Marxism: The West's Religion of Resentment and Violence

From classrooms to boardrooms, the long march is complete. Your loyalties shift from family to state.

Awakening in an Unfamiliar World

You don’t need to be a political junkie to sense that something has shifted. Walk into a classroom and you’ll hear teachers telling children that boys can be girls, that truth is just a matter of opinion. Step into a “progressive” church and you’ll hear more about “equity” and “inclusion” than about scripture or salvation. Turn on the news and you’ll see people treated as dangerous for questioning official narratives—parents at school boards branded “domestic threats,” protesters cast as enemies of the state. And in Canada, during the trucker protests, citizens—without charges or trial—woke to find their bank accounts frozen for backing the “wrong” cause.

And now, in America, we’ve watched something even darker: the assassination of Charlie Kirk. A political commentator gunned down in public, his death cheered by some who once would have called themselves defenders of democracy. What should have been a moment of universal mourning became, instead, a grotesque spectacle of people rationalizing or even celebrating political murder. It’s a reminder that when you declare certain ideas “dangerous,” when you decide dissent itself is violence, you invite real violence to be seen as justice.

These aren’t random. They are symptoms of the same disease: a belief system that promises justice but runs on envy, that talks fairness while demanding obedience. It acts like a religion—dogmas, priests, heretics, punishments. Step out of line and you’re accused and silenced. Stay quiet and you’re rewarded with the illusion of belonging.

You don’t need the label to see the pattern. But the roots trace back to Marxism—dressed in the robes of compassion, driven by resentment. And the fruit of that resentment is no longer confined to the classroom or the pulpit or the news broadcast. It has spilled into the streets, into real blood, into a culture where violence is excused if it serves the “right” cause.

We are awakening in an unfamiliar world. The question is whether we’ll recognize it for what it is—and whether we’ll resist before it hardens into something irreversible.

A Decade of Destruction

2010–2015 — The Language Shift

A new vocabulary swept schools, HR departments, media, and even churches: diversity, equity, inclusion; identity; climate justice. It sounded kind; meanings quietly changed. Disagreement became “harm.” Classrooms moved first—shape the classroom, shape the country. As Lenin allegedly put it, “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown shall never be uprooted.” Why did institutions buckle so easily? Because tiny, disciplined cadres can steer large bodies: 1% activists + ~9% sympathizers can effectively direct the remaining 90%, especially in education and religious life. Around the same time, legacy outlets dramatically increased the use of moralized race-language—racist, white privilege, and similar terms—signalling a new script. Surveys showed the centre and right stayed comparatively stable while the left moved sharply left on cultural issues. Soft words carried hard rules.

2015–2020 — Campus Chaos Goes Mainstream

Campus tactics spilled into public life: shout-downs, ritual protests, statue campaigns (e.g., Rhodes Must Fall), and high-profile capitulations (e.g., Evergreen State). Debate gave way to theatre; institutions buckled on cue. Ordinary people installed an inner censor and kept their heads down. Youth-led moral crusades to smash the “old ways” became fashionable—foreshadowing the Cultural Revolution parallels to come.

2020–2021 — Emergency Ethics

COVID flipped the switch. “Safety” became the master key. Governments, platforms, and employers asserted sweeping authority—not with tanks, but with guidance, mandates, and moderation. Questions were flagged as “misinformation.” “Temporary” measures calcified. This is how creeds advance: declare an emergency, suspend limits, promise a better tomorrow if today’s “heretics” are silenced.

2022–2025 — Sentiment Becomes Systems

Shaming became structure. Speech “violations” and ideological deviations now meet bureaucratic penalties: licences threatened or conditioned on “coaching” (see the Jordan Peterson case), credentials voided, investigations opened for “incorrect” remarks. Financial and digital rails discipline dissent: during Canada’s Emergencies Act, accounts were frozen; elsewhere, platform rules throttle reach. New speech regimes are codified in law and policy. Even comedians in the UK have faced arrest over posts. Humane branding; hard switches—licences, credentials, banking, blacklists.

Today — Crossing the Rubicon

What began with words has now crossed into blood. In 2025, we’ve stepped into the realm of political assassinations. The murder of Charlie Kirk was not just an attack on a man but a signal that ideological conflict has spilled into outright violence. For years, dissenters were smeared as threats, extremists, or enemies of democracy. Now that narrative has hardened into justification—some even cheering or excusing the killing as deserved. It is the logical end of a culture that equates disagreement with harm, speech with violence. Once that equation takes root, actual violence comes to be seen not as a crime, but as justice.

Taken together, this isn’t a jumble of accidents. It’s a straight line. The sales pitch was fairness; the product was compliance; the enforcement is increasingly digital and financial.

The Religion of Resentment

Before Karl Marx became a theorist, he was a man in revolt—against his family, against God, and finally against the world as it was. His own father, Heinrich Marx, worried aloud about the spirit that consumed his son. In an anguished letter he wrote:

“Your heart, Karl, is not great enough to embrace the whole of mankind. For a man so gifted, it is most dangerous to surrender himself to a demon who holds the empire of the world in his hands… and who has never been conquered. And what is even more alarming, you belong to a group of young men who are of such a nature that they seek to make sport of all that is sacred.”

Heinrich asked whether the “demon” governing Karl’s heart was heavenly or Faustian—whether his son would ever be capable of ordinary happiness.

The father’s fears proved prophetic. As a young poet, Marx exulted in damnation. In one verse he declared:

“Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well.
My soul, once true to God, is chosen for Hell.”

In another, he imagined himself in league with darkness, crying out:

“I shall build my throne high overhead…
Cold, tremendous shall its summit be.
For its bulwark—superstitious dread,
For its marshall—blackest agony.”

He also relished the words of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, Satan’s mouthpiece in Faust: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” Marx didn’t treat it as a warning but as inspiration, a fitting motto for what he later called “the ruthless criticism of all that exists.”

The rebellion was not just intellectual. It was personal and shameful. Accounts describe Marx as chronically indebted, leeching off of friends and relatives, and living in destitution—his home marked by filth and infestation. He borrowed and wasted family money, yet publicly demanded the abolition of inheritance. The contradiction was not incidental; it revealed the deeper spirit at work: resentment and destruction elevated into principle.

From this temperament came the programme. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels laid it out plainly: abolish private property; abolish the family—“a most radical rupture” with inherited relations; abolish religion and morality. In short: sever the bonds—faith, family, property, inherited duties—so that a new “truth” could be imposed from above.

Seen in this light, today’s bureaucratic machinery of “equity” and “inclusion” is not a departure from Marx but a continuation of his envy and iconoclasm. The vocabulary is softer, the tools more refined—HR portals, compliance modules, government guidance—but the blueprint is the same: dissolve older loyalties and transfer moral authority to a central creed.

Put plainly, the wreckage isn’t a mistake—it’s the design. The doctrine promises liberation but delivers dependence; it preaches justice but institutionalizes envy. That is why the outcomes rhyme across eras and continents.

From Marx to HR — The Engine Never Stopped

If you trace how the idea changed over time, you can see why it keeps coming back with new labels. It all started with Hegel. He argued that progress when an idea runs into its opposite and the clash forces something new. Think of it like this: one position rises, an opposing position pushes back, and the conflict produces a “synthesis” that takes centre stage. That process—the dialectic—was meant to be the engine of progress.

Marx kept the engine but swapped the fuel. Instead of ideas, he made it about material life—who owns, who works, who eats. History, he said, is a struggle between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” and the end of that struggle would be a revolution that wipes away the old order.

Workers didn’t rise as Marx prophesied, so Lenin changed tactics: ordinary people won’t revolt on their own; a tight, disciplined vanguard must manufacture and drive the revolution—and keep it moving. Each victory creates a new “oppressor” to overthrow.

In the West, another shift came when workers stayed loyal to prosperity and normal life. Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School moved the battlefield from economics to culture: if people won’t revolt at the factory gate, capture the institutions that shape belief—schools, media, churches, the arts. Change common sense first; politics follows. Over time, Western Marxists stopped trying to radicalize workers and focused on marginal groups—race, sex, sexuality—turning identity into the new front of struggle. This became the “long march through the institutions.”

Then came the postmodern turn. Power, they said, isn’t just about money; it runs through language, roles, and norms. Truth claims are power plays. The personal is political. Finally, intersectionality and critical theories built a moral hierarchy out of identity. Each layer of claimed “oppression” adds moral authority; each layer of “privilege” subtracts it. In caricature: the “ultimate proletariat” might be a disabled, poor, elderly, black, Muslim, trans woman from the developing world; the “final bourgeois boss” a middle-aged, straight, able-bodied, white, Christian man from the West with wealth and influence. The more grievance you can claim, the more your voice counts; the more privilege you’re said to hold, the less it does.

That is how a 19th-century programme marched from the halls of academia to boardrooms and political office. The names changed; the operating system didn’t. What began as class war reappeared as culture war, then HR policy, then platform rules. The result is what you feel now: soft words, hard rules.

Welcome to Pathocracy

A final ingredient explains why this creed endures. A certain personality type—resentful, chaotic in habits, quick to blame the world—finds Marx’s religion especially attractive because it offers absolution and a mission. If life is messy, lonely, or disappointing, the doctrine whispers: it isn’t your fault; the system is wicked and must be remade. That was Marx’s own posture, and you can recognise it in a slice of today’s activist class.

The madness has a name. Political ponerology is the study of how disordered personalities hijack institutions. In Andrew Lobaczewski’s model, a pathocracy—rule by the pathological—emerges when people lacking normal moral brakes worm their way into leadership and then use uplifting language as camouflage. They don’t sell domination; they sell morality.

It starts with the operators: psychopaths and narcissists who lie without blinking, delight in manipulation, and treat society as a power playground. In a corrupted system, their traits aren’t a liability; they’re an asset. Around them gather the ideological architects—what Lobaczewski calls “schizoid” types—detached theorists who draft inhuman policies with utopian logic, cold to human costs. Then come the spellbinders—charismatic mouths: celebrities, pundits, and influencers who package control as compassion with slogans about equity and safety. They recruit the spellbound—true believers who enforce the creed as a moral crusade.

Most people aren’t zealots. They’re the adapted conformists: they know something is wrong but comply to keep jobs, reputations, and peace, and their conscience goes numb a little at a time. A smaller group are the resisters: they keep their moral bearings and say no—so they are mocked, censured, or professionally punished. The rest are bystanders: confused, afraid, hoping it passes; their silence lets the system metastasise.

Once these layers click together, vocabulary becomes a weapon. That’s doublespeak: keep the word, swap the meaning. “Equity” becomes a pretext to reward loyalists and punish doubters. “Inclusion” becomes an excuse to exclude anyone who won’t repeat the catechism. “Safety” becomes a blank cheque to censor, isolate, and coerce. The label on the bottle stays; the liquid inside is switched.

How does a minority rule a majority? Obedience, not agreement. Think of Milgram: a few refuse from the start; a few relish the role; the large middle complies because an authority says it’s necessary. Most people don’t want a fight with City Hall, HR, or the school board. They keep their heads down. They say the line. They move on. And when that reflex sets in, you no longer need censors—people install them in their own heads.

None of this is accidental. It’s how ponerogenesis—the birth of a pathocracy—unfolds: the system rewards the disordered and punishes the moral, while compassionate words provide the cover. Until we recognize we’re not only debating bad ideas but confronting pathological people who weaponize them, we will keep losing ground.

Why This Script Always Ends the Same

The arc is predictable: promises → inquisitions → tyranny. Revolutionary movements justify silencing dissent today to build a purified tomorrow. The words change; the logic doesn’t: eliminate “heretics,” centralise truth, compel unity.

History offers two mirrors. In Russia, the Bolsheviks announced the dawn of justice and built an inquisition. The Cheka—the Soviet secret police—put it bluntly: “We don’t want justice, we want to settle accounts… even if the sword falls on the heads of the innocent.” In China, Mao’s Cultural Revolution declared war on the Four Olds—old ideas, culture, customs, habits. Youth brigades turned on teachers and parents; struggle sessions forced confessions and ritual humiliation; relics and names were smashed and replaced.

Look around the modern West and you can see the rhymes. Renaming streets and schools while toppling statues. Treating heritage as suspect while elevating politicised rituals. Social-media pile-ons and mandatory “trainings” that function like soft struggle sessions. Encouraging children to challenge parents and ancestors as obstacles to progress. The mass deaths are not here—but the logic that justifies escalation is.

Today we see a softer version of the inquisitorial stage. The promise sounds humanitarian; the structure is punitive. Dissent is “harm.” Doubt is “disinformation.” Institutions reward enforcers and isolate non-believers. Financial switches and blacklists do the rest. We aren’t in gulags. But we are in the phase that prepares people to accept them if the creed ever requires it.

Breaking the Spell

This wasn’t a string of policy mistakes. It’s a creed. Marxism operates as a religion of envy—promising justice while demanding that we destroy what gives life stability and meaning: faith, family, property, truth.

The spell breaks when we stop pretending. Totalitarian systems run on consent manufactured by fear and polite lies. Start locally: tell the truth, out loud, even when it costs. Refuse to repeat catechisms you don’t believe. Name envy when you see it dressed as virtue. Defend those punished for dissent. Withdraw prestige from institutions that demand untruth, and put your time and resources into building parallel institutions that reward competence, honesty, and courage. Re-anchor your life in loyalties that predate the state and outlast it—your family, your faith, your neighbours, the voluntary ties that make real community.

This isn’t a call to rage; it’s a call to clarity. The opposite of pathocracy isn’t chaos, but ordered liberty governed by truth. Ideocracies collapse quickly once enough people stop pretending to believe. That begins with you.

Every false religion demands sacrifices. Marxism demands civilization itself. The only question is whether we will keep offering it up.

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Sources

Andrew M. Lobaczewski — Political Ponerology

• Concepts used: pathocracy (rule by the pathological), ponerogenesis (how it forms), “schizoid” ideological architects, spellbinders, adapted conformists, the spellbound, paramorality/doublespeak, minority leverage and obedience dynamics.

• Applied in: “Welcome to Pathocracy,” “Why This Script Always Ends the Same.”

Paul Kengor — The Devil and Karl Marx

• Material used: Heinrich Marx’s letters to Karl; Marx’s poems (“Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited…”; throne/blackest agony); Marx’s admiration for Mephistopheles (“Everything that exists deserves to perish”); Marx’s personal life contradictions (debt, squalor, reliance on others) and public calls to abolish inheritance; Communist Manifesto aims (abolish private property/family/religion).

• Applied in: “The Religion of Resentment,” biographical framing of Marx.

Arthur Versluis — The New Inquisitions

• Concepts used: ideocracy (rule by creed), inquisitorial dynamics in modern settings, moralised heresy-hunting under humanitarian language.

• Applied in: timeline sections (2010s–today) and the shift from social shaming to policy/structural enforcement.