Karl and Friedrich's Execrable Adventure

 

Karl and Friedrich's Execrable Adventure

 

The Vogue of Bad Ideas

 

 

      Having undertaken the chore of slogging through some of the verbose ramblings of Karl Marx in his The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, and after hearing and reading many erudite and reasoned assessments of the great bearded sage’s life and theories, I have come to the reasoned understanding that Karl could best be summed up as a layabout, itinerant moocher and generally worthless consumer of the fruits of other people’s labor, who endeavored to justify his sins of indolence by penning wordy ramblings of suspect credibility in order to cover for his glaringly parasitic existence.

      He has been hailed by many as one of the great theoreticians, polemists and political thinkers of the modern era. His theories have been hailed as weighty, profound and intellectually engaging. They have stirred the minds and captured the emotions of millions. His grasp of mankind’s longing for a producible and reproducible social system of order, justice and fairness led him to propound a body of work which was grand in scope, all-encompassing in regards to human interactions, bold in its ingenuity and profoundly and indisputably wrong.

      In fact, Marx and his BFF Friedrich Engels were wrong about so much in their theories and observations that the exegesis of those errors literally fills volumes. I just wanted to cover a couple of them here and use those intellectual blunders to illustrate how the exuberance of our country’s youth for all things Marxian is not only going to leave them morally and intellectually bankrupt, but will also quite likely help usher in a totalitarianism so sweeping and all-encompassing that it would leave Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong weeping for their own lukewarm and middling accomplishments. And our horribly Stepfordized progeny will accomplish all of this speedily if we don’t come to our senses and realize that we are the adults in the room.

     As new and fresh-faced gaggles of university-indoctrinated social justice warriors emerge from their hothouse cocoons in academia and flutter off to the four corners of western civilization, the world’s progressive institutions open their arms in joyous welcome for these refreshing cadres of new acolytes—energetic and cacophonous heralds for all the politically correct, expedient, and without doubt, Marxist issues of the day: income inequality, gender discrimination, climate change catastrophe, toxic masculinity, and the ever-evil patriarchy. They trumpet with parrot-like ignorance the platitudes they have been spoon fed by their Marxist professors, dreamily oblivious to any and all other points of view, as those countering viewpoints are proffered by no sane individual who desires to continue receiving a paycheck at our lock-step leftist universities.

     One of the major conceits of Marxism is the belief that human nature is simply a loosely aggregated set of beliefs and principles, infinitely malleable, as changeable as the weather, and ripe for engineering by those of sufficient insight and will (like, say…..Karl Marx and his buddy Friedrich Engels.) There is, of course, some obvious malleability to our thoughts and actions, and societies have used everything from the rule of law to threats of violence and death in order to shape those thoughts and actions, but the drives for self-preservation—the acquisition of food, shelter and comfort for ourselves and our families (the first and foremost social unit) form a primary and universal motivational drive and cause of action in all species, human and otherwise, which are stubbornly resistant to tinkering.

     Almost all societies have some form of rule of law—even if it is no more that a common consensus on the disagreeableness of murder. And more advanced societies have, obviously, more numerous and situation-specific laws on which people can depend for not only personal safety, but also improved societal interactions and the lubrication of commerce. These laws in most modern societies are agreed upon, at least in theory or in part, by agreement of the populace (purely dictatorial societies, on the other hand, receive these laws as direct and non-negotiable mandates.) One of the foremost, and I would argue most counter-intuitive and deadly ways in which Marx and Engels part ways with capitalist (his term) and free-market economies is in the fanciful and now provably-wrong notion that men and women will work as diligently and thoughtfully for a nebulous collective as they would for themselves and their families. That grievous notion has been proven wrong in many and diverse locations, all the way from John Smith’s Jamestown colony to Joseph Stalin’s Russia, Mao Zedong’s China and the killing fields of Pol Pot. It’s been tried. It fails horribly each and every time because when our personal responsibility for our own and our families’ welfare is handed off to some unseen and unaccountable bureaucracy, we can be assured that that loss of responsibility for ourselves and our families will manifest itself in inaction, loss of motivation, and ultimately decay and death of both the will and the body.

     As anyone who has lived long enough to see the Edsel, Betamax and New Coke can attest, it is generally well understood that great ideas on paper don’t always translate into great ideas in the real world. Marxism is perhaps the epitome of that axiom, with the added negative outcome of biblical-scale squalor, starvation and murder to really drive the point home. Marx’s writings are an excellent example of the old adage: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Marx promised Nirvana; his ideas and policies delivered necrosis. It was death by a thousand good intentions, all because—and this is the crux of the problem as I stated earlier—he believed he could negate human nature via fiat. We have to ask ourselves how many times must this be proved wrong before we actually take the lesson to heart? Karl Marx believed he could create the Communist New Man out of the old one by disallowing him every avenue of self-interest, self-preservation and self-actualization and replacing those desires with some ethereal commitment to a common good from which he would see little if any benefit. Why would we be surprised when this fanciful notion collapsed like a house of cards?

     I will grudgingly give credit to Karl and Friedrich for one small insight which they stumbled onto blindly and then predictably twisted completely in on itself in execution: that is the recognition of the benefits of decentralized control. When Marx and Engels proposed the idea of taking businesses away from their rightful owners and then, insanely and with absolutely no justifiable reasoning, turning them over to the glorified “workers,” they appeared to be recognizing the inherent danger and proclivity to avarice and corruption which concentrated power in the hands of the few was wont to engender. But shazam! Would that they could have seen the enactment of their socialist/communist policies, in those countries that adopted them, just a few years down the road. They nearly all became perfectly distilled examples of the centralized criminality run amok that Marx and Engels claimed to be thwarting with their new and ingenious ideas and policies. Their writings helped usher in some of the most heinous and diabolical governments in all of recorded history, and he in part achieved that Machiavellian feat by ignoring two very important human proclivities—one of which I have alluded to already: 1) The natural inclination of all of us—human and animal—to regard self-interest as a good and necessary quality for survival, and 2) The absolute necessity of hierarchical systems in civilization.

     It is a fantasy to believe that anything other than chaos will reign in a society which does not support some form of hierarchy. To deny leadership to those with the talent, drive and ability to manifest that gift is to hamstring society as surely as would happen if all decisions were put to a purely democratic, all-encompassing and every-one-included vote. It is foolish to believe that a civilization could progress within that constraint; it would be a logistical nightmare. All civilizations of note in all of recorded history have been hierarchical. Of course there probably are some small tribes buried in the hinterlands which are truly communal, but no societies or civilizations of note have ever operated in a pure Marxist and non-hierarchical fashion—it is just plainly and provably unworkable. And sadly these two misunderstandings of human nature are becoming all the rage again as a new generation of public school and university students, uneducated and unaware, leave our houses of learning full of fire and zealotry to fundamentally transform society, with the results being seen almost nightly on our local newscasts as these broods of social justice warriors take to the campus commons, the streets, and ultimately the boardrooms to remake civilization in the image of their two failed and discredited idols: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.