Opiates of the people
by Bob on November 26, 2007
Life is hard enough. People seem to need opiates of sorts to get by in life. Some people use real pharmaceutical opiates. Others use the equivalent of this pacifier, such as TV, internet, video games, iPODs and even walking in a labyrinth ritualististically or reciting a mantra.
Marx once wrote that religion is the opium of the people. This is a very complicated statement and part of his 1844 essay on "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right". It is part of a larger argument on society and religion as part of his introduction to the essay.
This statement has always baffled me, although I understand perfectly what Marx wrote, and in its context. I think Marx was making a larger statement and not necessarily an anti-religion statement.
I think he was saying how easily people could misuse religion and let the opiate of it take over their lives and thieir responsibility for their deeds and living, akin and tantamount to blind fortune or the fates, with no sense of personal controllable destiny.
Of course this all gets very complicated. Most religions do make us account for what we do on earth, and advise us, if not command us to live a just life.
Nevertheless, Marx still raised an objection or a warning in a more general sense. And he was likely worried about decadence in a society, which was many times historically precedented.
As we see there are many opiates of the people now. Even Nero had it with his bread and games and gladiators in the Roman Coliseum for the people.
And even in Marx's time, opiates did not have the bad connotation that they seem to have today. They were useful in medicine. So maybe his statement was not as piercing as it would seem.
Today, TV is definitely an opiate. And Muzak. And iPODs. Many more things, too. Mostly things of leisure and pleasure. Perhaps even idle pleasure.
Marx, I am fairly sure, would object to them all, but he had a particular dislike how how organised religion affects people. It would seem to absolve people from all responsibility, although that really isn't the case with religion in general. For without certain Hope, life can be torturous. After all, in the mythology of the ancient Greeks, when Pandora opened her jar, all the ills flew out upon Mankind, except for Hope which remained on the lid of the jar, according to Hesiod's version.
The idea of an afterlife being more rewarding than the present arduous life irks many social philosophers, like even Marx. The claim might be that one might become complacent in the present life if the afterlife and all its better accoutrements is coming. One would concentrate on what will be rather than what one needs to do now. In theory that could be one objection to the promise of the future at the risk of the present.
I once saw a sign on a wall which said something like "If you dream of what you could be, you are wasting the person that you are". That's either profound or trite and silly. For man wants always to dream and hope to be more than he is, for the most part. But the ancient Greeks objected in their theology saying that the gods are not happy with the idle man.
We must compare and contrast the practical yet symbolically profound difference between a usual unicursal labyrinth and a confounding maze, especially in our lives, right in the here and now. Especially since we are not all as fortunate as Theseus and his Ariadne's ball of thread to get him out of the ancient labyrinth of the Minotaur and escape the fate of death.
This is a real meditation. And a conundrum. How not to be unwittingly somatised in life or from life. And yet get the laundry and washing done here on earth.
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[from Karl Marx and his essay "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" in the Introduction, Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher, February, 1844]
The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion
does not make man.
Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who
has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself
again. But, _man_ is no abstract being squatting outside the world.
Man is _the world of man_ -- state, society. This state and this
society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the
world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general
theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular
form, its spiritual point d'honneur, it enthusiasm, its moral sanction,
its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and
justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence
since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle
against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that
world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real
suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of
the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of
soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the _illusory_ happiness of the people is
the demand for their _real_ happiness. To call on them to give up their
illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a
condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is,
therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which
religion is the halo.