First published 2 25 2024
“The way to Hell is paved with good intentions,” Karl Marx, Das Kapital: The Production of Surplus-Value, Vol. One, Chapter Seven, Section 2.
And [the serpent] said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’ ” The woman answered, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden, but about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You must not eat of it or touch it, or you will die.’ ” “You will not surely die,” the serpent told her. “For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:1-5)
You can tell by his writings that Karl Marx loved playing God, but like his Marxist successors today he wasn’t very good at it, lacking any sense of irony and wasting all his native intelligence in efforts to redefine obvious natural truths and systems to fit his own flawed narratives. He possessed a vastly superior vocabulary to modern acolytes like Kamala Harris, but shared her pedantic and condescending style – always presuming to teach the world what he did not fully understand himself, and wreaking havoc because he had the de-facto political power to impose his will on other men’s lives.
Unlike Herbert Marcuse, his super-star ideological descendent who founded “Cultural Marxism,” (nick-named “Marcuse the Obtuse” by his hapless students) Marx wrote plainly enough that his errors are readily observable (which perhaps explains why Marcuse chose the path of obfuscation through gratuitously complex rhetoric.) For example, consider the leading quote above and its context. With no apparent sense of self-awareness Marx cited the “road to Hell” aphorism as he spoke in the third person as a hypothetical “Capitalist” confronted with a lack of profit from a yarn manufacturing venture. Here is the passage:
“An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which the labourer interposes between himself and the subject of his labour, and which serves as the conductor of his activity. He makes use of the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of some substances in order to make other substances subservient to his aims....Thus Nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, one that he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible.
“Our capitalist, who is at home in his vulgar economy, exclaims: ‘Oh! but I advanced my money for the express purpose of making more money.” The way to Hell is paved with good intentions, and he might just as easily have intended to make money, without producing at all....“I might have played ducks and drakes with the 15 shillings; but instead of that I consumed it productively, and made yarn with it.’ ... Let him therefore console himself with the reflection that virtue is its own reward. But no, he becomes importunate. He says: ‘The yarn is of no use to me: I produced it for sale.’ ... Our friend, up to this time so purse-proud, suddenly assumes the modest demeanour of his own workman, and exclaims: “Have I myself not worked? Have I not performed the labour of superintendence and of overlooking the spinner? And does not this labour, too, create value?” His overlooker and his manager try to hide their smiles.” [Emphasis added.]In the space of a few paragraphs the smug and supercilious Marx unintentionally reveals the reason his own life’s work led civilization to a Hell on earth: he rejected the wisdom of God in favor of “serpent reasoning.” The serpent persuaded Adam and Eve to adopt the premise that God’s guidance could be wrong and that following their own counsel would make them “gods” like Him.
In the matter of economics, God’s counsel on economics is spelled out clearly in the Bible. For example private property is implicit in the Ten Commandments (“Thou shall not steal” has meaning only when things can be owned) and the socially just redistribution of wealth is prescribed in the Torah as a function of the seven year Sabbatical and fifty year Jubilee cycles. But, rejecting God’s wisdom, Marx and his humanist fellow-travelers intended to remedy some genuinely evil social conditions of his era (such as the virtual slavery of children in mines and factories, and obscene hoarding of wealth by new-money elites with no inclination to noblesse oblige) by engineering humanistic and eugenicist social changes of their own design, backed by resentment-fueled class warfare.
In the portion I highlighted above in bold, Marx ignorantly misinterprets Luke 12:24-26, which reads:
“Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, which have neither storehouse nor barn; and God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds? “And which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? “If you then are not able to do the least, why are you anxious for the rest?”
Marx completely missed that trust in God’s providence – and the practical implementation of His Bible-based ethics, morality and governing systems – was the only right answer to the “social injustice” of his day.
It has been roughly two centuries since Marx started paving his generation’s road to Hell. Today, the “elite” strata of our 21st Century society is teeming with Karl Marxes, each brimming with good intentions animated by serpent reasoning. They’re cooperating together with factory-like efficiency to achieve their mutual fantasy of a “perfect” society, and their collective efforts have upgraded the Marxian path to a super-highway.
The common denominator of these men (which term properly incorporates women in authentic biblical reasoning) is defacto secular humanism – serpent reasoning – regardless of whatever religion they may nominally profess.
Authorities differ on the original source of the “road to Hell” quote but I believe it’s first use in the form and meaning assumed in this article was a sermon by John Wesley in 1741: “The Almost Christian” It’s worth a read, especially the opening paragraphs in which Welsey describes what would in the early 20th Century be called the “social gospel,” which American Humanists invented to undermine the church, and which more recently has served as the stepping stone to the widespread “social justice” movement in today’s “Almost Christian” church.
When you talk to self-styled “Progressives” or their self-deluding “Almost Christian” counterparts in their unguarded moments you find they almost universally perceive their intentions to be good, but in reality, to whatever extent they substitute their own serpent reasoning for God’s wisdom, they are, literally, paving their own personal road to Hell (John 3:18) and dragging the rest of society down with them.
