No two persons have made a more indelible mark on the world than Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.
Marx and Freud
Marx wrote “Das Kapital” and “The Communist Manifesto.” These two works set the stage for the Russian Revolution. Without Marx we would not have had World War 2, The Cold War, The Korean War, The Vietnam War and the Middle East Crisis.
Freud gave a new understanding of the development and functioning of the human mind.
They left a worldview that influenced the morals and values of global society. Marx called religion the opiate of the people. Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was a staunch atheist and very much a secular Jew. He was ardent in the belief that the idea of God was an illusion that arose from childhood needs for protection and a dominant father figure.
Parallels In Their Lives
The two men whose work most radically influenced 20th century thought met only once, in 1927, when Albert Einstein, then 47, paid a call on 70-year-old Sigmund Freud. Remarked Freud: “He understands as much about psychology as I do about physics, so we had a very pleasant talk.
Marx and Freud had a lot in common.
Both had virtually no friends.
Both were bitter and disillusioned. Freud wrote in 1918, “I have found little good about humans on the whole. Most of them are trash.”
Both had conflicts with their fathers and with authority figures in general.
Both had devout fathers. When Marx was six his father became a Christian. He wrote to Karl in college saying, “A good support for morality is a simple faith in God.” Freud’s father gave him a bible on his 35th birthday inscribed in Hebrew, “My dear son, it was in the seventh year of your age that the spirit of God began to move you to learning.”
Both experienced adversity but lacked the resources to deal with their troubles.
C. S. Lewis, Marx and Freud
In his earlier life, C.S. Lewis was an atheist. Not until age thirty-three did he become a believer. His earlier beliefs were influenced by Freud and Marx.
September, 1931, Lewis was in conversation late into the night with JR Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson. They were discussing all the old myths that they loved, and how Christianity was the one true myth of history, the one that actually happened.8 days later, Lewis chose to believe that Jesus was the Son of God, Saviour and made a decision to follow him.
The Pilgrim’s Regress (available for $1.49 on Kindle) Lewis’s first apologetic work written only two years after his conversion, repeatedly pokes holes in Freud and Marx’s psychological argument of “wish-fulfillment.” Pilgrim’s Regress, like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, involves a quest embarked on by a seeker.
“His main character, John does not encounter generic temptations that could divert him from life in Christ; rather, he is faced with the challenges of specific people common to the intellectual life of then-modern culture.” C. S. Lewis Institute
C.S. Lewis recognized quite early how Karl Marx’s philosophy, a “potent evil,” would justify terrible crimes.
The greatest threats to humanity’s future are the two major Communist powers. We see Russia’s brazen criminal ambitions currently on display in Ukraine. Communist China’s malevolent intentions are more insidious and far more dangerous.
In 1040, Lewis wrote, “Fascism and Communism, like all other evils, are potent because of the good they contain or imitate. Diabolus simius Dei.* And, of course, their occasion is the failure of those who left humanity starved of that particular good.”
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