Today's Exercise In Frustration And Despair

Original source unknown | May 26, 2002 | None

[danielmryan]

I seem to have pinpointed a hoax with respect to the United States. Pure Marxism, when matched with the political facts of America, often falls short: it's a known fact that the blacks in the segregated South won their humanity through the Baptist and other Protestant churches. This flatly contradicts Marx's characterization of religion as an ineffectual "opiate of the people."

But Marx had sufficient power as a writer, and sufficient penetration as a thinker, to blank this out of reasoned awareness. The "terror of his name" was sufficient to stop people's thought.

If there's a Marxist that stayed in the fold in America that either isn't part of the uppers or affiliated with them, I'd be really surprised. The ones that seriously characterized the American uppers as "social fascists" were either hushed up or else booted out of the Left.

If America has an "opiate of the people," it's social science. All of the fundamental assumptions that any social scientist has to accept as the tools of their trade are Hamiltonian. This leaves the true Jeffersonian looking either dumb, gullible or ignorant. That's really hurt you guys.

As far as the personal reasons are concerned, they amount to this: the only known way to break your mind out of a hoax is to act adolescent - to shove it right back in their face. Then your brain clears.