This is very helpful and explains a lot. Who are the leading contemporary philosophers?
How much do the useful idiots know? When I think of the moonbats in my own family, they seem to have blind faith in the particular dogmas (environmentalism, evil capitalism) without any coherent ideology.
Their "faith" is just a fancy form of urban legend. It functions at hyper speed in social media. You can see this tendency in Ben Carson by the way random, not well thought out fecal nuggets fall out of his mouth.
Eric Voegelin and Cyril O’Reagan.
Murray Rothbard writes about Gnosticism in several articles but he does not recognize it by that name. He calls it “reabsorption” religion.
IMO, this is all satanic projection. Clearly Satan cannot grant humans salvation. But throughout history, humans have followed this broad meme in a vain attempt to build a Utopia outside of God’s laws. So, my operating theory is that this is really Satan using human proxies to prove God wrong, that he (Satan) can really create a society that can function apart from God’s laws and should that be successful, Satan can demand that God return Satan and his demons to “their rightful place in the heavens.”
Humanity is expendable to Satan. It does not matter how man humans he must consume in these attempts to create a working godless Utopia. In the end, it is Satan who expects to be restored to his previous position as angel.
This is the Gnostic vision run out to a conclusion that consistent with the Scriptures.
The Development of Keynes’s Economics: From Marshall to Millennialism
by Joseph T Salerno [1]
...
Keynes’s social philosophy, the rudiments of which can already be found in The Economic Consequences of the Peace and which was expounded in widely scattered articles, book reviews, and speeches throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, can be classified as “millennialist.” Although there are numerous variants of social millennialism
or chiliasm, including those based on Christian theology and Hegelian philosophy (Rothbard 1990) [3], what is common to all is the view that social evolution is teleological and, from a specific starting point, progresses along a necessary and definite course to a pre-ordained end. All millennialist theories are therefore presented as theories of historical stages in which human history is foretold as coming to a close in a paradisiacal final stage or millennium.
The teleological aspect of social millennialism has been well-described
by Ludwig von Mises ([I9361 1951, p. 287) [2]:
The teleological view describes the course of [social] evolution in all
its windings and deviations. Thus it is typically a theory of stages. It
shows us the successive stages of civilization until one is reached
which must necessarily be the last, because no other follows it. When
this point has been reached it is impossible to foresee how history is
to proceed.
As a consequence of their teleological orientation, millennialist
theories are inherently esoteric, gnostic, and antirationalist, involving
the explicit or implicit assumption that the theorist or prophet alone
possesses gnosis or direct intuition of the truths of social evolution....
[1] https://mises.org/library/development-keyness-economics-marshall-millennialism
https://mises.org/system/tdf/rae6_1_1_2.pdf?file=1&type=document
[2] Mises: Socialism, An Economic and Sociological Analysis
https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Socialism%20An%20Economic%20and%20Sociological%20Analysis_3.pdf
(Links may have changed due to reorg of material at mises.org)
Marx’s vision ofcommunism
10.1 Millennial communism
The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx (1818-83) is at bottom a simple one: Karl Marx was a communist. A seemingly banal or trite statement set alongside Marxism’s myriad of jargon ridden concepts in philosophy, economics, history, culture et al. Yet Marx’s devotion to communism was his crucial point, far more central than the dialectic, the class struggle, the theory of surplus value, and all the rest. Communism was the goal, the great end, the desideratum, the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile. History is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, would put an end to history and establish a new Heaven and a new Earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history. And just as for post-millennial Christians, man, led by God’s prophets and saints, would establish a Kingdom of God on Earth (and, for premillennials, Jesus would have many human assistants in establishing such a Kingdom), so for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints, would establish a secularized kingdom of heaven on earth.
In messianic religious movements, the millennium is invariably established by a mighty, violent upheaval, an Armageddon, a great apocalyptic war between good and evil. After this titanic conflict, a millennium, a new age, of peace and harmony, a reign of justice, would be established upon the earth. Marx emphatically rejected those utopians who aimed to arrive at communism through a gradual and evolutionary process, through a steady advancement of the good. No, Marx harked back to the apocalyptics, the postmillennial coercive German and Dutch Anabaptists of the sixteenth century, to the millennial sects during the English Civil War, and to the various groups of pre-millennial Christians who foresaw a bloody Armageddon at the Last Days, before the millennium could be established. Indeed, since the immediatist post-mils refused to wait for gradual goodness and sainthood to permeate among men, they joined the pre-mils in believing that only a violent apocalyptic final struggle between good and evil, between saints and sinners, could establish the millennium. Violent, worldwide revolution, in Marx’s version made by the oppressed proletariat, would be the instrument of the advent of his millennium, communism.
In fact, Marx, like the pre-mils (or ‘millenarians’) went further to hold that the reign of evil on earth would reach a peak just before the apocalypse. For Marx as for the millenarians, writes Ernest Tuveson,
“The evil of the world must proceed to its height before, in one great complete root-and-branch upheaval, it would be swept away...”
...
10.5 Marx’s character and his path to communism
Karl Marx, as the world knows, was born in Trier, a venerable city in
Rhineland Prussia, in 1818, son of a distinguished jurist, and grandson of a
rabbi. Indeed, both of Marx’s parents were descended from rabbis
...
In a companion essay, ‘Reflections of a Young Man on the
Choice of a Profession’, Marx expressed a worry about his own ‘demon of ambition’, of the great temptation he felt to ‘inveigh against the Deity and curse mankind’ .
Going first to the University of Bonn and then off to the prestigious new
University of Berlin to study law, Marx soon converted to militant atheism,
shifted his major to philosophy, and joined a Doktorklub of young (or Left)
Hegelians, of which he soon became a leader and general secretary.
The shift to atheism quickly gave Marx’s demon of ambition full rein.
Particularly revelatory of Marx’s adult as well as youthful character are
volumes of poems, most of them lost until a few were recovered in recent
years. Historians, when they discuss these poems, tend to dismiss them as
inchoate romantic yearnings, but they are too congruent with the adult Marx’s
social and revolutionary doctrines to be casually dismissed. Surely, here
seems to be a case where a unified (early plus late) Marx is vividly revealed.
Thus in his poem ‘Feelings’, dedicated to his childhood sweetheart and later
wife Jenny von Westphalen, Marx expressed both his megalomania and his
enormous thirst for destruction:
Heaven I would comprehend
I would draw the world to me;
Living, hating, I intend
That my star shine brilliantly ...
and
...Worlds I would destroy forever,
Since I can create no world;
Since my call they notice never...
Here is a classical expression of Satan’s supposed reason for hating, and
rebelling against, God.
In another poem, Marx writes of his triumph after he shall have destroyed
God’s created world:
Then I will be able to walk triumphantly,
Like a god, through the ruins of their kingdom.
Every word of mine is fire and action.
My breast is equal to that of the Creator.
And in his poem, ‘Invocation of One in Despair’, Marx writes:
I shall build my throne high overhead
Cold, tremendous shall its summit be.
For its bulwark - superstitious dread
For its marshal - blackest agony.
The Satan theme is most explicitly set forth in Marx’s ‘The Fiddler’,
dedicated to his father:
See this sword?
the prince of darkness
Sold it to me.
And:
With Satan I have struck my deal,
He chalks the signs, beats time for me
I play the death march fast and free.
from
Classical Economics, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume II, by Murray N. Rothbard, page 317, 337-339
Free PDF download at:
http://mises.org/library/austrian-perspective-history-economic-thought