The Devil and Karl Marx: Dr. Paul Kengor (Full Transcript) 

So join us for that.

The Importance of Marx’s Early Writings

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So welcome, Paul. I just read your book, “The Devil and Karl Marx” recently. And there is — a lot of it was striking to me for a couple of reasons. I suppose reasons that are more idiosyncratic to me, there are many reasons that it’s of general interest.

But so the first one was, one of the things I noticed about my students, especially the ones that were really searching, is that if I gave them free rein to write an essay, they’d often either include or want to show me a poem that was relevant to that pursuit. And then my first book, “Maps of Meaning,” actually started as about a 40 page poem.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Wow.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, and so I studied Jung’s analysis of creative thought a lot. And Jung had this notion, which I think is right, that when we first investigate something that we don’t understand, we fantasize about it, right? Which in some ways seems so obvious that it hardly needs to be said, but it does need to be said because you fantasize about it, or you dream about it, or you daydream about it.

And what you’re doing is you’re using what you already have a grip on to get a new grip on this indeterminate object, and that’s fantasy. And so you have, it’s like you have the dream, and then you have the drama, and then you have the dream. And then you have something like the poem, because the poem is where the dream meets the verbal. And then you can differentiate that further, so it becomes more and more semantic and more explicit.

Now, this is a long way of asking you this question. One of the things you took pains to do in this book was to concentrate on some of Marx’s work before he was an economist, because he wrote drama and he wrote poetry. And so, and your claim in the book is that, well, we should really be paying attention to some of that early work because it does something like set the frame and sheds light on his motivation. And it also sheds light on the story that he was imagining or acting out. So can you make some comments about that?

Marx’s Secret Love of Poetry

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah. So this is quite fascinating. I think you should write the next foreword. The foreword for this one is written by Michael Knowles, a great colleague of yours at Daily Wire.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah. So Marx fancied himself a poet. I mean, Marx’s secret love was poetry. In fact, one of his, I think, is the most important biographer. And this guy has been kind of following — people who don’t know about him today.

No one had anything against him really, but his name was Robert Payne. So he was a British academic, man of letters, the arts, a translator, drama. I mean, he was no right winger. He was probably slightly left of center.

He did a couple, did several works on Marx, late sixties, late sixties, early 1970s, published by New York University Press, Simon & Schuster. So, you know, very credible. And he was really the first one to mine Marx’s poetry, to go through and figure it out.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: How much of it is there? How much poetry?

Marx’s Disturbing Poetry

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Well, there’s quite a bit and it’s deeply disturbing stuff, all right. A lot of it is about the devil, quite literally about the devil. It’s chilling, right? “Thus, heaven, I forfeit it. I know it full well. My heart, once true to God, is chosen for hell.”

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right. Straight Lucifer from Milton.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah. Yeah. 1837, that one was. It was one of his first published writings. He would have only been 19 years old at that time. Another one. So it’s called “The Player” and it was 1841. And here he puts himself, it appears, in the form of this kind of mad violinist who’s like frenetically, maniacally sawing away at the violin and he’s summoning up the powers of darkness and he’s doing this in front of his love interests.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And the love interest, as one does.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah, right. The love interest, Robert Payne says, appears to be his girl at the time, Jenny, the girl that he would end up marrying. And he’s summoning up the powers of darkness and she’s saying, why are you doing this? It’s like a Faustian bargain, more in Faust and Goethe and Mephistopheles in a moment, but just to sort of set the table for people who are shocked by what I said about him writing about the devil.

So here’s what he says in “The Player.” Here’s just one stanza. He tells the girl, “Look now, my blood dark sword shall stab unerringly within my soul. The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed. See the sword, the prince of darkness sold it to me. For he beats the time and gives the signs ever more boldly, I play the dance of death.”

The Influence of Faust on Marx

And then he plays a sort of Faustian bargain. But to back up a little bit, that’s his poetry from an early age and Robert Payne, who wrote the book, the Simon & Schuster book, the New York University Press, said Marx’s first love was poetry. And he fancied himself as aspiring to be nothing less than the Goethe of his age, to write the “Faust” of his age. And Goethe’s “Faust,” of course, the famous character is the Mephistopheles character, the devil, demon character. And as you saw in the book, many times.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And Mephistopheles in “Faust,” that’s a character I’ve done a fair bit of study about. Well, there’s a motif that’s repeated both in “Faust I” and “Faust II.” So Mephistopheles in “Faust” is a variant of the Heavenly Adversary, right? So he opposes being itself.

And his ethos, which Goethe has him state twice, is that the suffering that’s a necessary consequence of existence in its finite and limited manifestation, so our mortal frames, let’s say, that suffering is so unbearable and so unconscionable, that it would be better if existence itself did not exist. So, well, so what Satan does in Goethe’s conceptualization is make the case that life is so unfair in its fundament. He’s like the antinatalist, the modern antinatalist, that anyone ethical would act in order to bring being itself to a cessation.

Right now, the problem with that seems to be, as far as I can tell, this is the problem with antinatalism. One of many problems is that the reason that Mephistopheles is anti-being, hypothetically, is because of the suffering. But the problem is, if you turn that into a political doctrine, all you do is multiply the suffering, right? Because you become anti-life.

And so you might say, well, I’m working for the cessation of suffering because I’m working for the extinction of consciousness, but if the price you pay for that is the endless multiplication of suffering, well, that’s partly why I found your book so horrifying. Because all that, in principle, is lurking beneath the surface.

Marx’s Atheism and Satanic Influence

Okay, so what do you make of this conceptually? Now Marx proclaimed himself an atheist. Okay, so the first question you might ask is, well, what the hell does an atheist have to do with Satan? Right?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, so what do you think about that?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And by the way, he had a favorite line from Mephistopheles, which was, in fact, they said this was Marx’s favorite quote. Everything that exists…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes, that’s the line. Exactly. That’s exactly the line.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And that’s repeated. It’s in “Faust II,” too.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah. That’s his favorite line. So if someone were to ask me, do you have a favorite quote, do you have a favorite line? I might give a scripture verse, I might be not afraid, something like that. Because Marx said, “Ah, yes, yes, Mephistopheles, you know, Goethe’s “Faust,” everything that exists deserves to perish.”

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s terrifying. Well, it’s terrifying because it truly is the case that as the character of Mephistopheles is revealed in “Faust,” in “Faust I” and “II,” that’s the apotheosis of his philosophy, right? When you really start to understand who Mephistopheles is, that’s the final revelation. He is the foe of everything that exists.

Now the rationalization is because of the suffering, or it isn’t just the suffering, because there’s a Luciferian pride element. Mephistopheles is opposed to the structure of being also because it doesn’t meet his standard.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. In one of the poems, Marx shouts in the form of Satan, right, “I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind.” And Robert Payne says, picture Marx standing there in the middle of like a burned down village, a burnt down house, the raised R-A-Z-E-D building, and flames all around him. “Everything that exists deserves to perish,” and as if to say, now we can begin, right? He wants to take everything down. He wants to completely level it.

And yet all of this, going back to your original point, this is what he was writing before he was doing anything uneconomical, before he was doing, and also yet at the same time, because I know there might be some Marx biographers who’ve ignored this. I know they’ve ignored it. And they might say, well, it’s so early. He did this as one of his first published writings, 1837. He was 19 years old. That’s not the real Marx.

Well, the one I just read to you, “The Player,” that’s 1841. That was the same year that he started with Bruno Bauer at the University of Bonn as professor of the Archives of Atheism, the Annals of Atheism journal that he started. His peak of writing was really in the 1840s. I mean, they were writing the “Communist Manifesto” 1846, 1847, released February 1848. So it’s not that long.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s not that long.

The Continuity of Marx’s Early Ideas

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, the other thing, too, is that if the hypothesis that we described at the beginning of this discussion is true, and I truly believe it is, like a complex set of ideas comes out of a dreamlike matrix and you could make the case that someone radically shifts their view away from that initial revelation, but that isn’t generally how things work. And I think you need very strong evidence of discontinuity not to accept the default proposition that continuity is the much more likely occurrence.

One of the things I do in my interviews with the people that I’m fortunate enough to interview, all of whom are accomplished people, is an autobiographical analysis. And it’s invariably the case that you can trace the seeds of, you can trace who they are to seeds that made themselves manifest very early. Now you might say, well, that’s all retrospective memory.

But I don’t believe that because one of the things I’ve noticed in doing that kind of interviewing is that the people who tell the story are shocked themselves at how much of what they still do was there in a nascent form, like even when they were children.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: My father saw that, Heinrich Marx in the letter that he wrote to him in 1837. And that was not long, probably, well, in that letter, he talks about the disorder in Marx’s life.

Marx’s Goal of Radical Disruption

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And I know you write a lot about order, including in your most recent book. And Marx was all about tearing down the traditional order. In fact, he said, he and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, communism represents the most radical rupture in traditional relations —

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: The most radical conceivable disruption.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. So not the most erratic, the most radical.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right. And that was the goal.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah, that was the goal. And the one word, well, two words that jump out of the Communist Manifesto, all of Marx and Engels writings to criticism. And Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge in 1843 called for the ruthless criticism of everything that exists.

By the way, not just people thinking about this, not just for the ruthless criticism of the bad things in society, right, of that malady or this, the ruthless criticism of everything that exists. And the other word that they use all the time is abolition, abolish. They want to abolish everything, right? Communism calls for the abolition of the present state of things, they said in the manifesto.

So after they talk about the entire theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence, abolition of private property. All right. So that’s gone. Abolition of capital. In the manifesto, they write abolition of the family, exclamation mark, even the most radical flare up of this infamous proposal of the communists. So we’ve got capital, property, family, present state of things, entire societies. I mean, just it’s complete. One person said to me, it’s nihilism.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: He has kind of no worship of destruction. Nihilism is you don’t care. That’s if he’s an avid devotee of Mephistopheles, it’s active destruction. You don’t want to underestimate the fact that a poetic line takes root in someone’s soul, especially when it’s produced by someone as profound as Faust. Like that’s not nothing that that really means that Marx identified the central spirit of Mephistopheles. He pulled out the central message and that’s stuck in his memory.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: OK, so let’s talk about his memory and integrate it into his world view right into into what he loved doing the most, writing poetry. So it’s really fully, deeply a part of him.

Marx’s Disordered Personal Life

And yeah, it’s well —

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You also talk in the book a fair bit about the sordid details of his private life. I mean, Marx was also, by all accounts, a person who was filthy in every way, essentially, that you could be filthy, like literally because his personal hygiene habits were detestable, to say the least. But he also lived in it while you’re a better you’re better at explaining this than me. So do you want to walk through that?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And I would circle this back to the point of disorder. So it is a totally disordered personal lifestyle that his father noticed it when Marx was in college. And then when Marx got married, his life was a wreck. And both his mother and his wife both expressed the wish that Karl would start earning some capital. Rather than just writing about it. The family had to beg for money all the time, everywhere that they went.

So first they got the money from Karl’s father. All right. And then when he died, by the way, Marx didn’t attend the funeral of his father. Some biographers have said that’s because it was out of spite against his father. The biographer says he just couldn’t make it there. Maybe because of the weather. I don’t know.

But he didn’t go to the funeral of his father. He was interested in his father’s money. And the one letter that I quote from his father, the father’s like, OK, here’s what you really want. I will give you the money for whatever, whatever, whatever. So he clearly knows that the son wants money. After the father died, he went to visit his mother, who he wasn’t close to at all.

He was at least a little close to the father. And the goal was to get money from the old lady. And he writes a letter back to Jenny, his wife, ahead of time, basically reporting that, well, I really didn’t get much money out of the old lady, but she did agree to burn up the IOUs. So in other words, success.

I at least got her to do that. And then Jenny would go begging to her relatives. And in one case…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: She was from a rich family. Correct.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah. Fairly well off family. And that family eventually got to the point of tough love. They had to cut her off as well. And both her family and also Marx’s wider family all knew that when Jenny or Marx came knocking on the door, it was because they wanted money.

Marx’s Exploitation of Lenchen

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. So they lived in economic disarray.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Economic disarray, at the point where Jenny’s family got to the point where they said, OK, look, we know that you and Karl have all these kids. We know that you need money. These are our grandchildren. We feel bad for you. Jenny, we can’t give you any more money. We just — we just we can’t do it.

So the family lends to the Marx family, the family nursemaid. Now, this is a woman named Helen DeMuth, who is called Lenchen. So the nickname was Lenchen. She grew up with Jenny. So Jenny’s parents say, OK, we will lend you Lenchen to help the family out rather than giving you more money. So Lenchen basically here is Karl Marx, champion of the proletariat, the working class, right? Doesn’t pay her a dime, never gives her any money.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: That’s right. And what he’s developing is kind of the ideal world that he wants for himself, that other people will pay for him to do whatever he does in the library, the writing, the research. So at one point, Marx has sex with Lenchen behind Jenny’s back and she got pregnant.

Now, Robert Payne says that he thinks that the sex might have been nonconsensual, that it could have been rape. But I don’t know how he would know that. But either way, Lenchen got pregnant. Marx refused to admit that the child was his. Everybody knew the child was his. Jenny knew it.

In fact, Jenny was crushed. I mean, her heart was broken. She never really forgave her husband for this. The child, Friedrich Engels, steps up. Now, the Marx family gets most of their money at this point from Engels. Engels becomes the Marx family’s sugar daddy. I mean, he’s not just just a partner with Marx. Engels inherited all this money from his from his wealthy industrialist father’s inheritance.

And so he subsidizes not just Karl, but the Marx family. So Engels, who doesn’t believe in marriage, these guys were against marriage long before anybody else was, Engels has various women that he shacks up with, which in that day is really unusual. I mean, that was scandalous. You didn’t live with a woman that you weren’t married to.

And a lot of these women wanted Engels, Friedrich, to marry them, make honest women out of them. One of them died. And Engels was really crushed by it, really brokenhearted. Marx writes him a letter and he kind of acknowledges Engels loss in the first couple of sentences. And then he gets straight to the point of asking for more money.

Engels just raged back in the letter. Even my bourgeois friend showed more compassion and interest than you did. But the point of Lenchen. So Engels doesn’t care about his reputation. Everyone knows he doesn’t believe in marriage. So he steps forward, Helen DeMuth, Lenchen gives birth to this baby boy.

And Lenchen says, I’ll accept paternity. Let’s give him the name Friedrich. So the son is known as Freddy. Marx never acknowledges his existence, never acknowledges that it’s his kid. Of course, never gives him a penny, just like he never gave a penny to Lenchen. And by the way, that poor kid, Freddy, ended up surviving all the Marx family. Of the six kids he and Jenny had, four of them died before they did, he and Jenny. And then the two girls that survived both committed suicide in suicide packs with their husbands and by drinking poison.

The Tragic Fate of the Marx Family

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And as you notice in the Marx poetry, a recurring theme in all this poetry is about the couples coming together. The one, “The Pale Maiden,” which sounds like a late night B movie horror flick, this “Pale Maiden.” You know, she drinks hemlock, she commits suicide, lovers committing suicide in suicide pacts. That’s how Marx’s two daughters died.

But the family, it was a complete wreck. The household with the house was in complete disarray. There are German police reports from 1848, 1849 on how one of them says, trying to take a seat in the Marx household is a dangerous enterprise or something like that because the chair could break from under you. It was dirty. The landlords would kick them out. The landlords would cut off the heat.

Marx suffered from Boyle’s carbuncles, which Paul Johnson, the late British historian said, you know, people don’t consider this, but “Das Kapital” is kind of this long, agonizing, painful to read work. Marx’s carbuncles on his bottom were at their worst when he was writing “Das Kapital.” He had them on his private parts, on his penis, to the point where they would sometimes set him into these outbursts of rage.

He wrote one letter to Engels, he said, I have this boil between my upper lip and my nose. It’s like the devil has been hurling excrement at me, use the word S-H-I-T. But he suffered and the doctors tried to figure out, boy, why does Marx have all these boils and carbuncles? No one else in that home seems to have them. Well, the answer is he wouldn’t bathe. The guy refused to bathe.

Marx’s Disordered Research and Writing

Mao Zedong refused to bathe. Some of these communists were like this, but he was a very disordered individual in so many different areas of his life. Even his research, we could probably talk about this later. You and I are both PhDs. We’ve done academic social science research. Marx never went into the field or the factory.

He wrote about the proletariat from the vantage, from the library, from a desk, from a desk in the library in London or at his home. He never actually did real field research. And if you read the “Communist Manifesto,” it is not the work of an economist. It is more like a polemic. It’s more like a philosophical statement.

He said once the revolution that began in the brain of the monk, that would be Martin Luther, he says this in his “opium of the masses,” will now begin in the brain of the philosopher. So he really fancies himself a philosopher and a poet, a poet above all. He’s really not an economist.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, that was probably an accurate self-characterization because his work really, I know there are economists who’ve fallen under his sway, let’s say, but his work really served the purpose of motivational doctrine. So the typical writings of an economist aren’t taken up by the masses as a rallying point. But poetry and philosophy can be taken up as a rallying point.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And that’s what this book does. If you actually read the “Communist Manifesto,” which most young people who say, well, if you read the “Communist Manifesto,” it’s a pretty good book. It talks about sharing. They haven’t read it.

They haven’t read it. It’s about that thick. The one I have in mind, the 1998 Penguin Classics edition, edited by Martin Malya, is 56 pages. In my Marxism course at Grove City College, every spring semester, we read it. It’s only 56 pages, it’s not long.

You’re right, if it was an economics work or tract, I mean, it would have data, it had information. It wouldn’t be anything that could rally anybody, right? But this is more like a Jefferson “Declaration of Independence,” right?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Except the same that the Mephistophelean, Mephistophelean ain’t —

DR. PAUL KENGOR: It’s actually polar opposite, but in the sense of Adams and Franklin saying, you know, we need a kind of statement here to rally everybody for this. Who can write? That Jefferson’s a great writer, right? 33 years old, fantastic writer. One of the course of human events just puts it out.

And of course, in his case, it’s truth and it’s inspiring. But what Marx sits down to write is just kind of this polemic, the “Communist Manifesto” is kind of a diatribe. It’s really, there’s a lot of anger in there. There’s a lot of catchphrases, kind of revolutionary phrases, a guy who could really turn a phrase. I mean, that was Marx.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Radical leftists are very good at turning phrases.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: They really are.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Gender affirming care, stroke of genius, diversity, equity and inclusivity.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Like once those slogans, you know what the derivative of the word slogan is? This is so funny.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: What’s that?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It comes from the Welsh. Two words. Sluagh and Garam. Sluagh is S-L-U-A-G-H and Ghairm is G-H-A-I-R-M. Sluagh, Ghairm. Battle cry of the dead. That’s what a slogan is. Oh, it’s so perfect, right, because it conjures up images of armies of the dead fighting against the living. Right. No kidding.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: He was really good at slogan here. In fact, to the point where the only part of the end of the “Communist Manifesto” anybody remembers is “workers of the world unite.” We have nothing to lose but our chains. The people just back up.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: To each according to their need is pretty damn good.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: But if you just go back one paragraph at the end, right, the communists support every revolutionary movement, the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. I mean, those lines are in the next two final paragraphs, and that’s what really the Manifesto is all about.

Marx’s Professed Atheism vs. Religious Themes

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay. So I want to go get back to a question that we touched on but didn’t fully address. What in the world is — absolutely why is an atheist toying with not toying with centered on what would you say analysis of an identification with religious tropes?

Now he claims atheism, but you don’t write a Faust like poem. Being in league with Mephistopheles is not technically atheism. Now you might ask about the relationship between the two, but that’s a different question. But so what do you make of the fact that he was obsessed with these Faustian notions and with ideas of conjuring up the underworld, despite his professed atheism?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah, by the way, even the phrase, “from each according to his ability to do according to his needs,” that’s a twisting of the scripture, right, of the New Testament. But in his case, so, yeah, and people have asked me this, they say, well, if he had this fascination with the devil, it must have only been in a kind of rebellious sort of way. Like Mikhail Bakunin, Saul Alinsky in the intro to “Rules for Radicals,” right, “lest we forget at least an over the shoulder acknowledgement to that, first of all, rebels who want himself his own kingdom.”

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. “Lest we forget.” No kidding. Yeah. You don’t walk by that sort of statement accidentally. No, definitely not.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: They’re like, well, he’s just being figuratively.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, right. Well, those are the same people who think that Milton’s Lucifer is a hero. And lots of people thought that.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And who give their magazines names like the Jacobin.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Absolutely.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Why in the hell would you name your magazine after a group that guillotined 40,000 people in France?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, right, right. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’ve also noticed that I’ve read a lot of comments by online anonymous trolls. A lot. And I’ve looked at their names, and there’s a sizable minority of the really vicious online trolls who adopt satanic names.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Absolutely.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Like far more than you’d expect. And it’s not cute or funny. And not in the least. And it sums up the manner in which they deal with the world with much more accuracy than they might imagine when they’ve had that, what would you call it, unmitigated gall to dare such a thing.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. Right. And I won’t say who it is because she could end up watching this, but it’s somebody I know the name of the magazine and her pen name, I won’t give the first name, but the last name is Diabolo, which is Italian for devil. And I mean, what does that tell you?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Because a lot of people, well, the people who picked that would say, well, Lucifer is misunderstood because he’s just a rebel against tyranny. And so that’s their, that’s their standard. The devil is misunderstood. He’s just a rebel against tyranny.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: That’s how Mikhail Bakunin, one of Marx’s associates, got in the state. He wrote about Lucifer in this heroic way. And he was an atheist.

Now, in Marx’s case, so he wasn’t an atheist in 1837 when he wrote that first poem, OK? By 1841, was he an atheist? Probably. Let me back up.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, the question is, was he ever an atheist? You know what I mean? Because if he stated his allegiance to Mephistopheles when he’s 19 or 20, and that’s actually the motif of his writings, he’s never an atheist. He might not be very pleased with the idea of God, but that’s not exactly the same thing as being an atheist.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And they also end up putting their faith in Marxism-Leninism in an almost religious way. Ronald Reagan, well, Marxism-Leninism, that religion of theirs. The opium of the intellectuals is what Raymond Aaron called it.

Marx’s Religious Background

But in Marx’s case, let me back up a little bit. So he’s born May 5th, 1818, in Trier, Germany. Trier is spelled like Trier, T-R-I-E-R, a very religious city. I mean, like 90 percent Roman Catholic. The great cathedral of Trier was founded around the year 320, 330. It was paid for by St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, of all people.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Oh, really? So it’s that early?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah, exactly. And so, and by the way, it is also the birth town of St. Ambrose, who was the bishop of Milan later, who brought Augustine into the faith. So, Ambrose and Marx are both from Trier, Germany, of all things.

So you have this cathedral in Trier, St. Helena is the one that goes to the Holy Land and brings back all kinds of relics, all right? In fact, she believes that she found the Holy Lance, which is pierced the side of Christ. That is at the Vatican today. She found, she believes, the crown of thorns, which is in Notre Dame. She believed that she found the Holy robe that Jesus wore at the crucifixion that the Roman soldiers cast lots for at the foot of the cross.

The Holy robe is in that cathedral in Trier. By the way, Marx, in his 1841 poem, “The Player,” right, which is actually a play because you mentioned drama. A lot of the plays are actually dramas as well. His demonic violinist who’s summoning up the powers of darkness, Marx not only wrote the character and the words, he also wrote the stage, the production, the furniture on the stage, the clothes people would wear. The violinist is wearing the Holy robe of Christ from the cathedral in Trier while he’s summoning up, I mean, chilling, chilling of all things.

And there’s a letter between Marx and Jenny, whose wife, who’s an atheist, and at one point when everyone’s coming to town for like the annual sort of festival where people come in to venerate the robe, Jenny’s making fun of them, like all these silly people, right?

But so in Marx’s case, he’s born May 5th, 1818 in Trier. He was baptized in 1824. Now he’s a Jew. The family, he comes from a very Jewish family, not just in terms of ethnicity, but Judaism. They are religious Jews, they’re Orthodox Jews, a bunch of rabbis in the family. His father had converted to Christianity, to Lutheranism specifically, Heimlich Marx.

And some say that he did because of social pressures in Germany in the day, anti-Semitism, and perhaps so maybe. He had an uncle who converted to Roman Catholicism, which most people there did, because it’s like 90% Roman Catholic, but Marx’s father converted to Lutheranism. And Marx’s father died a believer, right? Probably kind of a more liberal Christian, but he was a Christian.

So Marx converts, Marx is baptized 1824, he would have been five or six years old. His mother really didn’t want him to, the mother really didn’t want to convert. But Marx is a fairly dedicated Christian through his teenage years, and he really doesn’t start to change until college.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Any idea what happened?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Well, he came under the influence — I had a hard time pinning this down, and I don’t think there’s enough good information. And you’ll appreciate this as a fellow academic, so many academics don’t give a damn about faith at all. I mean, the first biography that I set out to do on Ronald Reagan, I’d written, I think, eight books on Reagan, was going to be about him and the end of the Cold War. And I ended up writing a book called “God and Ronald Reagan” because I found all the stuff on Reagan’s faith that no one had talked about.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Oh yeah, oh yeah.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Look at all this, look at all this. Look at all these letters.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s particularly relevant in the context of this conversation.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Wow, look, in this letter to this Methodist minister who’s having doubts about Christ’s divinity, Reagan blew it using the liar, lord, or lunatic argument of C.S. Lewis. I kind of picked up on that. But so many of these biographers ignore faith.

So in Marx’s case, I’m one of the only ones that really cared, right? A lot of the Marx biographers are leftists, so they ignore all of this stuff. I’m getting off track. The first main Marx biographer, Franz Mehring, this would have been over a hundred years ago, was the first to discover the demonic poetry and plays. And he presented them to Marx’s daughter.

And he said, you know, we should, this stuff shouldn’t see the light of day. I mean, this is, this is bad. I mean, this is really damning. And a communist with some integrity, David Risenhoff, with the Marx-Engels Institute in the 1920s found all of it and said, no, for the sake of, you know, we need to put this stuff out there so people know what Marx believed.

Marx’s Transition to Atheism

DR. PAUL KENGOR: So he actually found it, first published it. It’s untouched until Robert Payne mentions it late 1960s, early 1970s. Paul Johnson wrote about it in “Intellectuals.” Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, who was tortured in the Romanian prison of Patecy, wrote a book called “Marx and Satan.” He wrote about it. But all the other Marx biographers, they just ignore it. They completely ignore it.

So long way of saying, how and why exactly did he become an atheist? What happened between those teenage years and college years that really flipped him? The best that I can determine. He came under the influence of a professor in college named Dr. Bruno Bauer, University of Bonn. And he was a professor of theology who was an atheist, right? Imagine that, just like the colleges today.

He’s eventually run out of the university. But he and Marx became very tight, very close. Interestingly, too, Bruno Bauer was intensely anti-Semitic. So close that they together, so Bauer influences Marx’s atheism. They start a journal together called “Annals of Atheism,” which never gets off the ground, partly because they don’t have money to support it. I guess they couldn’t find a wealthy atheist socialist who could help them out.

So they start this archives of “Annals of Atheism.” And then Bauer eventually fired from the university. He’s pushed out of the university. And he and Marx pulled a couple stunts. In one case, they went to a nearby village for Palm Sunday and rode in on donkeys together, kind of mocking the entrance of Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Mocking or imitating. Well, you have the same weird dichotomy there with the character in the play that you described. Are you mocking or usurping? That’s a better metaphor.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yes, absolutely. I don’t like the word channeling that people use today, but I might have to apply it.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Usurping is good, because Lucifer is a usurper. He’s the spirit that wants to overthrow everything and put himself at the top. Not just himself, but his intellect specifically. And that’s very reminiscent of the way Marx conducted himself in his life, right? Everything around him, including his family, his wife, his friends, everything was sacrificed to the glorification of his intellect, right? And this is exactly what happens in the Faustian bargain, right? I mean, Faust essentially tells his soul for what would you say? Intellectual supremacy.

There’s a good diagnosis for the universities for today, too. But it is the fundamental temptation of the intellect, right? Because it is the highest angel in God’s heavenly kingdom, most capable of going bitterly wrong. And Marx is a great example of that.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And finding his own kingdom, which is what Alinsky liked about him.

The Arrogance of Marx’s Critique

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Think of the arrogance that it requires to be a critic, like a devastating critic of everything not in the manner that Descartes question. That’s not the same thing, right? Questioning is more an admission of your own inadequacy, but that damning critique of everything like the question is, who the hell do you think, you know, the kids who shot up the Columbine High School, that’s the position they put themselves in, like their writing, which no one pays any attention to is absolutely bone chilling.

Like there’s no difference between the writing of the more literate of the two and something that you would expect from someone who’s manifesting signs of, for lack of a better word possession. It’s really chilling stuff. This is independent of your religious belief, like you can’t read what he wrote without the hairs on the back of your neck standing up. And he literally positioned himself as the judge of everything, he believed human life was inadequate.

He believed everything should be destroyed, him and his friend were planning a much more destructive rampage than they managed. And they had fantasies and wrote about destroying entire cities. They wanted to lay everything waste exactly in that Mephistophelean manner.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And you see that in Marx’s poetry as well. I mean, Marx says, I mean, in one case, he’s like jury and executioner, right?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right. And I shall howl, the hygienic curses at mankind. And in the mockery, it’s a good point, I mean, because the devil hates to be mocked with the devil mocks Christ, the devil mocks God, right.

And in Marx’s case, so they’re imitating or mocking the Christ entering Jerusalem. They would go into churches together, he and Bruno Bauer, and laugh and kind of make noise in the pew just to be disrespectful. So he’s an angry — throughout his life, but no one liked him.

Marx’s Difficult Relationships

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I can’t imagine why —

DR. PAUL KENGOR: He got along with his own family. You know, his wife, I mean, his family tolerated him. Some biographers say that he had a great relationship with his daughters, other than he did is amazing to completely diametrically different takes on that. But all the different people who worked with him described him in this like this dictatorial kind of way.

And he eventually split with everybody, Mikhail, Bakunin, Thorbach, all these different guys, and it would eventually get to the point where Marx is calling him an ape or a baboon. Well, this is Marx’s typical filth and vitriol and bile. This is what he does to everybody. So he eventually got to that point with just about everybody. But on your point, right. So when did he become an atheist?

So he’s there by 1841 at that point. At that point, he would have been 23 years old. And I’d love to really see some sort of documentation of exactly how it began to slip away.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Although you said that this association he had with the professor, well, that’s in some ways a sufficient explanation. Not exactly, because it doesn’t explain why he would have been attracted to that professor. But you could, it’s easy to imagine that, well, maybe that professor paid a lot of attention to him.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: I think so. And which is odd. And Marx is Jewish and Marx ends up with some very anti-Semitic statements. He said, the Israelite faith is repulsive to me. And he has this one statement where he talks about in the end, the final emancipation, the emancipation of the — it sounds like something Hitler could have said. I mean, some really disturbing statements about it.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So tell me about the emancipation.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: I’ll get that exact quote.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So we don’t know. OK, so we have this sense that he identified with Mephistopheles, which is not great. And that he has a Luciferian intellect, which is also not exactly what you’d hope for.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: By the way, just for the cameras, I did a piece called “Marx on Judaism, Christianity and Evolution Race.” If you look that up. OK. It has that quote.

Marx’s Demonic Writings

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: OK. So he’s writing a poem called “Atheism.” These poems that he wrote that were pans to to Mephistopheles is that after he becomes an atheist?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: No, he’s writing. So the first one was 1837, wrote another in 1841. He wrote a bunch of them. And he did just a chilling play called “Oulanem,” O-U-L-A-N-E-M. And people that are watching this, if they now type into their computer, “Oulanem,” even in Google, it’ll pop up, “played by Karl Marx,” even has a Wikipedia entry.

And let me warn people, you might not want to do this, but if you click the images button, you will see I mean, there’s some satanic stuff up there from like not heavy metal, but like black metal groups. So “Oulanem” is an anagram for “Immanuel” or “Immanuelo,” right? So Marx takes “Immanuel,” which is the name given to Christ or “Immanuelo,” and he flips it into this anagram called “Oulanem.”

And it’s this chilling play. The main character is Lucindo, Lucindo, L-U-C-I-N-D-O. And you just can’t believe what you’re reading with this play.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So that was written later in the 1840s. So really, the prime of his writing, including the decade when he wrote the “Communist Manifesto,” is also the same decade when he was writing these poems.

And plays. And throughout his life, his kids and others would say, yeah, he had a favorite line always from Mephistophean, “everything that exists deserves to perish.” So that remains a part of him throughout his life.

Marx’s Demonic Persona

His son, Edgar, has a letter where he addresses his father as “my dear devil,” which I don’t know, maybe it’s playful. I don’t know. Although I would never call my dad my dear devil. His wife called him “my wicked knave.” I quote Henrik Heinzen, referring to him as a goblin, trying to take me under his spell. Other cases of where he’s using that kind of language. When Engels first met him, he describes him as this dark man from Trier who hops and leaps and springs on his heels, “the monster of 10,000 devils,” he describes him.

And the letter from his father is written in 1837, a year before his father died. So his father writes to him, March 2nd, 1837, “Karl, at times my heart delights in thinking of you and your fortune, and yet at times I cannot rid myself of ideas which aroused in the sad forebodings and fear when I am struck as if by lightning, by the thought is your heart in accord with your head.”

“Your talents has a room for the earthly, but gentler sediments, which in this veil of sorrow — it’s a beautiful letter in many ways — are essentially consoling for a man of feeling.” And then this question from the father of Karl Marx to his, at this point, 18 year old son. “And since that heart, Karl, is obviously animated and governed by a demon, not granted to all men, is that demon heavenly or Faustian?”

“Will you ever, and that is not the least painful doubt of my heart, will you ever be capable of truly human domestic happiness? Will, and this doubt has no less tortured me since I have come to love a certain person like my own child, will you ever be capable of imparting happiness to those immediately around you?”

By the way, the answer was no, right? And since that heart is obviously animated and governed by a demon, not granted to all men, is that demon heavenly or Faustian? That’s his dad. And there’s only so many of those things, I think, that a sympathetic Marxist or Marxist biographer can shrug off. I mean, there’s just so many statements like that from him and people about him and people who knew him, the loved ones, a wife, a son, a best friend from Engels, and then the different writings.

Was Marx a Satanist?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so let’s attack this.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: How is he a Satanist, right? That is a whole different thing that I can’t personally answer.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, it seems not unreasonable to presuppose that he was a devotee of the Mephistophelean ethos. So the question is, you know, what constitutes a Satanist? Well, someone who generates a murderous doctrine, that raises questions, I mean, dead serious about that. The most murderous doctrine ever promoted in the roughly Judeo-Christian context, by a large margin.

So I would say it’s incumbent on those who would defend them to describe why we wouldn’t just assume that. But part of the reason that I was so interested in talking to you was because I felt that what you documented in your book was extraordinarily telling from the psychological perspective, because I know how these things work.

And it is not something that can be overlooked, that that was his favorite quote, especially not when you understand Goethe’s centrality in the German intellectual tradition. That’s like having a favorite quote from Shakespeare, right?

Marx’s Demonic Possession

And it’s not any old quote. It’s the central credo of Mephistopheles. So that’s extraordinarily telling. Now, OK, now I do have another.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Can I give you a quote?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: So Robert Paine, the very serious academic, no right winger, British man of letters, the guy who really broke this first in his 1968 biography of Marx, all right. His chapter where he talks about this stuff is called “The Demons,” and this is Marx’s biography. He wrote this, and I’m not saying that I endorse this as an academic. I can’t say if this is correct.

“There were times when Marx seemed to be possessed by demons.” That’s what Paine wrote. And now this I would at least more endorse. “Marx had the devil’s view of the world and the devil’s malignity. Sometimes he seemed to know that he was accomplishing works of evil.” I think that gets closer to it.

Now, Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, who wrote the famous book “Tortured for Christ” and was tortured for Christ in Romanian prisons by communist captors who were shouting, “I am the devil” while they were torturing him. He did a book called “Marx and Satan.” He is convinced that Marx was a Satanist and did some things ritualistically that might have even been satanic. But I can’t say that. I can’t endorse that.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: But you see evidence of that in his play, in terms of at least his fantasies.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: That’s right. That’s right. In fact, Paine even goes so far as to say, Vladimir Lenin. There’s a statement from Lenin which said, when I was a teen, I broke from all religion. I took the cross from my neck and I threw it in the rubbish bin. And Paine has a quote, not Paine, Richard Wurmbrand, where I think he believes that Lenin even stomped on it. He says, well, that’s a satanic ritual. I don’t know. I don’t know that it is or not.

But there’s another case of Lenin who at least did the work of the devil. I mean, Lenin had, according to Robert Conquest, W.H. Chamberlain, the first historian of the Russian Revolution, 500,000 people were killed from 1917 to 1923 under Lenin, not even including the Russian Civil War. If that’s not the devil’s work, I don’t know what the hell it is, right?

But I think what Paine said in the latter quote, the devil’s view of the world, the devil’s malignancy. And at the very least, this identification with kind of devilish-like destruction, right? Carrying everything down, rebelling against the world, everything that exists deserves to perish. That at least.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Again, the ideology that he created that just happened to be responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people in the 20th century, more than World War I and World War II combined. So that ideology was pretty hellacious.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah. Yeah. To say the least. OK, so and I think it’s very naive not to assume that the events that we described in Marx’s life are not connected.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Yeah. Right. So Marx’s economic polemics were somehow independent of his poetic imagination. It’s like, obviously they weren’t because they wouldn’t have had that motivational force. So they were calling on dark forces, obviously. So because otherwise they wouldn’t have compelled people in that manner, especially not toward that sort of immense, sadistic murderousness and utter destructiveness.

The Communist Hatred of God

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And of course, get to the hatred of God, which all the communists did.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So all the communists thereafter seeked to ban religion.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. Right. Atheists.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s right. Exactly. Atheists stomp something out.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: That’s right. It’s not just it’s not just sort of neutrality.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s right. It’s not a neutrality toward religion. It’s not your religion. It’s not separation of church and state. It is militant, aggressive atheism. Trotsky and Lenin create the League of the Militant Godless.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. They ban religion. They have the Moscow church trials. They blow up churches. They jail priests.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. You know, the Solzhenitsyn writes in “The Gulag Archipelago,” they put nuns in special sections of the Gulag with prostitutes.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yes. Right. Right. Team them. Absolutely. Lenin said all worship of a divinity is a necrophilia. There is nothing more abominable than religion. So they they don’t just try to stop religion. They want Pol Pot, the Buddhist monks in Cambodia, to renounce their vows to marry. It’s not enough for them to be quiet.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I don’t know how you can separate a militantly anti-religious atheism from, especially, say, within a Christian context, from something approximating satanic ideology, because I don’t see how conceptually that separation is possible. It’s one thing to be atheist in the manner that leaves people to go to hell in a hand basket in their own way. But to be actually an enemy of the religious enterprise, that’s a whole different thing.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: It is. So, and on that, obviously, Marx and the communists were obviously that clearly, obviously. And Satan might say, I don’t care if you believe in me or not, you’re doing my work now.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Well, that is our church blowing up churches. It also that also touches on the issue of what it means to believe.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. I mean, you could imagine someone comparatively harmless, who toys with ritualistic satanic activities in a sort of dramatic manner. And then you could imagine someone who tortures nuns and priests and burns down churches, but forgoes any technical affiliation with Satan. I would say that the latter is the Satanist in a much deeper sense than the former. Not that what the former is doing is excusable.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Or satanic. Yes, right. To do what the communists did to the religious enterprise is evidence of something far more militant than a mere atheism.

Separating the Man from His Works

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah. So, okay. Okay. Now, here’s something that was bothering me, too, when I was reading your book. So, one of the things that the radical leftists do that, especially, and this is sort of in proportion to their, what would you say, their intellectual arrogance, is elevate themselves on moral grounds above the great figures of the past.

So, I can hardly stand going into art museums anymore because a typical art museum now, and this is true even of the greatest museums in the West, is a great painting with a little polemic off to the side written by some art critic who’s basically claiming moral superiority over the artist because of their adherence to whatever the current ideological doctrine is. It’s sickening.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Even though that work of art has survived for six centuries. We’re still looking at it. Well, but imagine what a great advantage it is to the art critic to be able to claim moral superiority to a truly great man of the past without having to actually have accomplished anything. I mean, what a deal, right?

Okay, but I would like to be very careful in our conceptualization here because I’ve thought the same way about Foucault. So Foucault was a person rather unpleasant, you might say, in his personal habits. Like seriously unpleasant. And so, but here’s our conundrum.

In the story of Noah, Noah is described as a man who’s good in his generation. And it seems to mean something like, for his time and place, he was a good man. And there might be men that are so good that their goodness transcends their time and place. And I think we remember men like that. But the typical amount of goodness that you could expect from someone is that for their time and place, they’re good.

Okay, so now the temptation would be for us to look back into history to great figures of the past and to say, we understand what wasn’t good, even if we misunderstand it about their time and place, and then to say, well, those people weren’t good, and we should, we are now morally superior to them, and we can remove the detritus from our past. We can tear down the statues, for example, it’s happening in Canada, we’re going to tear down the statues of John A. Macdonald, who was the founding Prime Minister of Canada, and we point to his inadequacies as a person.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Okay, Churchill.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Sure, absolutely. Churchill is a great example, and that sort of thing is happening all over the US.

Now, how do you know that the leftist criticism of your critique would be something like, has to be something like, you have to separate the man, the works from the man. Okay. And I have some sympathy for that, because there are, like, Picasso is a good example. And Picasso, by any measure, was a remarkable artist and unbelievably productive.

He produced three pieces of art a day for 65 years, right? I can’t remember how many tens of thousands of pieces, it’s some insane number, and was revolutionary in that manner. But by the way, the left will not separate the accomplishments of the man from the personal life of the man when it comes to people that don’t like.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yes, I know. Yes. I know, but how do you…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: They’re very selective. But how do you, as an academic, you can imagine that there should be some separation between the products of thought and the personality of the person. Okay, so are you concerned about that in relationship to your critique of Marx and Marxism?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: No, it’s a great question. And by the way, in case we don’t get to it, people should know Marx’s views on race, especially toward black people. I mean, he had hideous views toward black people, all stuff that should get him canceled. I don’t believe in canceling anybody. But the things that the left is willing to cancel, this or that American figure on because of maybe a statement about race or somebody owned slaves.

I mean, what Marx said about black people is unbelievable. You’ll be reading letters in German between Marx and Engels and all of a sudden, the N word pops up, the American English racial epithet, N-I-G-G. It’s not like the German word for Negro or black, it’s like, oh, look at that.

And they were, in fact, his daughter was married to a guy named Paul Lafargue, who was, I guess, partly Cuban to some degree. And Marx and Engels are sitting there trying to figure out in the letter, deducing with scientific accuracy, how much N word blood is in his veins. Is it one eighth? Is it one twelfth?

And they called him Negrillo, the gorilla. And they made fun of him because he was black. And there’s a letter from Engels to Marx’s daughter, which is something like, oh, here he’s running for office in this district in Paris. Well, it contains a zoo as somebody who’s, he should be a perfect representative of that district being somebody who’s just closer to closer to the apes and the monkeys than we are.

They, Ferdinand LaSalle, who they referred to as the Jewish N word, they’re looking at his cranial capacity and all kinds of. So I mean, very, very racist if Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, who calls herself a Marxist, knew what Marx said about race. She probably called herself, I don’t know, maybe a communist, but she probably shouldn’t call herself a Marxist.

But in Marx’s case, to get to your question, the personal, what he believed in his writings and his ideas in the world, the world that he wanted is, in fact, an extension of his personal life. So it’s a fascinating example of where what he wanted in public very much is reflective of what he believed in private.

Because communism, again, people read, actually sit down, read the manifesto, OK? I mean, they actually call for the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. That’s an actual phrase that’s in the that’s in the next to the last.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: The problem is, is that for many people, that wouldn’t be shocking. It would actually be admirable.

The Attraction of Revolutionary Fervor

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, seriously, because, you know, what what we tend to think is that if the excesses of the real revolutionaries were revealed, that people would be less attracted to them. And I’m less optimistic about that, because if people can regard Lucifer himself as an admirable rebel, then the overreach of the revolutionaries is actually an attractive part of their fervor, right?

Because you’re hypothesizing something like an overarching reason that you could just appeal to, by contrast, and that that would do the trick. It’s like it isn’t it isn’t I think that the degree to which, for example, the real radical protesters that are burning down cities aren’t aiming at burning down the city is highly questionable.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah, yeah, right. Yes, it actually go down and to go down into the village square and just rip down the statue, you know, to go up and down the California coast to all the missions that were founded by St. Hennipero Serra, who, by the way, was canonized by Pope Francis, of all people, right, to go to every single mission and tear them down.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Ever since then, what are you tearing down?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah, right. Even though who this guy and what are you trying to put in place?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s right. Certainly you.

Marx’s Call for Forcible Overthrow

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And in many cases, they seem to be tearing down for the sake of tearing down.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Absolutely.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And so this quote from Marx would go right into this. This is in the next to the last paragraph of the manifesto. They, the communists, openly declare, this is an amazing statement, that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

So their aims can be attained only, only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. And by the way, I don’t even know, find me a leftist who wants to overthrow absolutely everything. I mean, certainly there, you know, you can name some things you’d like to keep, right? This guy wanted everything.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, it’s worse than that. So this isn’t about spreading the wealth and redistributing. This is about forcibly overthrowing everything.

Well, there’s two elements of that. Three elements of that are appalling, right? It’s difficult to differentiate the one that’s most appalling. First, that it’s everything. So it’s like a parody of omniscience and omnipresence and omnipotence. It’s everything. Okay, second, it’s, so it’s everything. Two, let’s go for two. It’s also not a consequence of a critique, right? And it’s not invitational, right?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: It’s forcible.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, right, that’s right. So not only do you have the worship of destruction, utter destruction, you have the worship of power, right?

Now, you remember when Christ is out in the desert and tempted by Satan after the 40 days of isolation after the baptism, that the third temptation of Satan, which is, I would say, the ultimate temptation, is one of power, right?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Now, it’s very interesting. You can have all of this.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, right, it’s straightforward power. And that’s the temptation that Moses falls prey to continually in his work as the exodus leader as well. It’s why he doesn’t get into the promised land. Like, there’s a very strict, and it’s something that Christ himself foreswears utterly. No force, no force, regardless of the provocation.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah. Now, what you have here in this doctrine that you just described is not only the desire for universal destruction, which, as you pointed out, is part and parcel of Marx’s celebration of Goethe’s Mephistophelean doctrine, but also allied with worship of power itself.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Because otherwise, why the forcible?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Because he could have written the overthrow of everything.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s right. And that could happen at the level of idea.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And of course, or even the phrase, the end, right? It can only be attained with the end of all.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Yeah. But no, they want the forcible overthrow.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. Which raises the question. Okay, so what is it that you want? Do you want the end state where everything’s raised to the ground so that you have a new beginning? Or do you want all the absolutely satanic pleasure of the act of forcible destruction?

And I would say, if you spend any time at all analyzing the history of Stalinist Soviet Union, including the Leninist period, for that matter, what you see fundamentally is a celebration of sadistic devastation, right? That’s the fundamental ethos. That’s the fundamental goal.

Now, the flag waving about the new utopia that’s going to be created in the future, that’s all cover story. That’s all camouflage. The actual worship is because the things that happened in those communist countries are so appalling.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, it’s unbelievable. Well, then people won’t pay any attention to them because they’re too much to even contemplate.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. Right. And so no one wants to know anything about them. But it seems to me that the point of dancing naked and triumphantly in the smoking rooms.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. That’s fundamentally the point. And if you happen to be jumping up and down on the bodies of your enemies and the toppled statues of your culture, so much the better.

The Connection Between Marx’s Personal Beliefs and Public Prescriptions

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And wondering how it goes, how the personal matters with the public. Right. OK. The end of his manifesto calls for the forcible overthrow of everything that exists. So that’s an actual law policy prescription at the end.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. We’re going to forcibly overthrow everything that exists. And as we saw in the private, that’s what he believes in his life, in the poetry.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: So you see it in the poetry. So you see one directly leads to the other. His hatred of religion.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Communism begins where atheism begins. The famous line, the opiate of the masses.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. That full quote. A lot of people I’ve heard people say from time to time. Well, I kind of see what he’s getting at there.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Religion can be like a sort of drug for people, maybe like a placebo, maybe like a crutch.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: But if you read that whole line, religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature. It is the heart of a heartless world. It is the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

And then Lenin picked that up and said, yeah, like Mark said, religion is the opium of the masses. It is a kind of spiritual booze. It is medieval mildew. There is nothing more abominable than religion.

And so what does that mean? Damn it. That means we’re going to shut down the church.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes. Right. And we’re going to put them in jail and we’re going to be an officially atheistic country. We’re going to create a league of the militant godless. You’re not going to be allowed to be a religious person. So the private thoughts are actually being implemented and acted out.

Challenging the “Opium of the Masses” Claim

Well, the other thing, too, about that phrase is it’s actually a lie. And it’s a lie in two ways. So there’s a Canadian philosopher, Taylor, who wrote about this in a book he wrote on identity. And he pointed out that the medieval fear of hell was at least the equal of the medieval fear of death. Okay.

So that begs the question is like, if your religion is an opium, then why isn’t it just all smiley faces and fun?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. Why? Well, hell is a really good start.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s like and, you know, the cynics might say, well, hell is a convenient place to put those you hate. But you have to be cynical and naive and stupid to come up with that theory because you’re a fool if you think that the fear of hell was anything but real among the believers in those periods of time where the reality of hell was amplified. They were terrified of that.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. And so what are you going to do? You’re going to do something convoluted like, well, you have to leave in the opium with a bit of terror so that it becomes believable enough to be a soporific. Like, hey, man, your theory is getting a little convoluted at that point. It’s like, why bother with hell?

And so that to me, and it’s the same with the Freudian critique, you know, that it’s a form of immaturity and over reliance on a benevolent father. It’s like, well, the father isn’t all benevolent. There’s hell. And so you better watch your step.

And part of that is implemented by terror. And then there’s more to it. And Jesus says, you want to follow me? Pick up your cross.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s the next thing. It’s like, OK, so we have Christ, the happy face God who asks people only to believe that everything is good and there’s no price to be paid for that. No, that’s not exactly that. That couldn’t be a bigger lie because there isn’t a larger sacrifice that is possible than the one that the founder of Christianity required of himself and his followers.

There’s nothing in that in the least that’s opiate. Now, you might say, well, the happy thought that you go to heaven when you die is the opiate. It’s like, well, wait a second. First of all, that only happens if you’ve actually lived a good life. And the cost of not doing that is, well, now we’re back to the hell problem.

So I don’t buy the the Freudian interpretation that it’s all, you know, immature dependence on the heavenly father, so to speak. And I certainly don’t buy the Marxist doctrine that there’s anything about it that’s opiate.

Now, you could say any naive person and any person looking for unearned security could take any doctrine and use it as a security blanket. And I think there’s some truth in that.

The Flaws in the Marxist Worldview

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: But boy, if you don’t think that applies to radical leftism as much as it applies to Christianity, far more than it applies to Christianity, you’re not thinking in the least. I mean, what you see with the radical leftists on campus now is that they make the presumption that all the leftist theorizing is predicated on an admirable compassion. It’s like, well, if you want an opiate, there’s one.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. Hyper simplification, pathological hyper simplification. That’s morally self-serving and dangerous beyond belief.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. So and Mark said, I was just looking for the quote right now and I couldn’t find it. But one of his criticisms of Christianity later was he said it preaches cowardice, self-contempt, self-abasement, self-sacrifice. It’s like, well, yeah, I don’t know that it preaches cowardice, but it preaches self-sacrifice. Those things don’t go in the same category.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: So they certainly don’t. I know what Christ did didn’t lack courage.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right. But for Mark, it was about the self, selfishness.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And in fact, that moment where the devil is tempting Christ.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. And Christ says, man does not live on bread alone.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yes, yes, yes. The Marxist actually acts as if man does live on bread.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Precisely. And then they believe that if you solve the economic problem, if you solve the class problem, I mean, that’s the key to your utopia right there.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Augustine said we have a God shaped vacuum in each of us.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. But he did say we have a dollar shaped vacuum in each of us.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: But the communists, they act as if we have a dollar shaped vacuum.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, I know. That’s that’s one of the other things that’s so perverse about the communist system.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right, right. Although hypothetically, they’re anti-capitalist.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. They believe that there’s an economic solution to every problem.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: They are perverse. Yes. So the communists and the leftists will say all the time, oh, you capitalists, all you guys care about money.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: No, Karl Marx, all you care about is money.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah. I mean, all you care about is the material world. It’s like they’re fashioning their golden calf out of money and capital. They just think that if you redistribute wealth, if you can level the classes, if everybody has equal income, right, that that’s your key to utopia.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. They think man does live by bread alone.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yes, definitely. But we don’t.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. So their alpha and omega is the economic problem. Pope Benedict XVI said the the the problem with the communists is not the communists failed even so much economically, though it did philosophically, though it did it. But anthropologically, they fail to understand human nature.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah, they fail to understand people and to just think that. And they put it this this simplistically in the communist manifesto. People say all the time, give me a give me a one sentence definition of communism. OK, that’s easy because Marx and Engels did it.

They said the entire communist theory or program may be summed up in the single sentence. Four words, abolition of private property, abolition of private property. They think that if you could abolish private property, that this is the beginning of the key to your utopia, of all things.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And that utopia utopia is entirely materialistic.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right.

Dostoevsky’s Prescient Critique of Communism

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So one of the things that I found particularly striking about Dostoevsky, especially in “Notes from Underground,” is he the “Devils” and “Demons.”

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah, well, right. Absolutely. He put his finger on the fundamental flaw in the communist doctrine before I think it was probably even expressed by Marx, at least popularly expressed. I don’t exactly know when “Notes from Underground” was written, but I don’t believe that Mark that Dostoevsky had any direct knowledge of Marx at that point.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Now, I’m not certain about doesn’t matter because the ideas were in the air anyway.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah, they were. So so but but one of the things that Dostoevsky points out in the “Notes from Underground,” which is so brilliant, is that he has this bitter, resentful underground character point out that if you did provide human beings with the materialist utopia that Marx promoted so that, Dostoevsky says, so that they had nothing to do but lie in warm pools of bubbling water and eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species, that the people so benefited would promptly go insane enough to smash it all to bits just to have something interesting to do.

Now, he phrases it more bitterly because he phrases it as a form of ingratitude. But there’s a point there. Then the point is that it is the point that man does not live by bread alone, that Dostoevsky

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Put every word from from the mouth of God.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, right. Well, Dostoevsky understood that we were built for something more than infantile satiation, and more than for more than hedonistic satiation. And I would say the Marxists ally very nicely with the infantile hedonists because both of them presume that the mere satiation of desire would suffice to bring about the utopia.

The Shift of Marxism from Economics to Culture

DR. PAUL KENGOR: That’s exactly right. Right, right. Exactly right. And maybe this is a kind of sharp departure. Look where the Marxists today are, right? A lot of the Marxists today are not even bothering with class or economics, but they’ve gone into the area of culture. They’ve gone into gender. They’ve gone into race, right?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. And a lot of the Marxists today, if you go to the website of People’s World, which is the successor to The Daily Worker, and you go to the about section, they have a call there not for factory workers, not for coal miners. I mean, the West Virginia coal miners voting for Trump, right? Not for steel workers.

My hometown of Pittsburgh, steel workers are probably large like MAGA people. A lot of those guys are blue collar union guys. They have a call for culture workers. So they’re looking, they’ve gone from the factory floor to the classroom.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah. And so the modern Marxists, knowing that the world of the Communist Manifesto and the Industrial Revolution of the 1840s is just completely gone. That book, by the way, is archaic. I mean, it’s written for 1840s, France, Germany and Britain.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. That world doesn’t even exist anymore. So a lot of today’s Marxists have taken the Marxist superstructure of oppressed versus oppressor, and they said, OK, it’s no longer the oppressor bourgeoisie and the oppressed proletariat and the proletariat would be the oppressed group.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: That would be the victim class and also the redeemer class.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. By the stripes of the proletariat, you were healed.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. They would usher in the revolution. So instead, people don’t. I mean, what young people today even know with the word proletariat or bourgeoisie mean they’ve taken the oppressed oppressor model and they’ve applied it to issues like race.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes, exactly. And so the oppressor and this is the most simplistic infantile thing anybody could do. The race based critical race theorists to take human beings who are I mean, I’ve done my DNA ancestry dot com. My family is just they’re all over the place in terms of their DNA.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. To boil people down in America in the 2020s as, OK, two categories, black, white.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. How do you do that? I mean, my youngest son, who’s adopted, is black. Actually, his mother’s white. His father is black. So is Obama. So he’s he’d be considered black.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. But if you do his DNA test, he’s all over the place. But the modern critical race theorists is going to say white oppressor, black oppressed.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. And they’re going to hammer you into one of those two categories with Marley, the King Junior said, no, we’re to be judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin. CRT, which I interviewed David Garrow, the King biographer about this, and he said CRT predates King.

King was shot in April 1968, so he didn’t talk about CRT, but he would have been totally against any kind of race classification of human beings. So the modern group is hammering you into one of these two categories, oppressed versus oppressor. So the new oppressed group will be blacks and they need to have their consciousness raised. They need to know that they are the oppressed group. They will usher in the redemption. They’re also the redeemer class.

And try telling somebody like Oprah Winfrey or Kobe Bryant that they’re oppressed just because they’re black. I mean, how racist is that? Whereas the white homeless guy that he’s the oppressor because he’s white is an unbelievably ridiculous, infantile, absurd, racist separation of human beings into opposing hostile kids. By the way, it divides people.

The Victim-Victimizer Narrative in Marxism

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And back to Marx, this is what Marx and Ingalls did with Klaus. Well, so you said that that took us a field. And I don’t think it did, because tell me what you think about this, because this ties maybe the close of our discussion to the beginning, because we talked about essentially theological matters in relationship to Marx’s fantasizing.

Okay, so imagine that there’s a theological element to Marx that can be traced all the way back to the story of Cain and Abel. Because Cain and Abel is the first victim-victimizer narrative, right? And Cain feels that he’s the victim of Abel. And he is driven by a bitter resentment.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: By the way, envy, which is what Marxism is all about.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Absolutely. And he becomes extremely hostile. Okay, so imagine that Marxism is essentially a retelling of the story of Cain and Abel with Cain as the protagonist.

Okay, so now, so once you get that, then you can see what’s happened with the modern meta-Marxists, because we might think, being slightly older, we might think that the core doctrine of Marxism is economic inequality, but it’s not. The core doctrine is victim-victimizer.

Now, what Marx said was the prime dimension of victim-victimizer is economic. Now, I think this is partly why Marxism was powerful. If you have to pick a victim-victimizer narrative, the most powerful one is economic. Let’s just leave that aside.

Now, you said, well, we no longer have the dark satanic mills, so the economic story isn’t playing out as well. But the victim-victimizer narrative, that’s still alive. And what I think of the new postmodern leftism as a metastasized Marxism, because it’s the victim-victimizer narrative that’s now multi-dimensional.

You can take any way you can possibly categorize human beings that divides them into groups, and you can take that dichotomous dimension, and you can say victim-victimizer, right? So now you explain everything, right? Then you can say, so you can explain everything. You got no more work to do cognitively, and you can learn that in 10 minutes, right?

But then there’s an additional advantage, and this is also endemic to Marxism. Imagine that you have two problems to solve in the world, as one is to understand it, and the other is to figure out how to conduct yourself in it. Okay, well, the victim-victimizer narrative gives you both, because not only have you now a complete causal explanation, everything can be understood in terms of power, because that’s the victim-victimizer story, but goodness merely requires that you identify with the victim.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right, right, right. So it solves your moral problem, too.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, right on. Exactly, and so what we have is the spectacle of the modern universities, what would you say? Promogating this meta-Marxism, metastatic Marxism, where they’ve fragmented the oppressor-oppressor narrative into multiple dimensions.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Even if they don’t know it’s Marxist.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Exactly, exactly.

The Victim-Victimizer Narrative as a Deeper Phenomenon

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, and it’s not, if it’s a retelling of the Cain and Abel story, it’s deeper than Marxism, right? Marxism would then become a variant of something even deeper, and I think what is deeper is the victim-victimizer narrative, that way of construing the world, and that is a way of, like the postmodernists, especially people like Foucault, it’s all about power.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: I mean, for them to know that they are a victim because of that.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes, that’s right. And if you don’t get that, if you don’t understand that you need your consciousness, this is where the university comes in.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: You’re also a traitor.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s right. And if you’re in the oppressor group and you don’t realize you’re an oppressor, right, you might be in that class. You say, well, you know, I was brought up actually in a multiracial family. We’ve got adopted kids.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah. And it’s like, no, no, no, no, no. You’ve got to understand your skin color defines you and puts you in that camp.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Or you are the oppressor or your sexuality or your gender.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah. I mean, what could be worse than as simple as, you know, male, female, right?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Gender Marxist. Yeah, but that’s unfortunate. Well, that allows you to multiply the dimensions of oppression, too, which is very convenient if you want to rationalize the power narrative. And you also want to claim moral virtue without doing any work.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: That’s right. I’m on the side of the victims. It’s like, really, are you really now you’re really on the side of the victim, right? And you’re sure you’ve got the victims properly identified and they’re only victims. And they’re in a power position, too. They’re in the position to define who’s the victim and who’s not. And those are always people during the revolution that are going to be in charge.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s a Lenin called the vanguard.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. And what is to be done in nineteen.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. He said, what’s needed here is a cadre of revolutionaries, kind of educated elites who can run this whole thing, who can run the project and tell you when you’ve gone from feudalism to capitalism, to socialism, to communism.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. They’re the same ones that tell you when it’s time for a new pride flag.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s right. That’s right. There seems to be about every week. That’s right. They’re the managers. And we stop and say, you know, I don’t get this. Everybody’s supposed to be equal in wealth. But Castro, I mean, doctors, janitors, baseball players, custodians all get one hundred twenty dollars a year in Cuba. Castro is worth a billion dollars.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. Look at the dachas in the Black Sea that all the communist apparatchiks have in the Soviet Union. Look at the Kims. Look how much money there is.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, you have to understand for them, they’re the rulers.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. The Marxism, the communism is for the rules, not the rulers. It’s for the masses, not the masses. It’s for all of you idiots.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, there’s also no evidence technically from the economic perspective that the communist governments had any impact whatsoever on inequality.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah, no, other than making everybody equally poor.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, well, that’s the thing is there was less to go around.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. So they were very good at suppressing the benefits of capital, but were able to address inequality.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Not at all. Yes. By well and by destruction.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. But they were not able to address inequality at all.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: No. Right. No, they nationalized everything, including poverty.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Personal Impact of Studying Marx

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: OK, so what let’s close with this and for more personal reflection. Your book about Marx is a rather personal analysis of Marx, and that makes it, as you pointed out, somewhat unique, especially in its concentration on his motivations. Let’s say it is poetic motivations, his revelatory motivations. What has that done to you personally in your understanding of Marx and let’s also your understanding of the world? Because there’s a very strange theological dimension to your analysis of Marx. OK, so was that theological dimension there before you wrote this book? Partly, I suppose.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Well, yeah, I think it probably was already there. I mean, I’ve always thought, Jordan, that when people ask me, how did communism catch on?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Even well, first of all, it’s never voted into power. And if it is, they don’t stand for another election.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. If Fidel Castro called for democracy and free and fair elections in 1959.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. And it never actually had him.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. The Kims don’t put themselves themselves up for election. But what’s the rational reason why anybody, if you just read the Communist Manifesto, it’s so clear that this is completely impractical. It can’t possibly work. I think there’s almost a kind of a diabolical explanation for this. Ronald Reagan said, in the grand destiny of humanity, we are not matters of mere material computation.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. When great forces are on the foot in the world, we learn that we are spirits, not animals.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. I think there’s almost a spiritual explanation behind.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. So you basically believe that the Marxist phenomena cannot be understood outside an overarching religious interpretation.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: I think so. And I think that’s right. And we haven’t mentioned the very opening words of the Manifesto. A specter is haunting the specter of communism.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: No kidding. Yeah.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: And it says all the old allies of Europe, Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, German and French radicals and German spies have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise the specter. Marx and Engels open the book with a paragraph describing it as a specter, a demonic specter that needs exercise. Again, well, they’re being playful with words.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, right. No, there’s too much of this. There’s too much of this. There’s something deeper. Every good joke contains a seed of the truth.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Well, in my experience, for what it’s worth, it was the horrors of communism that motivated me to think much more deeply about religious matters.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, me too. If you familiarize yourself with the hell of the communist regimes, you end up at a level of analysis, I think, that you can’t avoid at a level of analysis that demands that you account for an evil that profound.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. Yeah. I was in agnostic in college and close to being an atheist and studying this stuff in the end of the Cold War is part of what pulled me out of that pit, because you really do look at it and you say, this seems demonic. This seems diabolical.

Another quote from Reagan. This isn’t a matter of rockets and economics. This is something of the spiritual order. There’s something deeper, darker going on here. No, I think I can’t see how you can be. I also think that that’s a motif that’s reflected.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: The founder of which is Karl Marx.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah, right, right, right. I think that there’s a reflection in that of the dragon treasure dichotomy. You know, we know from time immemorial that you go searching for treasure where the dragons are, and there isn’t a dragon that’s more terrifying than the dragon. That’s the spirit of malevolence itself. And you cannot study communism without encountering the spirit of malevolence.

And then the treasure that lurks there is something like a recognition that the overarching religious framework is actually necessary to conceptualize the problem properly, and probably to offer something approximating a solution. That’s like a genuine solution.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that’s exactly right. Yeah, there’s a church in cyclical divinity redemptors from 1937 by Pius XI, and they described it as a satanic scourge orchestrated by the sons of darkness. I mean, the church then came to that conclusion that they believed that everything that the communists wanted and said and wrote in their books can only be interpreted in this really dark demonic sense.

The Continuing Influence of Marxism

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: What are the liberation theologists think of that?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Oh, yeah, they’re nuts. I mean, they’re powerful nuts. They are still. And even someone like Pope Francis said in December 2013, he said the Marxist ideology is wrong, but that having been said, he’s not a very good anti-communist.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, it’s a very powerfully contaminating force.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yes. And its tendrils are everywhere and not necessarily that easy to identify.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s exactly right. Especially if you don’t really want to look.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah. And if you tell somebody, you know, what you’re engaging in, there could be a form of Marxism applied to culture. Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci, cultural hegemony, founders of the Frankfurt School, Max Korkheimer, Theodore Adorno wrote about the culture industry and the dialectic of enlightenment. This kind of Marxism applied to culture as they look up cultural Marxism that pops up anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, right. It’s like, what’s that?

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Right. But it’s to the point where it’s infiltrated things where people engaging in the framework or meta-narrative or Marxist superstructure on gender, race, culture, whatever, often don’t even know that they’re guilty of it, which they’re, you know, credit to them. They don’t know it, but it’s so seeped in to the culture at large that, yeah, that’s what we’re dealing with.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right, sir. Hey, this is great. Thank you very much.

DR. PAUL KENGOR: Yeah. Well, there were many other things too that we could have talked about too. I would like to have talked about your work on Reagan and your other books as well, but we may save that for a further discussion. This was worth the devotion of 90 minutes to, I would say, just this topic. So I’m very glad that we did it.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Me too. Yeah. I’m glad too. And for everybody watching and listening on the YouTube side, we’re very happy for your time and attention as well. And to the film crew here, we’re at the Museum of the Bible, which is a very appropriate place to having this discussion in Washington, D.C.

That’s a museum whose work I did a documentary on for The Daily Wire, which I think is quite a successful documentary and was a great joy to actually produce. And it’s a great museum. So if you ever do happen to come to D.C., go check it out. It’s the kind of place that can help you understand a lot more deeply the relationship between, at minimum, the relationship between the fact of the Bible and the fact of literacy itself in its worldwide distribution, because those two things are very integrally associated.

And that’s an underappreciated contribution of Christianity and Protestantism to the world. So anyways, thanks to the Museum of the Bible for hosting us today. And I’m going to continue this discussion for another half an hour on The Daily Wire side. And what we’ll talk about is what I often talk about on that in that additional half an hour, which is the development of the interests that underlie this this body of work devoted not least to the catastrophe of Marxism and communism. So join us there.

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