Why do we revere mass murders, psychopaths? David Koresh burning to death his submissive charges; Jim Jones in Jonestown drinking poisoned cool aid with his flock, the most bizarre Eucharist of all? Karl Marx starving out his own children and then continuing in an unbroken line to modern Venezuela – 100,000,000 murdered. Why do humans pick faiths which so often precipitate their own destruction?

Faith – it is a powerful motivator in the hearts of men, filling as it does the emptiness created within us, that longing for meaning and purpose, Ecclesiastes “eternity in our hearts” which makes us human. And it comes in many forms, because we are people of faith, all of us though many put off realizing this until they are standing at the pearly gates, when it is too late. Yet it is our faith which allows us to carry out such feats as would be normally counter to the instincts of men, great acts of courage and kindness but also of wickedness and death.

The Prophet Marx

We are currently ‘celebrating’ 200 years since the birth of a prophet. His name was Karl Marx and his teachings became known as Marxism. Oh, sure many dress it up as an economics model or sometimes a political project, but as Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results”. Insanity, or maybe misplaced faith. Faith that despite all evidence to the contrary, the promised utopias will arrive. And as with all faiths, it is in the distance to that utopia in which the motivating power of that faith is found. When it becomes too imminent, people stop working – the Jews on Masada who only waited, the citizens of Islamic State’s ‘caliphate’ bored to death – and soon they stop believing.

Like Camus has said in his “Essay on Man in Revolt”:

Marx recognized that all revolutions before his time had failed. But he claimed that the revolution announced by him must succeed definitively. Up to now, the workers’ movement has lived on this affirmation which has been continually belied by facts (…). In proportion as the prophecy was postponed, the affirmation of the coming of the final kingdom, which could only find the most feeble support in reason, became an article of faith. The sole value of the Marxist world henceforth resides, despite Marx, in a dogma imposed on an entire ideological empire. The kingdom of ends is used, like the ethics of eternity and the kingdom of heaven, for the purposes of social mystification.  

But faiths must have their doctrines and their articles for them to be consistent in the minds of men, to continue to inspire successive generations, to teach and guide and instruct. And herein lies the rub, because Marx, “…wanted to abolish the morality of revolutionary action because he believed, correctly, that revolutionary power could not be established while respecting the Ten Commandments.”

Faiths are only valid and legitimate insofar as they serve as a beacon to keep our eyes on transcendental principles that we as humans know are right and good and true. The Bible calls them the fruits of the spirit: Galatians 5:22-23 reads, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” If this is the case, what are the fruits of the Marxist spirit? Hate, envy, intemperance, impatience, violence, wickedness, betrayal, harshness and immoderation. And against these, alas there is also no law.

Now, 200 years later, and with our nostrils twitching with the fresh stench of Marxism’s latest disaster, I think the moment has finally arrived that this dark faith be called out for what it is and cast aside; like Camus says, “…it is high time that the falsehood should be dispassionately denounced.” Alas, reason cannot do this for faith is at its heart an irrational entity, and not fit for governing the political affairs of men.