Marx is Nuts
Not much posting at the moment, got a bunch of uni assignments due... but after much study and reading, I've concluded that Karl Marx, and probably a lot of his peers, likely had Asperger's Syndrome. Think about it.
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2 Comments:
I don't know too much about Marx's personal life, let alone his friends. My experience with Marx comes strictly from a reading as an undergrad of sections of Das Kapital (not even the whole thing; it was a 100 level survey course). Which aspects of Marx's life leads to your assertion? The intense interest in a single subject? Or the social interaction difficulties? Again, I'm not familiar with Marx's personal life, so I don't know if he was a sociable person or not. Anyway... from reading that link, I have no idea if Marx was an Aspie or not, but it seems as though a large number of famous figures in history were. I mean, hell, look at Patton: Narrow, intense interest, pendantic idiosyncratic language use, trouble showing empathy... Criteria met?
As a broader comment: Based only on that Wikipedia link, it seems like that description fits practically 80% of this university town I live in. :)
I'm being half facetious -- I've no real idea if he had Asperger's or not. But I've been wrestling with the realisation that for such an obvious genius (and a lot of his smaller observations are obviously that) his broader logical process is just obsessively narrow.
Everything comes back to materialism, economic means of production, and nothing else matters. Or to the extent that it does matter, it's explained by the means of production and the people who control them. It's the utter inability to see that anything human or psychological might play any kind of serious role in the evolution of human society. Thus religion is just a construct of economic forces, as are political ideologies (his own included), as is morality itself. A bit like Freud, I guess, linking everything back to sex.
Of course, Marx isn't alone in wishing to find a single, simplistic cause for every observable effect, it's a common thread amongst a lot of leading scientific thought -- Hawking has often said he'd like to find a general theory of everything, like the theory of relativity except much bigger. I'm sure lots of scientists would like to, and I'm not sure the universe will oblige. But this is just my problem with Marx (and some other sociologists, but him in particular) -- human society cannot be understood scientifically. Generally, yes, specifically, occassionally, but not scientifically. There's no universal formula, only trends.
And of course, history proves the dude was wrong. On the big stuff, at least.
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