On the widespread phenomenon of frustrated and angry young men becoming hateful and destructive: “I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate” is a line from Mikhail Lermontov’s 1840 novel, A Hero of Our Time.
I’ve frequently wondered, given the timing, how much the young Karl Marx fits this profile. Lermontov (born in 1814) was diagnosing a general psychological phenomenon in his generation while Marx (born in 1818) is a particular case. Young Karl Marx wrote teenage storm-and-stress poetry, such as this, excerpted from Feelings, written when he was 18 years old:
Worlds I would destroy for ever,
Since I can create no world,
Since my call they notice never,
Coursing dumb in magic whirl.
Those expressed feelings of impotence (“I can create no world”) and of being socially alienated (“my call they notice never”) leading to nihilism (“Worlds I would destroy forever”) — how much do they explain not only a personal psychology but a later entire developed philosophy?
Related: Chapter 5 of Explaining Postmodernism, “The Crisis of Socialism” traces the devolution of socialist, especially Marxists and neo-Marxist strategies as they repeatedly fail in theory and practice, raising the question of how much they are theories based on evidence and logic and how much they are expressions of underlying psychologies.
I wonder is resentment is born from lack of responsibility, meaning the world didn’t appreciate Marx’s genius so he grew bitter and resentful. Channeled his formidable energy into attacking the status quo.
I suspect this person was never ready to love the whole world, but deluded himself into thinking he was. Meanwhile, Marx’s “philosophy” strikes me as an elaborate rationale for his own mental illness. His personal behavior toward those around him closely resembles the contempt that he projects as justified by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. We know that he sponged off of everyone who was better off than he, and attacked other socialists who were more successful than he was, even as he ripped off their ideas without attribution.