Apr 082022
 

Marx wrote something that was profound, and reads like a description of the modern twitter mob. Just… not *that* Marx, Karl, but his father, Heinrich. From a letter from father to son, 1837, when the future father of the communist monster and it’s megadeaths from genocide and democide was still a teenager:

Frankly speaking, my dear Karl, I do not like this modern word, which all weaklings use to cloak their feelings when they quarrel with the world because they do not possess, without labour or trouble, well-furnished palaces with vast sums of money and elegant carriages. This embitterment disgusts me and you are the last person from whom I would expect it. What grounds can you have for it? Has not everything smiled on you ever since your cradle? Has not nature endowed you with magnificent talents? Have not your parents lavished affection on you? Have you ever up to now been unable to satisfy your reasonable wishes? And have you not carried away in the most incomprehensible fashion the heart of a girl whom thousands envy you? Yet the first untoward event, the first disappointed wish, evokes embitterment! Is that strength? Is that a manly character?

Another letter, same year:

On several occasions we were without a letter for months, and the last time was when you knew Eduard was ill, mother suffering and I myself not well, and moreover cholera was raging in Berlin; and as if that did not even call for an apology, your next letter contained not a single word about it, but merely some badly written lines and an extract from the diary entitled The Visit, which I would quite frankly prefer to throw out rather than accept, a crazy botch-work which merely testifies how you squander your talents and spend your nights giving birth to monsters; that you follow in the footsteps of the new immoralists who twist their words until they themselves do not hear them; who christen a flood of words a product of genius because it is devoid of ideas or contains only distorted ideas.

Yes, your letter did contain something — complaints that Jenny does not write, despite the fact that at bottom you were convinced that you were favoured on all sides — at least there was no reason for despair and embitterment — but that was not enough, your dear ego yearned for the pleasure of reading what you knew already (which, of course, in the present case is quite fair), and Herr Son could say to his parents, that was almost all that suffering, whom he had oppressed by a whom he knew to be senseless silence.

As if we were men of wealth, my Herr Son disposed in one year of almost 700 talers contrary to all agreement, contrary to all usage, whereas the richest spend less than 500. And why? I do him the justice of saying that he is no rake, no squanderer. But how can a man who every week or two discovers a new system and has to tear up old works laboriously arrived at, how can he, I ask, worry about trifles? How can he submit to the pettiness of order? Everyone dips a hand in his pocket, and everyone cheats him, so long as he doesn’t disturb him in his studies, and a new money order is soon written again, of course. Narrow-minded persons like G. R. and Evers may be worried about that, but they are common fellows. True, in their simplicity these men try to digest the lectures, even if only the words, and to procure themselves patrons and friends here and there, for the examinations are presided over by men, by professors, pedants and sometimes vindictive villains, who like to put to shame anyone who is independent; yet the greatness of man consists precisely in creating and destroying!!!

True, these poor young fellows sleep quite well, except when they sometimes devote half a night or a whole night to pleasure, whereas my hard-working talented Karl spends wretched nights awake, weakens his mind and body by serious study, denies himself all pleasure, in order in fact to pursue lofty abstract studies, but what he builds today he destroys tomorrow, and in the end he has destroyed his own work and not assimilated the work of others. In the end the body is ailing and the mind confused, whereas the ordinary little people continue to creep forward undisturbed and sometimes reach the goal better and at least more comfortably than those who despise the joys of youth and shatter their health to capture the shadow of erudition, which they would probably have achieved better in an hour’s social intercourse with competent people, and with social enjoyment into the bargain!!!

 

Seems like Karl would have fit in quite well with his modern followers who demand much, provide little, complain often. He blew through his families money (money he himself did not earn) at a very high rate; he produced nothing, but destroyed much; he complained all the time; he did not have any use for his family save as an ATM. Like many modern college lefties, he came from privilege, did not have the first clue how things were actually done, he valued nonsensical  dreaming over objective reality and he helped bring untold misery. He was very much the prototype for the modern SJW.

 Posted by at 4:46 pm