I was watching a presentation recorded at a Turning Point USA event last weekend, “Defeating the Great Reset.” Dr. James Lindsay, the author of “Race Marxism,” “Cynical Theories” and several other books, was giving a lecture entitled, “A Brief History of the World Economic Forum.” At about the 8 minute mark of the lecture, Lindsay said this:
“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy was on a video from 2016, but that was not an idea that was expressed for the first time in 2016. Let me tell you something that was written in 1844. In 1844, a young 25 year-old goober by the name of Karl Marx, was writing what is now known as “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” sometimes called the “Paris Manuscripts” . . .
In these manuscripts what Karl Marx did—this is four years before he wrote “The Communist Manifesto” and 23 years before “Capital” [Das Kapital], this was his early writings--and what he designed in those pages was nothing short of a religion. The name of the religion can be called communism or it can be called Marxism. And what he describes throughout those pages is what that religion entails.
But at one point, page roughly 103 in the copy I have, if I remember right, he writes that communism is the positive transcendence of private property. You will own nothing, and you’ll be happy. It is not just relinquishing private property—that’s crude communism. True communism is the positive transcendence of private property. You don’t need private property. You will own nothing and you’ll be happy.
And what he says that is equal to is the transcendence of human self-estrangement, which is how you know it is a religion. Humans are estranged from one another in the same way that humans after the Fall are estranged from God. And we’re going to undo it. We’re going to make our way back into the Garden of Eden on our own terms.
That’s what Karl Marx was writing about; that is the Marxian religion. And we’re going to have the positive transcendence of private property as the mark that we have arrived. That is the goal. At which point, Karl says, we will remember that we are truly social, our human nature is that we are a truly social species-being, a truly social animal. Communist, is what he means. Communism, he says at the end of the same paragraph, is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be the solution.
You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy is the 2016 update of an 1844 sentence by Karl Marx, or paragraph, if you want.
So when you realize that the “Great Reset” is a comma in a communist revolution, or communist religion, you realize that what we’re going for is some kind of updated communism.
And we’ve tried these things and they don’t work. And they’re not going to work. Every attempt so far in the world to introduce communism has killed people by at least the hundreds of thousands, depending on the country, often the millions, sometimes the tens of millions, so that its victims over just the 20th Century alone probably number just over 100 million people who didn’t need to die.
But as you heard from Charlie [Kirk], Karl Marx learned from Hegel, and Hegel said history uses people and then discards them. History is like the god that has its agenda, which is to arrive at the perfect society. It just uses people along the way, and then its discards them, because it doesn’t need them. They’re irrelevant. . . .
So the people perpetrating the Great Reset understand this mentality; they will use people and then discard them. We’ve seen hundreds of millions die in the twentieth century, I believe it will be billions, with a “b” and an “s” on the end of it, if this is allowed to proceed through the next, say, 30 years. And we’re at the exclamation point part of that. We’re coming to the point where this has to be stopped.”
To me, it is very striking when someone who is not an Adventist or even a Christian (James Lindsay is reportedly an atheist), and couldn’t possibly know much about the Adventist religion, starts talking about 1844 and “early writings.” I interpret a coincidence like that as God trying to get my attention, and He got it.
What Dr. Lindsay is telling us is that Karl Marx had formulated the basic principles of his new religion in 1844, years before “The Communist Manifesto” and “Das Kapital” were published. In the Marxian religion, we will transcend private property and thereby overcome original sin, and make our way “back into the Garden of Eden on our own terms.” Marx’s Leftist Utopian religion killed over a hundred million in the 20th Century and, despite the Soviet capitulation in 1989, it is now far stronger and more influential than it has ever been, in the form of the radical environmentalism (“The Green New Deal”), Cultural Marxism, critical theory, and race and gender ideology.
Interesting year, 1844.
Were there any developments in biology in 1844? In November 1844, a Scottish journalist named Robert Chambers published a book called, “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,” which argued for what was then called “transmutationism,” which basically is what we call Darwinism, evolution, or macro-evolution. “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” was widely read, and it was a forerunner, a sort of John the Baptist preparing the way and making straight the path, for Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” which would come 15 years later, in 1859.
If we research a little into Darwin’s magnum opus, we find that he did something significant in 1844. In July, 1844, Darwin wrote a 230-page "essay" that would eventually be expanded into “Origin of Species.” Darwin had already formed his theory, so he produced the shorter manuscript setting out his basic principles in case he should die prematurely, before the completed work could be published.
What else happened in 1844? The 38 year-old Joseph Smith was killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. Smith’s new religion would soon pass into the hands of a far more capable leader, Brigham Young, who led the Mormons to Utah. Seventh-day Adventists continue to be confused with the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” because both groups have a “day” in their name. Within the United States, the Mormons, with no paid clergy, have been vastly more successful at evangelism than Adventists; there are more than five times as many Mormons in this country as Adventists (but, worldwide, the Adventist Church is larger).
Clearly, 1844 was a year of tremendous interest. Prophetically, it was the beginning of the last days, with no more prophetic time periods remaining to expire. The great anti-typical day of atonement—the investigative judgment—began in the Most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary. How long that investigative judgment will continue is not known, nor is it known when the judgment of the living begins, nor when probation is to close, nor when we will see our Savior coming in the clouds of glory.
1844 was also a year of great intellectual and cultural import. The ideological currents set in motion that year have continued to shape our world to the present day. We live in a world dominated by secularism and humanism, which are principally founded on the ideologies of Darwinism and Marxism—the belief that man evolved with no divine intervention, that man essentially created himself, and that man can perfect himself and human society by the application of various types of coercion, such as psychological influence and manipulation, intimidation, theft, imprisonment, and murder.
First Darwinism and now Marxism have taken over most significant Western institutions, beginning with academia. From there, these ideas have spread all throughout the culture and society, including into the Christian Church. Christianity is on the wane throughout Christendom and the West, as non-Christian immigrants have come into these areas, and the natives have ceased to embrace Christianity; those who claim Christianity in the U.S. have fallen to under 65% of the population, and by 2070 could be down to 35%.
We would all much prefer to be entering the scenario of last day events predicted by Ellen White and Adventist eschatology, in which the great issue is the Sabbath versus the counterfeit sabbath of Satan’s devising, Sunday. But as yet our struggle is almost entirely with an ascendant and aggressive secularism. Whether we like it or not, this is our current war. A variation on a theme by Donald Rumsfeld: “You fight the war you have, not the war you wish you had.”
The fight against Darwinism and Marxism is our war for the foreseeable future.