was great thanks so much thank you very much yeah well there were many other things too that we could have talked about too I would have liked to have talked about your work on Reagan and your other books as well but we may save that for a further discussion this was worth the devotion of 90 minutes to I would say just this topic so I’m very glad that we did it me too glad too and for everybody watching and listening on the YouTube side we’re very happy for your time and attention as well and to the film crew here we’re at the Museum of the Bible which is a very appropriate place to be having this discussion in Washington DC um that’s a museum whose work I did a documentary on for the daily wire which I think is quite a success ful documentary and was a great joy to actually produce and it’s a great museum so if you ever do happen to come to DC um go check it out it’s it’s uh it’s the kind of place that can help you understand a lot more deeply the relationship between at minimum the relationship between the fact of the Bible and the fact of literacy itself in its worldwide distribution because those two things are very integrally Associated and that’s a underappreciated contribution of CHR Christianity and protestantism to the world so anyways thanks to the Museum of the Bible for hosting us today and uh I’m going to continue this discussion for another half an hour on the daily W side and what we’ll talk about is what I often talk about on that in that additional half an hour which is the development of the interests that underly this this body of work devoted not least to the catastrophe of Marxism and communism so join us there [Music]

Video Tags: Jordan Peterson,Jordan B Peterson,psychology,psychoanalysis,existentialism,maps of meaning,free speech,freedom of speech,personality lectures,personality and transformations,Jordan perterson,Dr Peterson

Video Duration: 01:40:34