“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Who said this? Bernie Sanders? AOC in one of her Twitter fits? Any of our “woke” college activists rampaging at a Charles Murray presentation? Good guesses, but wrong. The author is Karl Marx in his “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”.
In one sense, though, it sounds like the kind of thing they would say (maybe not AOC because that would ask too much of her facile understanding). And it sounds like the kind of thing rattling the synapses of the vast majority of those manning our broadcast studios, newsrooms, and much of the publishing industry. It’s a view of the world smothering the mental faculties of many in the chattering classes, whether chattering with the mouth or a word processor.
The notion has infected much of what we read, watch, and learn in our classrooms. It’s the idea that a hidden structure of oppression exists to ensnare us no matter what we do. For Marx, the idea justified a complete revolution in the individual’s mind to the family to social relations to government. Everything was to be managed, and that means big, really big government. Sounds like the Green New Deal?
I’m reminded of Marx’s influence, now, almost every time I pick up my National Geographic Magazine (NGM). The magazine reads like a series of op-eds in The Daily Worker. A common tactic in its articles is to quote opinionated academics to buttress an opinion. Add some stats and a few graphs, and, voilà, an opinion becomes “science”. Marx also liked to say that his opinions were “science”.
Race is a field rich with possibilities for exploitation by those inclined to see the world as Marx did. For instance, NGM’s April 2018 issue, “Black and White”, blathered about race as some “social construct” while veering off into Confederate statues and racial profiling. The opinions of opinionated profs were replete in the issue’s articles. The confusion of opinions with science has become a hallmark for the magazine, just like Marx.
Let’s examine the magazine’s treatment of racial profiling. There’s more to the story than “racist” cops, but you wouldn’t know it from the piece. Absent from the author’s angle on the issue is any recognition of something called “context” – context as in any other considerations. What about the uneven distribution of chaos in the home, the uneven distribution of violent crime on the streets, the war on drugs, the debilitating effects of made-in-America welfare, other issues like the epidemic of illegal immigration to the tune of an accumulated 11 million to 21 million “undocumented” (Who knows?), and the attendant presence of the Sureños/Norteños/MS-13 and Crips/Bloods? Circumstances exist beyond the hidden, unconscious prejudices of a police officer and the Man.
An interesting aside that’s never been adequately explained by the race hustlers: There was a time when NYC black cabbies would avoid fares from young black males. In advertising, it’s called branding. Past experience can brand an entire demographic, even among black cabbies tired of being crime victims by the very same demographic. I would think that something else is at work other than racism (hidden or otherwise) against blacks by black cab drivers.
Instead, NGM and its stable of writers traipse off into the fantasy of Marx’s world. Evil has always resided in the souls of our species. Racism and general mayhem have always been there. Marx’s non-stop revolution won’t change that fact. An ever-bigger government to police human thought and conscience won’t either. A healthy civil society – the very thing that the Left is systematically dismantling – with appropriate public sanctions is the answer.
Adopting Marx is a descent into the snake pit of totalitarian control. Bad, very bad.
RogerG