455. The Devil and Karl Marx | Dr. Paul Kengor
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Hi, everybody. I have the privilege of speaking with Paul Kengor today. He's written a book called

Many books. One of them is, for example, The Crusader, Ronald Reagan, and The Fall of Communism. This is going to be made into a movie. I just interviewed the lead actor for that movie a couple of weeks ago, Dennis Quaid. And so that'll be releasing, the movie will be releasing at the end of August. Paul is also the editor of the American Spectator. And this month's version has a list of the best conservative movies

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. 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 is

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 Mephistophelian nature of the fantasies, the poetic fantasies that Karl Marx developed as a young man and how that ethos, that Faustian ethos,

what would you say, shaped and crafted the murderous doctrine that he developed as a polemicist 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 there is, 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 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. So I know where you're going with this. Okay, okay, okay. So I studied...

Jung's analysis of creative thought a lot. And Jung 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 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 a poem is where the dream meets the verbal. And then 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 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 and

light on his motivation and it also sheds light on the story that he was imagining or acting out. So 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 Knowles, a colleague of yours at Daily Wire.

Yeah, yeah. So Marx fancied himself a poet. I mean, Marx's secret love was poetry. In fact, one of his, I think his 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 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 slightly left of center. He did a couple, did several works on Marx, late 60s, early 1970s.

published by New York University Press, Simon & Schuster, so, you know, very credible. And he was really the first one to mine Marx's poetry to go through and figure it out. - How much of it is there? How much poetry? - Well, there's quite a bit, and it's deeply disturbing stuff, all right? A lot of it is about the devil, quite literally about the devil. It's chilling, right?

Thus heaven I forfeited, I know it full well. My heart, once true to God, is chosen for hell. - Right, right. - 1837. - Straight Lucifer 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. Another one, so it's called "The Player," and it was 1841. And here he puts himself, it appears,

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.

As one does. Yeah, right. And the love interest, Robert Payne says, appears to be his girl at the time, Jenny, the girl 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 him? It's like a Faustian bargain. More on Faust and Gerrit and Mephistopheles in a moment. But just to sort of set the table for people who are shocked by what I said about him writing about the devil. So here's what he says in The Player. Here's just one stanza.

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 plays this sort of Faustian bargain. But to back up a little bit, that's his poetry from an early age. And Robert Payne, who wrote the book, the Simon & Schuster book, the New York University Press said, Marx's first love was poetry.

And he fancied himself as aspiring to be nothing less than the Goethe of his age, to write the Faust of his age. And Goethe's Faust, of course, the famous character is the Mephistopheles character, the devil, demon character. And as you saw in the book many times. And Mephistopheles in Faust, that's a character I've done a fair bit of study about. Because, well, there's a lot, there's a...

a motif that's repeated both in Faust I and Faust II. So Mephistopheles in Faust is a variant of the heavenly adversary, right? So he opposes being itself. And his ethos, which Goethe has him state twice, is that the suffering that existence has

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 worse. So what Satan does in Goethe's conceptualization is make the case that

life is so unfair in its fundament he's like the antinatalists the modern antinatalists that anyone ethical would act in order to bring being itself to a cessation yes right now the problem with that seems to be as far as i can tell and this is the problem with antinatalism one of many problems is that the reason that mephistopheles is anti-being hypothetically is because of the suffering

But the problem is, is if you turn that into a political doctrine, 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, that's partly why I found your book so horrifying. Yeah. Because all that's, in principle, lurking beneath the surface. Okay, so...

What do you make of this conceptually? Now, Marx proclaimed himself an atheist. Okay, so the first question you might ask is, well, what the hell does an atheist have to do with Satan? Right. So what do you think about that? And by the way, he had a favorite line from Mephistopheles.

which was, in fact, they said this was Marx's favorite quote. Everything that exists deserves to perish. Yes, that's the line. Exactly. That's exactly the line. Everything that exists deserves to perish. And that's repeated. It's in Faust 2, too. Yeah. 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 Marx said, ah, yes, yes, Mephistopheles, you know, Goethe's Faust.

Everything that exists deserves to perish. That's terrifying. Well, it's terrifying because it truly is the case that

as the character of Mephistopheles is revealed in Faust, in Faust 1 and 2. That's the apotheosis of his philosophy, right? When you really start to understand who Mephistopheles is, that's the final revelation. He's the foe of everything that exists. Now, the rationalization is because of the suffering. Or it isn't just the suffering, because there's a Luciferian pride element

Mephistopheles is opposed to the structure of being also because it doesn't meet his standard. Right. Right. In one of the poems, Marx shouts in the form of Satan, right? I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind.

And Robert Payne says, picture Mark standing there in the middle of like a burned down village, a burnt down house, the raised R-E-Z-E-D 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. Right, right. Before he was doing—and also yet at the same time, 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 Marx. Well, the one I just read to you, The Player, that's 1841, right?

That was the same year that he started with Bruno Bauer at the University of Bonn as professor of the Archives of Atheism, the Annals of Atheism journal that he started. 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 hypothesis that we described at the beginning of this discussion is true, and I truly believe it is,

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 continuity is the much more likely occurrence. I mean, one of the things I do in my interviews with people

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 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 a nascent form. - Right. - Like even when they were children. And so, no, my sense- - Marx's father saw that. - Yeah, right. - Marx's father, Heinrich Marx, in the letter that he wrote to him in 1837,

And that was not long, probably, well, in that letter, he talks about the disorder in Marx's life. Yeah, right. And I know you write a lot about order, including in your most recent book. And Marx was all about tearing down the traditional order. In fact, he said, he and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, communism represents the most radical rupture in traditional relations.

Right, the most radical conceivable disruption. Right, so not just irradical, the most radical, right? 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 Engels' writings,

Two, criticism. And Marx wrote to Arnold Rouge in 1843, called for the ruthless criticism of everything that exists. Right, right. Same thing. By the way, not just people thinking about this, not just for the ruthless criticism of

the bad things in society, right? Of that malady or this ill, the ruthless criticism of everything that exists. And the other word that they use all the time is abolition, abolish. They want to abolish everything, right? 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 communists may be summed up in the single sentence, abolition of private property. All right, so that's gone.

Abolition of capital. Yeah. And 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, present state of things, entire societies. I mean, just it's complete. So one person said to me, it's nihilism. Right. But in a sense, it's.

He has kind of a goal. No, it's worship of destruction. Exactly. That's different. Nihilism is you don't care. Right, right, right. No, no, this is way different. No, no, if he's an avid devotee of Mephistopheles, it's active destruction.

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And you don't want to underestimate the fact that a poetic line takes root in someone's soul, especially when it's produced by someone as profound as Faust. Like, that's not nothing. That really means that Marx identified the central spirit of Mephistopheles. He pulled out the central message there.

and that's stuck in his memory, right? And then, okay, so let's- Stuck in his memory and integrated into his worldview. Right, right. Into what he loved doing the most, writing poetry. So it's really fully, deeply a part of him. And yeah, it's- Well, you also talk in the book a fair bit about the sordid 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 a, well, you're better at explaining this than me. So do you want to walk people through that? And I would circle this back to the point of disorder. Right, exactly. So it is a totally disordered personal lifestyle. His father noticed it when Marx was in college.

And then when Marx got married, his life was a wreck. And both his mother and his wife both expressed the wish that Carl would start earning some capital, right? Rather than just writing about it. The family had to beg for money all the time, everywhere that they went. So first they got the money from Carl's father, all right?

And then when he died, and by the way, Marx 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 he just couldn't make it there, maybe because of the weather, I don't know. But he didn't go to the funeral of his father. He was interested in his father's money. And 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 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 IOUs.

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... And 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...

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. Right. 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 just, we just, we can't do it. So the family lends to the Marks family, the family nursemaid. Now this is a woman named Helen DeMuth, who was called Lenschen. So the nickname was Lenschen. She grew up with Jenny. So Jenny's parents say, okay, we will, we will lend you Lenschen to help the family out rather than giving you more money.

So, Lenin basically, here's Karl 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.

Well, 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 Lenchin 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, Lentjen 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 child, Friedrich Engels, steps up. Now, the Marx family gets most of their money at this point from Engels. Engels becomes the Marx family's sugar daddy. I mean, he's not just a partner with Marx. Engels inherited all this money from his wealthy industrialist father's inheritance.

And so he subsidizes not just Carl, but the Marx family. So Ingalls, who doesn't believe in marriage, all right, these guys were against marriage long before anybody else was. Ingalls 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 Ingalls, you know, Friedrich to marry them, make honest women out of them. One of them,

One of them died and Ingalls was really crushed by it, really brokenhearted.

Marx writes him a letter and he kind of acknowledges Engels' loss in the first couple sentences. And then he gets straight to the point of asking for more money. Engels just raged back in a letter. Even my bourgeois friends showed more compassion and interest than you did. But the point of Lenchin. So Engels doesn't care about his reputation. Everyone knows he doesn't believe in marriage. So he steps forward. Helen de Muth, Lenchin gives birth to this baby boy. And Engels says...

I'll accept paternity. Let's give him the name Friedrich. 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 Lenchin. And by the way, that poor kid, Freddy, ended up surviving all the Marx family. 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 notice in the Marx 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 B movie horror flick, this pale maiden. You know, she drinks hemlock. She commits suicide. Lovers committing suicide and suicide pacts. That's how Marx's two daughters died.

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, trying to take a seat in the Marx household is a dangerous enterprise or something like that because the chair could break from under you. It was dirty. The landlords would kick them out. The landlords would cut off the heat.

Marx suffered from boils, carbuncles, which Paul Johnson, the late British historian, said, you know, people don't consider this, but Das Kapital is kind of this long, agonizing, painful-to-read work. Marx's carbuncles on his bottom were at their worst when he was writing Das Kapital.

He had them on his private parts, on his penis, to the point where they would sometimes set him into outbursts of rage. He wrote one letter to Ingalls. He said, I have this boil between my upper lip and my nose. It's like the devil has been hurling poison

excrement at me. Use the word S-H-I-T. But he suffered and the doctors tried to figure out, boy, why does Marx have all these boils and carbuncles? No one else in that home seems to have them. Well, the answer is he wouldn't bathe. The guy refused to bathe. Mao Zedong refused to bathe.

Some of 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 can probably talk about this later, you and I are both PhDs, we've done academic social science research together.

Marx never went into the field or the factory. I mean, he wrote about the proletariat from the vantage, from the library, from a desk, from a desk in the library in London 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 polemic. It's more like a philosophical statement. He said once, the revolution that began in the brain of the monk, that would be Martin Luther, he says this in his Opium of the Masses essay, 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. Yeah, well, that was probably an accurate self-characterization because 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 that's what this book does, right? I mean, 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 about that thick. Okay. The one I have in mind, the 1998 Penguin Classics edition edited by Martin Malia is 56 pages. Yeah. But in my Marxism course at Grove City College, every spring semester, we read it. It's only 50.

It's not long. But it is a... You're right. If it was an economics work or tract, I mean, it would have data. It had information. It wouldn't be anything that could rally anybody, right? But this is more like...

Like a Jefferson Declaration of Independence, right? Except it's aimed at the Mephistophelian aim, which is revenge on everything. It's actually the polar opposite, but 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, went in the course of human events, just...

puts it out. And of course, in his case, it's truth and it's inspiring. But what Marx sits down to write is just kind of this polemic. The Communist Manifesto is kind of a diatribe. It's really, there's a lot of anger in there. There's a lot of

Catch phrases, kind of revolutionary catch phrases. A guy who could really turn a phrase. I mean, that was Marx. Radical leftists are very good at turning phrases. They really are. Gender affirming care. That was a stroke of genius. Diversity, equity, and inclusivity. Seriously. Once those slogans, you know what the derivation of the word slogan is? Marriage equality.

This is so funny. What's that? It comes from the Welsh. Two words, sluag and gerrm. Sluag is S-L-U-A-G-H and gerrm is G-H-A-I-R-M. Sluag gerrm. Battle cry of the dead. That's what a slogan is. Oh, it's so perfect, right? Because it conjures up...

images of armies of the dead fighting against the living. Yeah, well, that's what his slogan is. Oh, yes. No kidding. 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. We have nothing to lose but our chains. But, you know, people just back up. To each according to their need is pretty damn good, too. That's a good one, too. That's a good one. But if you just go back one paragraph at the end, right, the communists support every revolutionary movement, revolutionaries.

the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. I mean, those lines are in 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.

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Protect your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash jordan. E-X-P-R-E-S-S vpn.com slash jordan. And you can get an extra three months free. That's expressvpn.com slash jordan. What in the world is an atheist? Absolutely. Why is an atheist toying with, not toying with, centered on atheism?

what would you say, analysis of and identification with religious tropes. Yeah. Right? Now, he claims atheism, but you don't write a Faust-like poem. Being in league with Mephistopheles is not...

technically atheism. Now, you might ask about the relationship between the two, but that's a different question. So what do you make of the fact that he was obsessed with these Faustian 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 each according to his needs, that's a twisting of the scripture of the New Testament. Right, right. But in his case, so, yeah, and people have asked me this. They say, well, if he had this fascination with the devil...

it must have only been in a kind of rebellious sort of way, like Mikhail Bakunin. Saul Alinsky in the intro to Rules for Radicals, right? Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement statement

to that first of all rebels who won himself his own kingdom. Yeah, lest we forget. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, 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 figuratively. Yeah, right. Well, those are the same people who think that Milton's Lucifer is a hero. And lots of people thought that. And who give their magazines names like the Jacobin.

Absolutely. Why the hell would you name your magazine after a group that guillotined 40,000 people in France in 1793 and 1794? Yeah, 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. 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 when they've had that, what would you call it, unmitigated gall to dare such a thing. Right. In fact, one of them, and I won't say who it is because she could end up watching this, but 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 Diavolo. Right, right. D-I-A-V-O-L-O, which is Italian for devil. Yeah. Right? And, I mean, what does that tell you? Well, that's the question. Nom de plume of all things, Diavolo, the devil. Well, it is the question. What does it tell you? Because the people who— Why would you pick that? Well, all the people who picked that would say, well, Lucifer is misunderstood because he's just a rebel against tyranny. Sure. Right. Right.

And so that's their standard. The devil is misunderstood. He's just a rebel against tyranny. That's how Mikhail 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. So...

He wasn't an atheist in 1837 when he wrote that first poem, okay? Even 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 Mephistopheles when he's 19 or 20 and that's actually the motif of his writings. He's never an atheist. No. He might not be very pleased with the idea of God, but that's not exactly the same thing as being an atheist. And they also end up putting their faith in Marxism-Leninism in an almost religious-like way. Yeah, almost religious. Ronald Reagan and

well, Marxism-Leninism, that religion of theirs. Yeah, yeah. The opium of the intellectuals is what Raymond Aaron called it. Yeah. But in Marx's case, let me back up a little bit. So he's born May 5th, 1818 in Trier, Germany. Trier is spelled like Trier, T-R-I-E-R. A very religious city. Right, right. I mean, like 90% Roman Catholic. The great cathedral of Trier was founded around the year 320, 330 AD.

It was paid for by St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, of all people, right? Oh, really? So it's that early? Yeah, yeah, exactly that early. Oh, wow. And so, and by the way, it is also the birth town of St. Ambrose.

who was the bishop of Milan later who brought Augustine into the faith. So Ambrose and Marks are both from Trier, Germany, of all things. So you have this cathedral in Trier. St. Helena is the one that goes to the Holy Land and brings back all kinds of relics, all right? In fact, she believes that she found the Holy Lance, which pierced the side of Christ, and that is at the Vatican today.

She found, she believes, the crown of thorns, which is in Notre Dame. She believed that she 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 poem, The Player, right, which is actually a play, because you mentioned drama. A lot of these plays are actually dramas as well. His demonic violinist who's summoning up the powers of darkness, Marx not only wrote the character and the words, he also wrote the...

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 in Trier while he's summoning up, I mean, chilling. Wow, wow. 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, Jenny's making fun of them, like all these silly people, right? But so in Marx's case, he's born May 5th, 1818 in Trier. He was baptized in 1824, right?

Now, he's a Jew. The family, he comes from a very Jewish family, not just in terms of ethnicity, but Judaism. They are religious Jews. They're Orthodox Jews. A bunch of rabbis in the family. His father...

had converted to Christianity, to Lutheranism specifically, Heinrich Marx. And some say that he did because of social pressures in Germany in the day, anti-Semitism, and perhaps so, maybe. 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? Probably kind of a more liberal Christian, but he was a Christian.

So Marx converts, Marx is baptized 1824. He would have been five or six years old. 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. I had a hard time pinning this down. And I don't think there's enough good information about

And you'll appreciate this as a fellow academic. So many academics don't give a damn about faith at all. I mean, the first biography that I set out to do on Ronald Reagan, and I've written, I think, eight books on Reagan, was going to be about him in the end of the Cold War.

And 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 about. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Look at all this. Look at all this. Look at all these letters. Well, that's particularly relevant in the context of this conversation. Yeah, yeah. Wow, look, in this letter to this Methodist minister who's having doubts about Christ's divinity, Reagan's blew it using the liar, lord, or lunatic argument of C.S. Lewis, right? So I kind of picked up on that.

But so many of these biographers ignore faith. So in Marx's case, I'm one of the only ones that really cared, right? A lot of the Marx biographers are leftists. Yes, of course. So they ignore all of this stuff. I'm getting off track. No, no, that's okay. The first main Marx biographer, Franz Mering, this would have been over 100 years ago, was the first to discover the demonic poetry and plays. Yes.

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 bad. I mean, this is really damning. And a communist with some integrity, was it David Risenau? With the Marx Ingalls Institute in the 1920s found all of it and said, no, for the sake of, we need to put this stuff out there so people know what Marx believed. So he actually found it, first published it

It's untouched until Robert Payne mentions it late 1960s, early 1970s. Paul Johnson wrote about it in Intellectuals. Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, who was tortured in the Romanian prison of Potesti, wrote a book called Marx and Satan. He wrote about it. But all the other Marx biographers, they just ignore it. They completely ignore it. So a long way of saying...

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 Bauer, University of Bonn. And he was a professor of theology who was an atheist, right? Imagine that, just like the colleges today. He's eventually run out of the university. But he and Marx became...

Very tight, very close. Interestingly, too, Bruno Bauer was intensely anti-Semitic.

So close that they together, so Bauer influences Marxist atheism. They start a journal together called Annals 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 socialist who could help them out. So they start this archives of this Annals of Atheism. And then Bauer's eventually fired from the university. He's pushed out of the university.

And he and Marx pulled a couple stunts. In one case, they went to a nearby village for Palm Sunday and rode in on donkeys together, kind of mocking the entrance of Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Yeah, mocking or imitating. Yeah. Well, you have the same weird dichotomy there with the character in the play that you described. It's like...

Are you mocking or usurping? That's a better metaphor. That's right. I don't like the word channeling that people use today, but that might actually apply in this case. Usurping is good because Lucifer is a usurper. He's the spirit that wants to overthrow everything and put himself at the top. And not just himself, but his intellect specifically. And that's very reminiscent of the way Mark's conducted himself in his life. Everything around him, including his family, his wife, his friends,

everything was sacrificed to the glorification of his intellect. Right. Right. And like, well, and this is exactly what happens in the Faustian bargain. Right. I mean, Faust 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 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. 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-of-the-mill sleep aid. It's a concoction carefully crafted to help you rest without the grogginess that often accompanies other sleep remedies.

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B-E-A-M dot com slash Peterson and use code Peterson for up to 40% off. Think of the arrogance that it requires to be a critic, like a devastating critic of everything. Not in the manner that Descartes

Question, that's not the same thing. Correct. 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 know, the kids who shot up the Columbine High School, that's the position they put themselves in. Like their writing, which no one pays any attention to, is absolutely bone chilling. Like,

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 Marx's poetry as well. I mean, Marx says, I mean, in one case, he's like jury and executioner, right? Right, right. And I shall howl, curses at mankind. Supreme judge.

And the mockery, it's a good point. I mean, because the devil hates to be mocked, but the devil mocks Christ. The devil mocks God, right? And in Mark's case, so they're imitating or mocking Christ entering Jerusalem. They would go into churches together, he and Bruno Bauer, and laugh together.

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 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 he had a great relationship with his daughters, other than he didn't. It's amazing, two 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. Mikhail Bakunin, Forbach, I mean, all these different guys. They would eventually get to the point where Marx is calling him an ape or a

baboon. Right, right, right. 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. 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 that point? At that point, he would have been 23 years old. 23. And I'd love to really see some sort of documentation of exactly how it began to slip away. Right, although you said that this association he had with the professor. Well, 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 it's easy to imagine that, well, maybe that professor paid a lot of attention to him. I think so. And the professor is anti-Semitic, which is odd. And Marx is Jewish. And Marx 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 Jews. So tell me about the emancipation? Yeah, I'll get that exact quote. Okay, okay, okay. I'll get that exact quote. Okay, okay. So we don't know... Okay, so we have this sense that he identified with Mephistopheles, which is not great, and that he has a Luciferian intellect, which is also...

not exactly what you'd hope for. By the way, just for the cameras, I did a piece called...

Marks on Judaism, Christianity, and Evolution Race. If you look that up, it has that quote on the Jewish. Okay, okay, okay. So we don't know why he turned to atheism. These poems that he wrote that were pans to Mephistopheles, is that after he becomes an atheist? No, he's writing—so the first one was 1837, right?

Wrote another in 1841. He wrote a bunch of them. And he did just a chilling play called Ulanem. Yes. O-U-L-A-N-E-M. And people that are watching this, if they now type into their computer Ulanem, even in Google, it'll pop up, Play by Karl Marx. It even has a Wikipedia entry.

And let me warn people, you might not want to do this, but if you click the images button, you will see, I mean, there's some satanic stuff up there from like, not heavy metal, but like black metal groups. So Ulanam is an anagram for Emmanuel, or

or Emanuello. Right, right. So Marx takes Emmanuel, which is the name given to Christ, or Emanuello, and he flips it into this anagram called Ulanem. And it's this chilling play. The main character is Lucindo, Lucindo, L-U-C-I-N-D-O,

And you just can't believe what you're reading with this play. So that was written later in the 1840s. So really the prime of his writing, including the decade when he wrote The Communist Manifesto, is also the same decade when he was writing these poems.

And plays. And plays. And plays. And throughout his life, his kids and others would say, yeah, he had a favorite line always from Mephistopheles. Everything that exists deserves to perish. So that remains a part of him throughout his life. 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 call my dad my dear devil. His wife called him my wicked knave. I quote Henrik Heinzen referring to him as a goblin who tried to take me under his spell. Other cases of where he's using that kind of language,

When Ingalls first met him, he describes him as this dark man from Trier who hops and leaps and springs on his heels, the monster of 10,000 devils, he describes him. And the letter from his father, which was written in 1837, a year 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 forebodings 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 Karl Marx 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 Faustian? 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, right? But that phrase, it's since... Obviously, 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 Faustian? That's his dad, right?

And there's only so many of those things, I think, that a sympathetic 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, the loved ones, a wife, a son, a best friend from Ingalls, and then the different writings. Okay, so 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 devotee of the Mephistophelian ethos. Yeah, I think that's a really good way to put it. Right, so the question is, you know, what constitutes a Satanist? Well, someone who generates a murderous doctrine, that raises questions. I mean, dead serious about that. Right, right. The most murderous doctrine ever promoted in the roughly Judeo-Christian context 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 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 is not something that can be overlooked that that was his favorite quote. Right, right. Especially not when you understand

Goethe's centrality in the German intellectual tradition. That's like having a favorite quote from Shakespeare, right? And it's not any old quote. It's the central credo of Mephistopheles. So that's extraordinarily telling. Now, okay, now I do have another. Can I give you a quote? Yes. 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 The Demons, and it's Marx'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 Marx seemed to be possessed by demons. That's what Paine wrote. And now this I would at least more endorse, right?

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, Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, who wrote the famous book Tortured for Christ, and was tortured for Christ in Romanian prisons by communist captors who were shouting, I am the devil, while they were torturing him. He did a book called Marx and Satan. He's convinced that Marx...

was a Satanist and did some things ritualistically that might have even been satanic. But I can't say that. I can't endorse that. But you see evidence of that in his play. I've never seen... In terms of at least his fantasies. That's right. That's right. In fact, Paine even goes so far as to say, Vladimir Lenin, right? There's a statement from Lenin which said,

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 Payne has a quote, not Payne, Richard Wurmbrand, where I think he believes that Lennon even stomped on it. He says, well, that's a satanic ritual. I don't know. I don't know that it is or not. But there's another case of Lennon who at least did the work of the devil. I mean, Lennon had, according to Robert Conquest's,

W.H. 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 I think what Paine 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 destruction, right?

right, tearing everything down, rebelling against the world. Everything that exists deserves to perish. 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, more than World War I and World War II combined. So that ideology was pretty hellacious.

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Yeah, to say the least. Okay, so, and I think it's very naive not to assume that the events that we described in Marx's life are not connected. Right. Yeah, correct. And that his economic...

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 were calling on dark forces, obviously. So, because otherwise they wouldn't have compelled people in that manner, especially not toward that sort of immense power

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. That's right. They're not exactly atheists because they're trying to stomp something out. That's right. It's not just... It's not a neutrality.

That's right. It's not a neutrality toward religion. It's not irreligion. It's not separation of church and state. It is militant, aggressive atheism. Trotsky and Lenin 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?

Solzhenitsyn writes in the Gulag Archipelago, they put nuns in special sections of the Gulag with prostitutes. Yes, right. Right, deem them whores to Christ. Lenin said, all worship of a divinity is a necrophilia. There is nothing more abominable than religion. So they don't just try to stop religion. They want...

um, Pol Pot, the Buddhist monks in Cambodia to renounce their vows to marry. It's not enough for them to be quiet. And so I don't, 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, because

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 handbasket in their own way, but to be actually an enemy of the religious enterprise, that's a whole different thing. It is. So...

And that obviously Marx and the communists were obviously that. Clearly, obviously. And Satan might say, I don't care if you believe in me or not. You're doing my work, man. Yeah, well, that... You're shutting down churches, blowing up churches. It also... That 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 could imagine someone who tortures nuns and priests and burns down churches but forgoes 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. Or at least satanic. Yes, right. But...

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, and this is sort of in proportion to their, what would you say, their intellectual...

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 little polemic off to the side written by some art critic who's 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 survived for six centuries. We're still looking at it. Well, but imagine 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 Foucault. So Foucault was a person rather unpleasant, you might say, in his personal habits, like seriously unpleasant. And so, but here's our conundrum. In the story of Noah,

Noah is described as a man who's good in his generation. And 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 are now morally superior to them, and we can remove the detritus from our past. We can tear down the statues, for example. It's happening in Canada. We're going to tear down the statues of John A. Macdonald, who was the founding prime minister of Canada. And we point to his inadequacies as a person. Churchill. Churchill.

Sure, absolutely. Church is a great example. And that sort of thing is happening all over the U.S. 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 works from the man. Okay. And I have some sympathy for that because there are, like Picasso is a good example. And Picasso, by any means,

Meijer 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 was revolutionary in that manner. But by the way, the left will not separate 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 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 Marx and Marxism? No, it's a great question. And by the way, in case we don't get to it, people should know Marxist views on race, especially toward black people.

I mean, he had hideous views toward black people, all stuff that should get him canceled. I don't believe in canceling 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 owns slaves. I mean, what Marx said about black people is unbelievable. You'll be reading letters in German between Marx

and Ingalls, and all of a sudden, the N-word pops up. You know, the American English racial epithet, you know, N-I-G-G. It's not like the German word for Negro or Black. It's like, whoa, look at that! And they were, in fact, his daughter was married to a guy named Paul Lafargue, who was

I guess, partly Cuban to some degree. And Marx and Engels are sitting there trying to figure out in a letter deducing with scientific accuracy how much N-word blood is in his veins. Is it 1 8th? Is it 1 12th? And they called him Negrillo, the gorilla. And they made fun of him because he was black. And there's a letter from Engels to Marx's daughter who says something like, oh, I hear he's running for office in this district in Paris. Well, it contains a zoo.

As somebody who's—he should be a perfect representative of that district, being somebody who's just closer to the apes and the monkeys than we are. They—Ferdinand LaSalle, who they refer to as the Jewish N-word, they're looking at his cranial capacity and all kinds of—so, I mean, very, very racist if—

if Patrice Cullors, 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. But in Marx's case, to get to your question, the personal, what he believed in his writings and his ideas in the world that he wanted is in fact an extension of his personal life. So it's a fascinating example of where Marxism

What he wanted in public very much is reflective of what he believed in private. Yeah. Because communism, again, people read, actually sit down and read the manifesto. Okay. I mean, they actually call for, you know, the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. That's an actual phrase. Mm-hmm.

That's in the next to the last paragraph. Well, the problem is that for many people, that wouldn't be shocking. It would actually be admirable. Well, seriously, because what we tend to think is 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 then the overreach of the revolutionaries is actually an attractive part of their fervor right because you're because you're hypothesizing something like an overarching reason that you could just appeal to by contrast and that that would do the trick it's like it isn't all 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, yeah. So to actually go down into the village square and just rip down the statue, to go up and down the California coast to all the missions that were founded by St. Junipero Serra, who, by the way, was canonized by Pope Francis, of all people, to go to every single mission and tear them down,

Right. So what are you tearing down? Yeah. Right. Do you even know who this guy is? And what are you trying to put in place? That's right. Certainly you. And in many cases, they seem to be tearing down for the sake of tearing down. Yes. Absolutely. And so this quote from Marx would go right into this. This is in the next to the last paragraph of the manifesto. They, the communists, openly declare. This is an amazing statement.

that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. So their ends can be attained only, only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. And by the way, I don't even know, find me a leftist who wants to overthrow absolutely everything. I mean, certainly there, you know, you can name some things you'd like to keep, right? This guy wanted everything.

everything to be overthrown. Well, it's worse than that. So this isn't just about spreading the wealth and redistributing. This is about forcibly overthrowing everything. Well, there's two elements of that, three elements of that that are appalling, right? And it's difficult to differentiate the one that's most appalling. First, that it's everything. So it's like a parody of omniscience and 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. That's right. So not only do you have the worship of destruction, utter destruction, you have the worship of power, right? Now, you remember when Christ is out in the desert, right?

and tempted by Satan after the 40 days 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 interesting. You can have all of this. Right, right, it's straightforward power. And that's the temptation that Moses falls prey to continually in his work as pastor.

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 forswears utterly. No force, no force, regardless of the provocation. 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 Goethe's

Mephistophelian doctrine, but also allied with worship of power itself. Because otherwise, why the forcible? Because he could have written the overthrow of everything. And that could happen at the level of idea. Or even the phrase, the end. Right.

right? It can only be attained with the end of all. Right. Yeah. But no, they want the forcible overthrow. Right. Which begs the question. Okay, 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? Right, right. And I would say if you spend any time at all analyzing the history of

Soviet Union, including the Leninist period 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 story. That's all camouflage. The actual worship is because the things that happened in

in those communist countries are so appalling that people won't pay any attention to them because they're too much to even contemplate. Right, right. And so no one wants to know anything about them. But it seems to me that the point of dancing dance

naked, and triumphantly in the smoking runes. That's fundamentally the point. And if you happen to be jumping up and down on the bodies of your enemies and the toppled statues of your culture, so much the better. And wondering how the personal matters with the public, right? Okay, 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 it in the poetry. So you see one directly leads to the other. His hatred of religion, right? Communism begins where atheism begins.

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 at there. Religion can be like a sort of drug for people, maybe like a placebo, maybe like a crutch. But if you read that whole line, religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature. It is...

It is the heart of a heartless world. It is the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. And then Lennon picked that up and said, yeah, like Marx said, 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 be a religious person. So the private thoughts are actually being implemented and acted out. Well, the other thing too about that phrase is

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. It's like, if your religion is an opium,

then why isn't it just all smiley faces and fun? Yeah. Right? 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 people.

the believers in those periods of time where the reality of hell was amplified. They were terrified of that. Right. And so what are you going to do? You're going to do something convoluted like, well, you have to leave in 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 part of that is implemented by terror. And then there's more to it than that, too. 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 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 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. Hypersimplification, pathological hypersimplification that's morally self-serving.

and dangerous beyond belief. Right, right. And Mark said, I was just looking for the quote right now and I couldn't find it, but one of his criticisms of Christianity later was he said it preaches cowardice

self-contempt, self-abasement, self-sacrifice. It's like, well, yeah. I don't know if it preaches cowardice, but it preaches self-sacrifice. No, those things don't go in the same category. No, they certainly don't. I know, but Christ didn't lack courage. Right. But for Mark, it was about the self, selfishness. And in fact, that moment where

the devil is tempting Christ, right? And Christ says to him, man does not live on bread alone. Yes, yes, yes. The Marxist actually acts as if man does live on bread alone. Precisely. And 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's as if Augustine said, we have a God-shaped vacuum in each of us, right? But he didn't say we have a dollar-shaped vacuum in each of us. But the communists, they act as if we have a dollar-shaped vacuum. Yeah, I know. 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 surplus

solution to every problem. Exactly. They are perverse. Yeah, so the communists and the leftists will say all the time, oh, you capitalists, all you guys care about money. No, Karl Marx, all you care about is money. I mean, all you care about 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's your key to utopia, right? They think man does live by bread alone. Yes, definitely. But we don't, right? So their alpha and omega is the economic problem. Pope Benedict XVI said the problem with the communists, it's not the communism failed even so much

economically, though it did, philosophically, though it didn't, but anthropologically. They failed to understand human nature. They failed to understand people. And to just think that, and they put it this simplistically in the Communist Manifesto. People say all the time, give me a one-sentence definition of communism. Okay, that's easy because Marx and Engels did it. They said the entire communist theory or program may be summed up in the single sentence, four words.

abolition of private property. Abolition of private property. They think that if you could abolish private property, this is the beginning of the key to your utopia, of all things. And that utopia is entirely materialistic. Right. So one of the things that I found

particularly striking about Dostoevsky, especially in Notes from Underground, is he... Speaking of devils and demons. Yeah, well, right, absolutely. He put his finger on the fundamental flaw in the communist doctrine of...

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 Dostoevsky had any direct knowledge of Marx at that point. Now, I'm not certain of that. It doesn't matter because the ideas were in the air anyways. Yeah, they were. So, but...

one of the things that Dostoevsky points out in the Notes from Underground, which is so brilliant, is that he has this bitter, resentful underground character point out that if you did provide human beings with the materialist utopia that Marx promoted,

So that, Dostoevsky 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 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 by bread alone. That

But in every word from the mouth of God. Right, right. Well, Dostoevsky understood that we were built for something more than infantile satiation. Yes. And 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 would suffice to bring about the utopia. That's exactly right. Right, right, right. That's exactly right. Okay, okay.

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've gone into race, right? And a lot of the Marxists today, if you go to the website of People's World, which is the successor to The Daily Worker,

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. 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, right?

So they're looking, they've gone from the factory floor to the classroom. And so the modern Marxists...

Knowing that the world of the Communist Manifesto and the Industrial Revolution of the 1840s is just completely gone. That book, by the way, is archaic. I mean, it's written for 1840s French Germany and Britain. That world doesn't even exist anymore. So a lot of today's Marxists have taken the Marxist superstructure of oppressed versus oppressor. Yes, yes.

And they said, okay, it's no longer the oppressive bourgeoisie 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 are 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 bourgeoisie mean? They've taken the oppressed oppressor model and they've applied it to issues like race. Yep, that's exactly right. And 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, I've done my DNAancestry.com. My family is just, they're all over the place in terms of their DNA, right? 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 black, right?

Actually, his mother's white, his father's black. So is Obama. So 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 press and they're going to hammer you into one of those two categories which marley the 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 garrow the king biographer about this and he said 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 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. 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. It's an unbelievably ridiculous, infantile, absurd, racist separation of human beings into opposing hostile camps. And by the way, it divides people. And back to Marx, this is what Marx and Engels did with Klaus. Well, so you said that 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 Marxist fantasizing. Okay, so imagine that there's a theological element to Marx that can be traced all the way back to the story of Cain and Abel. Because Cain and Abel is the first victim-victimizer narrative, right?

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 metamarxists. 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. That's 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 well. 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 multidimensional. Yeah. 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 you,

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 solves your moral problem too. Yeah. Right. And so exactly. And so what we have is the spectacle of the modern universities. What would you say? Promulgating this meta Marxism, metastatic Marxism, where they've,

fragmented the oppressor-oppressor narrative into multiple dimensions. Even if they don't know it's Marxist. Exactly. Well, and it's not. If it's a retelling of the Cain and Abel story, it's deeper than Marxism. Marxism would then become a variant of something even deeper. And I think what is deeper is the victim-victimizer narrative, that way of construing the world. And that is a way of, like the postmodernists, especially people like Foucault, it's all about power.

And they're always in search, this kind of modern post-market, whatever. They're always in search for the next victim group. Yep. Right? That's the key. Who's the next victim class? And once you're in that group, that group has to be taught to hate the other group. Mm-hmm.

I mean, for them to know that they are a victim because of that group. Yes, that's right. And if you don't get that, if you don't understand that you need your consciousness, this is where the university comes in. You're also a traitor. That's right. And if you're in the oppressor group and you don't realize you're an oppressor, right? You might be in that class, you say, well, you know, I was brought up actually in a

Multiracial family? We've got adopted kids. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. You've got to understand your skin color defines you and puts you in that camp, right? Or your sexuality. You are 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. But that's unfortunately where Marxism is today. Well, that allows you to multiply the dimensions of oppression too. Yes. Which is very convenient if you want to rationalize the power narrative and you also want to claim 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 position to define who's the victim and who's not. And those are always people during the revolution that are going to be in charge. That's what Lenin called the vanguard, right? In what is to be done in 1902. He said what's needed here is a cadre of revolutionaries.

kind of educated elites who can run this whole thing, 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 time for a new pride flag now. That's right. It seems to be about every week. That's right. They're the managers. And we stop and say, you know, I don't get this. Everybody's supposed to be equal in wealth, but

I mean, doctors, janitors, baseball players, custodians all get $120 a year in Cuba. Castro is worth a billion dollars, right? Look at the dachas and the Black Sea that all the communist apparatchiks have in the Soviet Union. Look at the Kims. Look how much money they have. 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 governments had any impact whatsoever on inequality. Oh yeah, no. Other than making everybody equally poor. Well, that's the thing. There was less to go around. So they were very good at suppressing the benefits of capital. But

Were able to address inequality. Not at all. Yes. By fall and by destruction. Right. But they were not able to address inequality at all. No. Right. They nationalized everything, including poverty. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what, let's close with this, a more personal reflection. Your book about Marx is fascinating.

a rather personal analysis of Marx. And that makes it, as you pointed out, somewhat unique, especially in its concentration on his motivations, let's say, and his poetic motivations, his revelatory motivations.

What has that done to you personally in your understanding of Marx and also your understanding of the world? Because there's a very strange theological dimension to your analysis of Marx. So was that theological dimension there before you wrote this book? Partly, I suppose. Well, yeah, I think it probably was already there. I mean, I've always thought, Jordan, that when people ask me...

How did communism catch on, right? Even, well, first of all, it's never voted into power. And if it is, 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 themselves up for election. But 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.

I think there's almost a kind of a diabolical explanation for this. Ronald Reagan said in the grand destiny of humanity, we are not matters of mere material computation, right? When great forces are on the foot in the world, we learn that we are spirits, not animals, right? I don't...

I think there's almost a spiritual explanation behind this. It doesn't make mere rational sense that this idea could have ever been fostered or caught on. I think there's a diabolical explanation, of course, behind it. Right, so you basically believe that the Marxist phenomena cannot be understood outside reality.

an overarching religious interpret. I think so. And we, I think that's right. And we haven't mentioned the very opening words of the manifesto. A specter is haunting. Yeah. The specter of communism. No kidding. Yeah. And it says all the old allies of Europe, Pope and czar, Metternich and Guizot, German and French, French radicals and German spies have entered into a holy alliance to exercise the specter. Yeah. Marx and Engels open the,

with a paragraph describing it as a specter, a demonic specter that needs exercise. Now, again, 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 darker going on. Every good joke contains a seed of the truth. That's right. Well, 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. Yeah, yeah. Oh, me too. If you familiarize yourself with the hell of the communist regimes, you end up at a level of analysis, I think, that you can't avoid, at a level of analysis that...

that you account for an evil that profound. - Right, yeah, I was an 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.

because you really do look at it and you say, this seems demonic, this seems diabolical. Another quote from Reagan, this isn't a matter of rockets and economics, this is something of the spiritual order. There's something deeper, darker going on here. No, I think I can't see how you can be... I also think that that's a motif that's reflected... The founder of which is Karl 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 immemorial 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. That's right. Like a genuine solution. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

Yeah, there's a church encyclical, Divinity Redemptors from 1937 by Pius XI, and they described it as a satanic scourge orchestrated by the sons of darkness. I mean, the church then came to that conclusion that they believed that everything that the communists wanted and said and wrote in their books was

can only be interpreted in this really dark, demonic sense. What do the liberation theologists think of that? Oh, yeah, they're nuts. I mean, they're... Yeah, they're powerful nuts. They are still. And even someone like Pope Francis said in December 2013, he said, the Marxist ideology is wrong. But that having been said, he's...

not a very good anti-communist. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a very powerfully contaminating force. Yes. And its tendrils are everywhere and they're not necessarily that easy to identify. That's exactly right. Especially if you don't really want to look. Yeah, and if you tell somebody, you know, what's

engaging in there could be a form of Marxism applied to culture. Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci, cultural hegemony, founders of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno wrote about the culture industry and the dialectic of enlightenment. You know, this is the kind of Marxism applied to culture. If they look up cultural Marxism, it pops up anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. So what's that, right? But, you know, it's

It's to the point where it's infiltrated things where people engaging in the framework or metanarrative or Marxist superstructure on gender, race, culture, whatever, often don't even know that they're guilty of it. Yeah. Which they're, you know, credit to them. They don't know it. But it's so seeped in to the culture at large that, yeah, that's what we're dealing with. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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 too, I would say, just this topic. So I'm very glad that we did it.

Me too. I'm 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, D.C.,

that's a museum whose work I did a documentary on for the Daily Wire, which I think is quite a successful 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, um,

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 an underappreciated contribution of

Christianity and Protestantism to the world. So anyways, thanks to the Museum of the Bible for hosting us today. And I'm going to continue this discussion for another half an hour on the Daily Wire 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 underlie this body of work devoted not least to the catastrophe of Marxism and communism. So join us there.

Thank you.