Robert Orlando on Marx's Contribution to the Modern World

It's at communitynews .org, but it's rdjmveroneatyahoo .com,

or you can call Rosalyn Verone, and the phone number is right here for more details.

But it's gonna be, I think, a great time at Princeton Theological Seminary, talking about Karl Marx and the events of 2020, and kind of where's the left -headed?

Where's Marxism headed? What's around the corner? So for that discussion, without further ado,

Robert Orlando, thanks for coming on. I am, for the first time.

I'm thankful that you've invited me to come down to this event, and I've never been on Princeton's campus, so I'm kind of looking forward to that, too, just to see what it looks like at Christmas.

But you are, I think, getting a second degree there. Is that right? Am I mistaken on that?

Yeah, I'm on my second master's of, it's called a THM, and it's like one degree between a doctorate and a master's, but it's specialized, a one -year degree, and I'm working with two, as an independent relationship with both

Dale Allison, Jesus scholar, and Matt Novitson, a Pauline scholar, well -known. So your documentary, this is going back,

I think, about a decade, on Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul. That, I think, might have been one of the biggest things that you've made.

I heard that all over the place in conservative media, so some people might recognize you from that. But this focus on Marxism that you've had recently, maybe talk to us about why you decided to focus on Karl Marx specifically, what your book is about, because I know the research went into this book, and what significance you think it has for our current political situation.

Everything, everything. The way I open sometimes when I do a talk, I'll say, if you don't have your own worldview, whether you know it or not, you're thinking

Karl Marx's thoughts. That's how influential he is. I think he's the number one, most influential thinker of our time.

And while his original ideas have been transformed, and they morph into different things, like in the postmodern setting and other things like that, academia for business, but fundamentally, his worldview and his presuppositions of how the world works are how we live most of our lives, especially outside of a

Christian environment. I know there's a difference between a classical Marxist outlook and some of the modern, some people call it neo -Marxist or critical theory outlooks, and there's different tributaries, we'll say.

Is your thesis essentially that the headwaters is Marx though, that Marx really gave rise to all these different iterations that people are living in, and so when they say things like Black Lives Matter, they may not be using all the language

Karl Marx did in the 19th century, but they're essentially mimicking the categories and critiques of his?

Yeah, this was like one of my finds that took a little while to dig down.

I started out knowing Karl Marx, let's say in the stereotypical way, most known as the Communist Manifesto Only Marx.

So you think of him as only that period in 1848, which was the time of the revolution and that pamphlet, but that's a very small part of his life, although it captures in snapshot, fortunately or unfortunately, most of those progressive ideas are in play in our policies in the

United States today. So it's not even something that we've dismissed, it made its way into the United States system.

Originally, it's a confluence of ideas, so bear with me a second. One was Paul Kengor, who's a good friend of mine, and wrote the book,

The Devil and Karl Marx, right before me for the same publisher, took a certain tact. I was going through the

Divine Comedy at the time, and 2020 was when they were burning down the inner cities and Minneapolis.

And I know there's different judgments, let's just say some combination of protesting and rioting, let's just say like to stay off the left, right, clear distinctions, because for me,

I'm not approaching it as a political thinker. But I would just say like that confluence of things that were happening on the streets, also,

I think had a history going back to the real estate market crash of 2008, the fact that young people did not have jobs, a lot of jobs went overseas, like in the case of the

Rust Belt. Then you had this appearance of like upper mobile, white, upper class people, academically trained with no families, no ability to move the upper mobile.

So you had just a confluence of things, then you have COVID. So you had a toxic situation, let's call it the dried leaves of all this.

Now, how do you handle this? How do people analyze this? I'm saying you had decades, if not generations of Marxist thinking to analyze what we were all looking at.

And when you take that filter and impose it on the world, what you tend to do is separate everything into binary groups.

So there's always like the in crowd with all the power and the outsiders who are the proletariats.

Now, you could morph those into race or gender or anything else, but the dynamics themselves, imposing, putting on the glasses that the way to see the world properly is the haves and the have nots in every situation.

And the only reason the haves have things and the have nots do not is because they manipulated the system either from inheritance or something granted to them or just oppression and the use of power.

So just think about that master of suspicion way of thinking of the world to start, and then you could overlay it onto the specifics of all the different issues you see in modern or pre, post, what'd you say, neo -Marxist thinking.

Well, one of the things that I've noticed in the theological world, and you're coming from Princeton Seminary, so I think that you'd be familiar with this, is in the

Roman Catholic world, it's liberation theology. In the Protestant world, there are various theologies of liberation or just plain and simple progressive

Christianity that mirrors, I think, in some ways, liberation theology. And there's a fusion of the

Marxist categories and critique with Christian theology. And what they'll often say is, well, if you go back to the ancient times and you look at prophets like Malachi or Zechariah, they are critiquing

Israel or Judah, and they're saying that one of the issues is the rich are getting richer and exploiting the poor.

And if you go fast forward to the New Testament, the epistle of James says similar things, that, look, the rich are exploiting the poor.

It says it right here. And so one of the things that I think might be interesting to talk about on the campus of a seminary is to what extent are these critiques from scripture in symmetry to what

Marx was saying, or are they totally different? I think they're different. I know you do. How would you approach that?

Again, I think what I'm looking to do is maybe I'm leading more as an academic than my usual author, filmmaker self.

I mean, fundamentally, the book is a biography, but I knew I was dropping a biography into a toxic situation where people would probably already have judgments about what

I'm trying to do. So I put a lot of method up front in the book to explain like what were the ideas

I was bringing to the biography, and then how the biography would be, I was putting it in a parallel track world with Dante's virtuous divine comedy journey.

So I was bringing different analysis, but I think fundamentally, I wanted to peel back the layers because to answer your question,

I think the modern Christian movement has a true sense of social justice and inequities that they're trying to correct.

But when you pull it out of a Marxist setting, now you have to parse Marx because you'd have to get what you said was like classical critique,

Marxist critique against what are they doing in cultural Marxism or other things. So probably for the

Christian, the modern Christian, I can't speak for anyone. I'm not very active in that community, but as a

Catholic who's very aware of social teachings in the Catholic church, the point of the position of the

Catholic church is critique right on the button. Answers, really, really bad.

Does not understand mankind, anthropology, what makes us tick, the restraint of a sinful nature, and how you have to be cautious and restraining of human beings.

They can't just reorganize things through material terms. So there's no simple answer, but I don't judge modern

Christians who are using the tool of Marx in that classical sense. There's injustice in the world.

And as Alasdair MacIntyre said, he just died, and I dedicated two dedications in the book.

One was to him and one was to my mom who died on January 20th. But what he said was, fortunately or unfortunately, you need to embrace the fact that when someone has a conscience for social justice, they use

Marx nomenclature to get it out in the modern world. And the Christian nomenclature is now passe.

Now, he didn't mean you can't reinvent it. You can't bring it back into the mix, but no one has a language better than Marxism, or at least they think to address social injustice.

So you think there is an analytical tool essentially here that can be utilized by Christians and others to look at the world and say, well,

Marx noticed something, and that's something that we can use even his categories and some of his observations to get at.

But the solutions, what he says prescribes should be done is where the problem comes in.

So I wanna ask this. I know your book is going through sort of a fusion of Dante's Inferno with Marx's teaching and sort of the whole,

I think, assuming that Marx is responsible for what happened in Minneapolis in 2020 and around the country.

Largest insurance payout, by the way, in our country's history. I'm sure you knew that, but bigger than any hurricane. I did not.

No, I didn't know that. Yeah, bigger than any hurricane, which is crazy. What happened with the destruction in 2020 with the various riots, because there were so many of them.

But this is, I suppose, what I wanna ask is when

I look at what scripture teaches about these things, and just typically in history, when you have people who legitimately oppress others, typically the response is stop doing that.

Like you guys who are doing that, that's an action that you're taking, that's sinful, wrong, evil.

I never hear, well, the category that you exist in, the strata that you're in is fundamentally rigged and wrong.

It shouldn't exist. We should just get rid of the disparity. And it's a systemic problem with a rigid interpretive grid that explains all of human behavior.

That's the difference in my mind between Marx and the typical critiques from even like Rerum Novorum, which talks about social justice, but it's talking about, hey, you have a responsibility, people who own land and factories to those who are poor, don't neglect that.

Whereas Marx is saying, no, no, no, no, blow up the whole thing. Just everyone needs to be at the same strata.

And once we get there, that's utopia. I see those things as fundamentally different. Is that your understanding?

You said a lot there. Just give me a second. I did say a lot, I know. I'm sorry. No, no, it's good. This is why I wanna do this, because I think the building blocks of this conversation have not been laid out.

I'm trying and I could not find other conservatives other than Paul Kenger. And I believe

I knew Sebastian Gorka's wife. I'm trying to think of her name now, but she wrote a book on cultural

Marxism all, and then yourself. So I don't know anyone else in let's just say middle to right space who's actually giving

Marx like the building blocks of what exactly is he really saying? So I would parse it and say, so Marx was a big fan of capitalism.

He just believed it's time had ended. So let me play

Marx for those playing the home game. Let me be an advocate for Marx.

Let me make the case. So he would say, if you were in the first century during the

Bible times, and you had a master slave economy, and you were saying to people, we've lived with this man for a long time.

We've lived with a master slave economy for a really long time. And it's coming to an end and didn't listen and any movements to kind of go away from it were getting crushed or oppressed by the wealthy who benefited from having a slave class.

And you lived at that time and you thought you were joining a revolution. And by the way, I think this is what

Jesus is doing by the way. But you're bringing a revolution saying the small is the top.

The bottom is the top. Go to the poor. He's not spiritualizing. He's like, the world is full of poor people, right?

What's the sheep and the goats? You came to me and I needed this. I came to, you gave me a coat.

Like what's a lot of the teachings of the gospel are just like, stop and give the man on the street.

Stop overlooking the poor and the suffering, right? Isn't that the main thrust of Jesus outside his messianic like big arc of his life is that he's helping the poor.

He's there for the sick and the downtrod. So if you were in that period of time and you were talking about revolution, getting away from master slave class, you'd be on Jesus's side because he's trying to overturn the whole system.

So all Marx is saying is that you went through a master slave system. Then you went to Lords and serfs through the medieval times.

And then the industrial revolution brought you to the employer employee. These dynamics are organizing around the contingencies of the different epochs they're in, but they're not static.

So where I would agree with them is that you should always be looking for a better system. You should always try and improve the dynamics of a system.

So one, he was pro -capitalist. He thought it was a phenomenal system, but it's time has come. And he would say the problem with capitalism is that when it's unbridled and when markets start to get slow and they're unpredictable for human beings to live in the unpredictability of markets, power concentrates itself.

And if it has to, it goes outside the boundaries of a country, like in the case of China with the Rust Belt. It'll go find cheap labor.

It'll now get entangled with foreign governments in order for the monetary stabilization because money likes totalitarianism.

It doesn't like unpredictability. It doesn't want to wait around for people. Money likes totalitarian government.

That's why we support militias in other countries because money needs stability like war and these things.

So it goes outside. And then he said it would buy the political class, not a fan of statism. Then it would buy the propaganda that comes through communications, big media.

And it would take over the whole thing and it would become an international thrust that would concentrate all the wealth for the few. Now, if you're asking me, that to me is a summary of the last 25 years of what

I've lived through. That's what I've seen go from the America I knew kind of in the Reagan era, like through that period, even the 80s and 90s to now,

I have seen that concentration of power. So for me, he is prophetically telling you that this is the weakness of capitalism.

It's gone too far. But yes, now the next step where I don't go with him is to go to revolution now.

And what that looks like by destabilizing the entire system and just burning it all down like that, to me is the ultimate, it's like committing suicide as opposed to reform and different changes or bringing the power back down to the people and other things that constitutional law has tried.

Now for the poor and those who have been struggling all these years, and you could say those who started at the bottom, they have to wait longer.

And it's a real strain in the temptation of revolution. I understand it. So when I'm going back to the streets, 2020, and all these forces are operating and people are now aware and they're looking at it through that lens, yeah, the temptation is enough's enough.

We've got to burn it all down. And I'm not justifying it. I'm not justifying it. I'm just - I know you are.

No, I know you aren't. No, I appreciate that. I think that's a well -thought through approach to this.

And in fact, regarding Marx's praise for capitalism, that's a bit of a new one for me, or maybe

I forgot that he was praising capitalism. I know he thought history worked in these stages, but you think of Marx as like the chief critic of capitalism that he hates it, and obviously he was, but he saw it as a necessary stage to pass through, is

I think what you're saying, right? And the best of what we could have accomplished to that point, but needed to go to another phase.

And for him, that was communism. That was communism. Well, we got to talk through what that means, because there's a process there where I think this is where he gets to the worst thinking and what leads to Stalinism and Trotsky and Lenin and all that.

But it's inherent in what he's saying, but it's not explicitly there. It could be taken out of it.

And I'll explain if we go down that road. Yeah, well, it's already fresh in your mind. Why don't you just go there and talk about what the problem with communism is?

Because what, here's more, again, to be a scholar on Marx would be two lifetimes, just the amount of output and the different fields he was in.

But let me just take a crack at it from combination of being a storyteller, analyzing narrative, pretty good reader.

I did a deep dive for five years here. I think what Marx was saying that in order, now, he uses socialism and communism.

It's a little tricky, but let's just assume socialism graduates to communism. Communism is the kingdom of God, right?

If you look at the parallel of Paul or Jesus, the kingdom of God is communism. It's the new world order.

Humanity has now evolved to a new place and they're living in the kingdom, right? But in order to get from capitalism to that nirvana, right, that kingdom of God for Marx, there's a socialism phase of it where the state does have to take over the means of production.

Because if they don't take over the means of production, the people will never have a chance. So he believed in the temporary role of government, temporary, he thought the government was as evil as capitalists, by the way, just for the record.

He was not a pro -government guy. There's another misnomer. You hear this in the left, right stuff all the time. He despised statism.

He just thought it was another mask for the powerful. And he actually looked at it the way

I did. These are a bunch of clowns. Politicians are the worst. At least businessmen make something. They're just clowns reflecting opinion.

They have no, they're the worst of human beings. I don't know if he knows, but Plato pitied three people more than others, prostitutes, actors, and politicians.

Did you know that? No, I didn't know that. That's interesting. Because he said they all live in the double lie of not only are they living in the cave, like being a human being, but the roles they play are a further masking of reality in the lives they live.

They're not really living a pure, like a real life. That's in the Republican. So I've read it, I guess. I forgot. So that's interesting.

Just bouncing around to different, but you could see why that would make sense anyway. So what he said is that that's the despotic period.

You needed the strong leader to come out, the Messiah. You needed the messianic figure, which is what

Marx is. He's thinking like a biblical eschaton. So the messianic figure would step in long enough, gather, take away the means of production.

Here's the revolution part, right? Take away through violent means of necessary the production long enough so that people could take over their own lives again and move on.

Where the whole system breaks down is those strong men never gave up their power.

They never gave that beauty. For a while, Stalin, I don't know if you know this, but he presided over the largest job growth market in history.

I don't know if you know this. Like if you look up just the pure, because you could do a lot if you are total power of a government in the

Soviet Union. Right, yeah. It was like mechanization at a scale that we've never seen. Never seen. So you could do it for a while, but did

Stalin then go away gracefully and give the power to the people? Did Lenin give the power ever to the? So my point to you is he forgot that in human nature, that's the problem.

So you still have someone in a human being needing to be a temporary despot to take all the power.

They're not going anywhere. And that's where it makes the transition to why I'm saying Marx misread the process.

It never got to communism and nirvana because right in the middle of that transition, now you have a despot.

That's when you have regimes taking over. But the way the revolution happened was nothing like, he thought it would come from urban cities like Paris and well -educated people.

It came from farmers in Russia. It came from people who were like desperate and farmland.

Yeah. So it didn't even work out. It didn't even work out the way he thought it would. It's interesting. So the human nature aspect is probably one of the more interesting things for Christians at least, because that's something we have very clear teaching on from scripture.

And you and I might differ on maybe the emphasis or the message of Jesus. I see

Jesus as coming to seek and save that which is lost. And then it's a spiritual poverty that he wants to correct.

You know, blessed are the poor in spirit. He does help those who are financially destitute, and he indicts the religious leaders.

I think that's the parable of the woman with the mite. That's not even a parable. He's just noticing she's giving of what she doesn't have, what the last she had to sustain herself.

And he's saying, this is what the Pharisees do to you. They make you pinch your pennies and it's an oppression essentially.

But if you look at some of his parables, he's also saying, hey, look, the workers are worthy of their wages.

The people who own property, like the parable of the vineyard, they can direct how much they want to pay their workers.

That's up to them. Investment, of course, you find that in the parable of the talents.

You even see hints at the slave system in one of his parables of the, when it talks about the servant who gets beaten essentially.

And so I look at all this and I'm thinking to myself, okay, Jesus, his primary mission is a spiritual mission when he comes.

He's not coming as a political revolutionary, which I think is how liberation theologians wanna view him, that he was gonna overturn the system.

The Romans killed him because that was the thing. But I think he was in the kingdom of God.

Maybe we don't wanna go there because it's gonna get us off track too much. No, no, no, I mean, we're definitely gonna follow up on another program with the

Paul. Okay, all right. Well, but I think this is important because I think getting my cards on the table now might help a few more questions you have.

So I'm a both -and thinker. I don't need to see it one way or the other. I think they're completely linked.

So I would say Jesus is a messianic figure, was always a king that came to conquer.

The surprise was, and people would argue whether he discovered this or whether he always knew this would happen.

But when the Messiah becomes the lamb who dies on the crucifixion, that's the subversive change that was never expected and why he was rejected.

But the idea that the Messiah would be anything but a revolutionary figure, I can't accept that at all.

I mean, the whole idea at the end was that there'd be a final war. It was just gonna happen with spiritual, not like flying in the sky, but meant like guided by God for the righteous.

But it was always war between God. The gods pick sides in war. So the kingdom that he would bring in is the

Messiah. I think the stumbling block that Paul talked about was, but it would begin with a lamb on a cross, not a victory standing over Rome.

But I think the expectation was a Messiah would always bring an army, of course. Yeah, and so I believe that too.

I think when he comes again, the second coming is certainly with a double -edged sword. And he said, if you read

Moses, you would have known this about me though. You would have known the suffering servant that I had to come and do this.

This was step one. Anyway though, fast forwarding to Mark though, because this is really the point, and this is more about what your book's about.

Jesus seems to indicate human nature is corrupted from within. That's where the evil comes from.

It's from the heart of man. You have these sinful problems because fundamentally there's a problem in the heart.

Mark's comes along. Now Mark's, I know Jewish background, but he's raised Lutheran. And I think one of the curiosities

I've had, and I have heard people speculate on this, that maybe he was a Satanist, like Richard Wurmbrandt did a book on that.

He seems to reject this idea that that's... So even in classical

Marxism, if you read the Communist Manifesto, he's not just talking about economics. He's saying marriage is just a tool of the bourgeoisie.

These inequalities in the rural versus the urban, that's a tool they use. It's like everything is just wired to benefit them.

And it's a structural problem that we have to destroy, essentially. And so it seems to me like Marx is saying evil is not something simply that comes from within.

It's at the very least, something that is built into a system that oppresses everyone.

And it's fundamentally altering that system. And that's the revolution, that we have to work towards this.

History is gonna flow this way anyways, but we need to be advocates of the next stage to get to the point of no inequality, total egalitarianism.

And that's the heaven on earth, I think as you rightly just pointed out, that's their utopia. And so where did this come from in Marx's thinking though?

Because I know he has a religious background. Why is he saying, hey, the evil is just the system that was erected around you?

Well, let me take a step back again. It sounds elitist when you say things like this, especially to the modern activist conversation, because we're not philosophically trained anymore.

And I'm not technically philosophically trained, but I've read so much. And I've been in the space of like Catholic teaching and philosophy like Hegelian thinking versus Aristotelian thinking.

But when you understand that first things, like your worldview informs the details later.

So where you commit to sound fancy or presuppositions, like what you commit to as the way the world works, your commitments of faith, like mankind, like nature, like material things, will decide later like a chess game, the moves you make later in the way you're thinking.

So if you're a materialist, you start with that, which he was, he was a monist. So his papers, doctoral dissertation in Berlin that he wrote was between Epicurus and Democritus about like them.

And then he went towards Spinoza, who was a monist too. So it means all reality can be seen in an atomistic way.

It's in the material universe. There is no transcendence. Even, and put aside religious, like revelation for a second.

We don't need to go. That is natural conversation, natural order talking, reason. Like even in the way

Paul talks about it, Romans one and two, with reason, like we have an accountability through reason, pre -revelation.

So if you just think of it this way, so if all the pieces on the board are material, then it's really organizing the pieces in a fair way.

Because there's no transcendent order. There's no higher order. Like even from a point of virtue or higher calling were rational to what's the most reasonable.

What's the most true, beautiful or good. You have nothing else. It's all material.

If you think of it that way, then really it's an organizing principle of material things and power.

That's the only thing you have. Who has it? Who doesn't? And what's the material breakdown of how it's organized?

There you go, like redistribution of wealth. It just means you're moving the pieces around again in a different way, not because of some higher virtue or anything like that.

Now having said that, if you think of it that way, then anything that gets organized is a social construct of the powerful.

Because what other motive would you have if you have no higher order of a moral order or a natural order to follow?

Or you're not sinful blinding to serve yourself, which I think Christianity would speak to the same injustice that Marx is saying.

That mask, we fool ourselves to serve ourselves. And I think you could just make that case. Even Adam Smith made that case, that there's no fairness in capitalism without the moral sentiments of Christianity.

But let's just assume for a sec. So if you just think of it that way, so now in gender, you may look, even

Jordan Peterson gets into this, you may look at the world and go like, why are men only engineers and women want to be nurses in Sweden?

And they did that big test and everything. So now you're looking at everything you look at is, oh, because the men must be oppressing the women.

Because there's no natural order. There's no other factors why they might choose that. The birth cycle is an opportunity not to cherish the differences and distinctions.

So I don't know if that made sense so far, but I want to now match it to Galatians 3 .28, when Paul says, in Christ, there's no longer master, slave,

Greek, or Jew. What's the third category? Master, slave, Greek, or Jew.

Yeah, male and female. Male and female, male and female. Now, if you think about the feminist war that's going on now between making men and women, so Paul didn't say there are no distinctions.

He just said, in Christ, these distinctions can be, they could be seen and get along through the empathetic nature of love in Christ.

Because you were loved in Christ, you could love things that are different, or the inequality can be overcome together.

It's like a message of hope. Maybe it's idealistic to some degree in real time, at times, if people could abuse it.

But it's an entirely different thing, because in the end, Paul is saying, I'm aware of the distinctions, but we're not going to obliterate the distinctions.

We're going to work in Christ to make a new person, a reformed human being spiritually, to get along so men and women could understand each other in marriage.

So that when you have wealthy people, not all of them got it because they stole and they pilfered other people.

Maybe they earned it, they have high skill levels, or they're very committed or disciplined. There's a million. So it's two different orientations.

One is hope and faith, seeing the corruption of man, but seeing a higher order, like the kingdom to come, but the kingdom here.

The other one is all suspicion. So every time you see a distinction. So back to the social Marxism cultural thing, it's like everything becomes a social construct, organized by material things in power.

Right. So there's a materialism at the base. And I think the liberation theologians want to make a theistic base for the same house, the project that Marx had.

They want to just try to put that on a different foundation, but fundamentally it is a materialist foundation. Can I just add two more things and push back?

I'm sorry to be long winded here, but this is like key stuff. One is, let's not forget, we've heard since the eighties, right?

Greed is good, Wall Street. The whole idea that greed is good, right? So the love of money is the root of all evil.

The love of money is the root of all evil. Think about how powerful that is. Now he's saying the love of money.

He's not saying money alone, saying the love of money, but you just think about that one verse, how powerful it is.

It's the root of everything else. Then I think of the two things Jesus says to the rich man, right?

How do I get in the kingdom of heaven? Repent and right. He said the entry is through the repentance.

How do I, I forget the exact words in the verse, but how do I store treasure in heaven? Go and sell everything you own and give to the poor, right?

So I'm saying to you over and over again, the message is that those who are on top here will be on the bottom later.

And those on the bottom here will be on the top later. So it is very revolutionary. And it does ultimately the spiritual,

I should say the material implications of the spiritual message are that material things matter a lot in your order now, how you live your life now.

So I don't think they're that far off where one is pure spiritual and one is pure material. I think that one is both and, and one is either or.

One doesn't recognize any spirituality, it's all material. The other one is trying to balance the spiritual with the material in the

Christian worldview. Yeah, I think, I don't know if we disagree. I think Paul in first Timothy, when he says the root of all kinds of evil,

I know there's different translations of it. I think that's probably the more appropriate rendering, but he's saying, he's instructing a pastor basically, like you watch out for filthy lucre.

Cause that's a thing that pastors often get in trouble for is they have power and they can extract donations and things like that when they don't need it.

And they get addicted to the money and they follow that. And instead of following Christ. And it seems like when

Paul is talking about there's neither slave nor free man, nor man, nor female, all are one in Christ.

He's saying that the redemption that Christ offers has no social barrier. Anyone can be saved, which to me is what

Marx practically rejects and that's what we saw in 2020. Not everyone could be saved.

If you're a white straight male, especially if you have privilege, man, you're out of the kingdom.

Like you're aware there's great gnashing of teeth. You're flipping it.

You're saying actually Marx is the one going to this Dante's Inferno to basically have a here, to judge, to be judged for what he's done.

But I think the system is, you can't deny the spirituality cause we're spiritual beings.

Even if you have a materials foundation, somewhere along the line, we're gonna start mimicking what the order God's put there.

And we're gonna realize some people are bad. Some people are good. We're gonna come up with some kind of a line where we can say, usually ourselves are good.

And these other guys are bad. And it seems like the line in 2020 was that. If you're a white straight male, heterosexual, especially

Christian like that, that's all oppressor category. It doesn't matter what else you think, what else you do. You are irredeemable.

You're a deplorable. You're the devil. You're the devil. Yeah. And what did it get us? Where it got us destruction.

And I think people have rightly, hopefully rejected that. What were, maybe you can play off any of what

I just said. The question though. Let me jump in again. I'm sorry. You're saying a lot on each. I am.

So if someone's willing to go through my book and I hope they do. It took a lot of time to kind of fuse these things together to kind of bring a new world view or an expose the wrong way of thinking about this.

I think in balance. I would say again, that what I'm trying to say in the world

I'm in is that when you put Marx through the filter of the virtuous Catholic world, you realize that at the end, the irony is he actually is a spiritualist.

He talks in material language, but I go through every piece of his thinking, his

Hegelian thinking, but he's actually disguising a prophetic, I believe like a

Jeremiah or Isaiah in the Old Testament. He's actually disguising a kingdom or spirituality the whole time, masking it going, it's just material is no thing, but it's a denial of reality.

And the reason why his biography is so strong is even his fellow peer Marx, there's no such thing as at the time, there's a famous saying

Marx says, the one thing I'm not as a Marxist, but I don't know if you know this. It's in a French paper, I believe it is. But, and I'll get back to this.

Some other things to qualify about Marx and communism. But I'm trying to say to you, like even then people would say,

Marx don't underestimate the spiritual side of mankind, like his peers who are also looking for revolution.

So it's not like there's a pure materialist like wing, like it's that he is a, he's an active, he's a militant activist.

So he's trying to always organize in the world that gets the most exacting change. He's a powerful writer.

He's got that propaganda -like style of writing where everything pops on the page.

Everything is power. It's like reading a comic strip, the way he uses language, the vampiric nature of capitalist money and just powerful thinking.

And he actually quotes Dante 13 times, which is what gave me the whole idea of exploring this. But if you look at it that way, but he is not fooling anyone because in the end, he's trying to create a new eschaton through a materialist base and it just doesn't work.

It just doesn't work. Wasn't his favorite prophet Isaiah or Jeremiah, was it? I think it was Jeremiah.

I think it was Jeremiah. Yeah. Yeah, I know that I heard that said somewhere. Let me ask you this, the condition in the 19th century.

I think this is so important for understanding Marx and understanding the world we live in now because we're in this thing called modernity.

Some would say post -modernity now, but we've been in this mechanized kind of egalitarian soup springing out of the enlightenment and just the technological advances that were happening and a whole host of things that converged.

And it seems like Marx, if he was prophetic, he could see where that was going. He could see there was gonna be things like alienation and labor.

It wasn't gonna be the same as the relationship under feudalism where the person who owned the land had a relationship with the person who worked the land and there was sort of a mutual affection that would be dissipated.

Was he a prophet? Would this all have happened with revolutions in Russia and other places, regardless of whether he existed, do you think?

Was this just baked into the story of where everything was going or did he have an active role in bringing about what took place?

Yeah, no, that's a great, that's a great. No, I think that's what activists do. I think activists, they grab the zeitgeist of the time.

So if you think of Marx, this is why I think reading my book and I'm not pushing the book, but I am available at all bookstores near you.

But if you go into it, I set up the table of like, where is he coming from? So he has all the ideas of the

French Revolution. He has Montesquieu and Voltaire to see how the French, and the French Revolution became horrific after it gave the most freedom and brotherhood to the most people, right?

There it is again. The two sides of it, like for a while, the French Revolution was like human rights, 100 % rights to the individual.

And it did all these things until it became a monarchy and a despot regime and started cutting heads off and everything.

So you have that, then he had Hegelian thinking, which was, again, we talked about this, I think briefly when we first spoke.

Hegelian thinking, thinking on top of evangelical ideas of dispensationalism, so the world is moving through a set of series.

And that's all he did is took the Hegelian idea and dropped materialism and he eliminated the world spirit. Now between you and I in enlightenment terms, the world spirit is

God. I mean, that's what basically Hegelian, he's a Lutheran trained, Hegel's a Lutheran trained thinker.

Adam Smith, right? He said all the same things that Marx said, the critique of capitalism, be careful if you don't have the moral sentiment at its core.

And Adam Smith has what? The invisible hand. Newsflash in the enlightenment, the word invisible hand is

God's hand on things. So they're all trying to get away and feel like they're in a new enlightenment period by changing the nomenclature because, and this is where you have to put yourself in the shoes of the time, because for them, they saw the church and those things, not like we're looking at them now as like counter ideas to neutralize the

Marxist influence. They were looking at as oppressive institutions, the divine right of kings. The idea that you would give so much power, we probably would be enlightenment thinkers at the time if we thought in freedom in modern

America. So he's coming and riding on the backs of all of these world movements that are going, and then you have the explosion of the industrial revolution in England and Engels is the son of a factory owner in Manchester, right at the heart of it, writing about the critique in the streets, just watch

Mary Poppins, just watch Christmas Carol. Like that's where they're living. And I remember Engels talking about, like he made it enough of a point to say, pregnant women were having babies on the stoops of these tenements and they're burning coal inside tenements.

Now that doesn't mean that that was all it was, but the concentration of power, the soot, the subways coming alive for the first time, he saw that like a monstrous mechanizing of human beings, especially thinking as that comment is like, we could be poets in the day and rurals and live on the farmlands.

And he had that ideal. Imagine that in a city like London in 1841, I think he moved there and lived there for the rest of his life.

Yeah. And I know some people, I've heard this, I don't know, I've never looked into it, but Charles Dickens was supposedly a Marxist. I don't know if that's just -

He was a socialist. He was a socialist, okay. Because he's focusing on these realities of urban life in that time and it's so dismal.

What was the thing that surprised you the most as you engaged in study on this topic about Marx? At heart, he's a romantic.

He's like a gothic, loved gothic literature. And where I went after him, because it was my strength, was in his understanding of Faust and tragedy.

And if you look at the line, slow me down if this is not clear. I would love to share this with an audience and have them just take this one strand and in the book, go for this.

But it's called a divine tragedy because divine comedy in the end, and I don't know if you know this, but historically the

Christian message is a comedy at the end, because we win, right? God raises the third day, right?

If you go to the fourth day and there's no resurrection, then you have a tragedy, but there's a resurrection. So in the end, a comedy or a tragic comedy, they'd say the

Gospels are tragic comedies, because for a while, everything looks grim and Jesus has now been killed and the apostles are scattered.

It's incredibly well -written. I'm doing something on Matthew in the future. You'll hear about it. But anyway, so, but if you look at that way and you look at him using

Prometheus, just think of this line through history. Prometheus, Lucifer, and I'm not treating

Lucifer, bear with me, I'm not treating him lightly here. And then you have Faust, the pact with Faust makes, and then you have

Frankenstein in the enlightenment coming through Mary Shelley's work. All of this is, and I don't know if you know this, but the subtitle of Frankenstein is

Prometheus Unbound. I don't know if you know that. It's like, that's the, so there's a line in all of history of the enlightened thinker challenging the system.

And he's taking pride in doing all that. But what I do is I use his love of literature to show him back, almost like a mirror back to him, but look what happened to Faust.

Where did he go wrong? He didn't understand human nature. He didn't know the monster, they didn't know the monster would get lonely and need a woman and do like, and then lose his mind because they took the, remember they created the woman for him and then they took her away.

So I'm like, they didn't realize that in thinking in material enlightened free terms, they actually were doing so much damage to the soul of man, to the soul of creation and making a monster.

And I think that's what Stalin is like. So he's the monster born, Paul would say ectroma, right?

Born out of time, monstrously aborted in time. But he's the project, the 20th century to me is the project of that monstrous delivery that starts back in Prometheus.

And it's the curse, like don't go too far, like the garden, right? Everywhere else, every other tree, but the tree of knowledge.

Like every other one you could, everything has a caution and a restraint. And for a romantic thinker, everything's possible.

There's no restraints, it's all possible. Well, the book is called

Karl Marx, The Divine Tragedy. And it is available in most bookstores as I understand it.

You can also go online. Do you have a website that you wanna send people to? Robert? They could go, well, they could go to, did

I give you the links or no? But yeah, it's on Barnes and Noble, Amazon and Tan Publishing. If they start there, they could get eBooks or the physical book.

They're all, you can order them on, I would say again, Amazon, depending on where you shop, Barnes and Noble, just do a search for the book.

It'll come up on seven different main outlets and Tan Publishing, or you could just write to the show or write to the numbers

I provided and I could send a signed copy for someone. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, and I can make that available in the show notes.

So if people want to reach out directly to Robert Orlando, they can do that. I know you said you can order a copy of the book directly from you and it's only $30 plus postage.

So I'll put that link in there so they can get in touch with you. What are you hoping for people to take away from this as a lesson for their own life or for maybe their own,

I don't know, political or social engagement? What do you think they should learn? That I think, again, there's a temptation to thinking in superficial terms sometimes because it's easy to exact change.

There's almost a subtle lie of the modern world that we have technology, so we're smarter.

We have iPhones, so we're smarter. The warnings of history always check me because they never change.

Human nature does not change. Yes, we have a phone now and we used to have a radio, but we never changed.

So to me, how to define a path of virtue and maybe updating the

Christian message to a more relevant contingent language of our time without distorting it, but making it more relevant for our time.

I think for us to do that, you must go through the Marxist prism. You must engage him, absorb all the true criticisms, absorb him into the system, and then move forward for a new integration of thought that allows the critique, even

Nietzsche, even Freud. Like I would take the critique, let it work on that classical way of thinking, but bring it up to date again.

And that's the history of Christianity. That almost sounds Hegelian, what you're saying. No, but think about the

Reformation. The Reformation takes certain balances of Augustinian thinking and rebalances against scholastic thinking, right?

There's always a dialectic to thinking. Even in your own brain, when you have an opinion, you think, well, that's then what would someone else say?

So I'm not saying I'm a Hegelian, I'm just saying that's a natural way of thinking that you compare two things, you synthesize it.

But history of Christianity, right? Paul synthesizes the church as it goes west to the Greco -Roman empire, starts bringing in ideas that are outside of Jerusalem after the fall of Jerusalem.

And then think of the medieval times and Thomas brings Aristotle back into the conversation. So all of history is this integration.

I just don't think we get any further without addressing Marx directly, not avoiding him, not calling him a

Satan worshiper only and like dismissing him or using Marx's terms in the worst of what happens in the 20th century to negate anything that he was saying that was true.

And I also think we need to face capitalism. I'm so sorry. I'm not sorry. I think we're into a techno -feudalism.

It's a book out. I don't know the author really well, but I read a bit of the book, used it in my book.

But I think we are moving toward a techno -feudalism and they use the example. I read a little bit of it, but if you just think of the five companies that run all the world right now and Facebook and social media, and they can control your shopping habits.

They know what your habits are, where you stop at the gas station and would you want something that, after a while you're being watched so much through technology now.

There's almost a feudalist like surf Lord relationship. And some argue in this book that we actually have taken a step back if you go at Marx's model.

We went from capitalism, we're going back to feudalism through the technology because so few could run so many things because of the technology.

So all of this, ultimately confront Marx, really get down to the architecture of Marx.

Like what are these ideas that still influence? Why are they so tempting? And how do you address them seriously so the conscience of the real social justice could be heard and not negated, but at the same time balanced back out by a more virtuous approach to resolutions and not revolution only.

So I do have the last question. It just popped in my mind because of a current. Did I make sense? Did that make sense what

I just said? Yeah, no, I think that was good, Robert. I think, I understand what you're saying to be, if I was gonna put it into my own words, that Marx is addressing issues and circumstances that we are under.

And if you just ignore those circumstances and issues, then you're not gonna have a compelling or relevant social outlook.

You can be rejecting the bad things about Marx, but if you throw out the fact that he is tapping into something that resonates with people because they are in a circumstance that he seems to at least explain, then you're not actually going to have a compelling message.

And I think that is true. And that's what sparks this question. I keep hearing -

Well put, by the way, well put. I keep hearing - You did it better than I did. No, I think you did a great job.

But it's something that I'm seeing on the right as well. So this isn't just unique to the left, right? I'm seeing on the right, and I think it's in development, right?

This isn't solidified. Marxism is kind of, I don't wanna say easy. What you did isn't easy, but you go back and you can find chapter verse.

Let's see how these ideas play out. Oh, that wasn't good, right? You have the experiment lab of history. Right now,

I see on the right something happening in some quarters where it's like, well, we have this oppressor class, right?

Young men, especially. Because they, and legitimately, they have been fed a message that their masculinity is toxic, yada, yada, yada.

And everything's against them. The media, entertainment, politics, finance, everything. And so you can't really have any approach until you recognize this fact.

You must understand the pressure that especially Zoomers have been under and why they can't seem to get married and why they can't seem to get a loan on a house.

All the things that are plaguing them. If you don't understand these dynamics, you will have no political vision for them.

And there's a sense in which I agree with this. Like, you have to understand political and social reality. There is though, and I'm keeping an eye on it, an excess that I'm starting to see where it's like there's this,

I think Marx called it a class consciousness, but this is like an oppressed perspective that attaches itself to the group where it's like a new canon of scripture.

You can't question it. It's sacred writings. You can't point out that maybe someone, maybe they didn't actually do the things they should have done.

Maybe they didn't take responsibility. Maybe they gave up. Maybe that's the reason. There was some personal responsibility lacking.

And so their life didn't turn out the way it should. But it's like, you can't say that because you must always attribute any failure to the system.

I'm seeing this start to develop. I'm keeping my eye on it. I don't know if you've seen the same thing. Is that Marxist?

That's interesting. That's good. Yeah, why don't you ask me a difficult question? No, that's great. Are we wrapping on this one or are you?

We're where we are. And I know I threw it out in the middle, so I'm gonna let this be the last thing that you can address. And then maybe you can leave a teaser or a cliffhanger.

We'll talk about it more in the weekend. Okay, okay, sounds good. No, I know exactly what you're saying.

So I would put it back into the patterns of human nature and history, regardless of what the idea is, that usually ideologies, the rigidity of ideologies take the place when thinking and dialectical thinking and movement and freedom of thought has been now so restricted that first,

I think that comes from a lack of available resources. People panic. It's just like in life, right?

You have to think in black and white when you're in survival mode, right? Ideology reflects that.

So does personality cult. Like when you see a personality cult forming around the president, it goes to a personality.

All these things are short speak ways to get out of a corrupting culture, to make easy answers for people because they have to live their lives.

I'm not blaming. This is like the human condition, right? So what I'm saying to you is what happens is, so maybe if I'm speaking your language just so that you understand,

I understand what you're saying. But maybe the correction of the left got to the point where in the same way that Marx was criticizing the opiate of the people being the

Christian religion, like it's flipped completely. So the left now got enough power to push back the other way through statism that they have taken a collective and they've created their own myth, their own opiate of the people.

But it's not the Christian religion, it's the message of social justice and the way they define it. And once you get the mythology and it's protected by power, it gets censorship.

Back to my point, once you control the means of communication, you make a censorship around it, right? So the same way in the divine right of kings, if you had spoken out about the king, he would have your head cut off.

I'm saying we're just seeing the alternative of it. But this is all why I'm a Christian first.

I'm not a left -right first. Because I believe the Christian worldview and whatever influence you want to see it in constitutional government is the saving grace.

It's the neutralizer. It's not a left -right polarization because the same extremes could happen regardless of what type of ideology you want.

But it's a sign of the narrowness, the difficulties, the lack of resources, the lies.

And that's what you're feeling. So it has to protect itself, govern itself through censorship. And that's what you're feeling.

It's almost the new religion has now appeared that's replaced Christianity. But you could have all the same critique of that, that the original enlightenment thinkers had about original

Christianity. So is it Marxist? I just think it's just human nature. It's human nature.

And Marx plays the most updated role in that game. It's ideology, yeah. Yes, yes. Well, that's good.

No, I didn't mean to throw out such a complicated question at the end there, but I had to, because it came to my head. I appreciate the work you put into this,

Robert. And if people want to check it out, they can obviously order the book. In the show notes, you'll find some information on that.

And do come out if you are in the area where Princeton Seminary is. It is going to be from three to 5 p .m.

on, let's see, December 13th. And there's information in the show notes for where you can apply to register.

With that, hope to see some of you this weekend. God bless, and thank you once again, Robert. Thank you so much for having me.