What I've Been Hearing
Part 6: People crave their opium. How could they not?
By the will of the Almighty Algorithm, I came across this parsing of Marx' famous metaphor — Opium des Volkes — which has been translated into English as both "opium of the people" and "opium for the people". As Professor Moeller explains, the difference between these two translations is huge. “Of the people” suggests that opium arises from the people, that we create God. “For the people” suggests that opium arises elsewhere, that it is given to us, that God creates us.
Interestingly, this contrast is only found in the English translation, not in the German original. Opium des Volkes literally means "the people's opium". Regardless of how we translate the phrase, the opium is ours, and I think we should devote our highest attention to the diligent study of this metaphor.
I’ll use Professor Moeller’s 13-minute introduction as an angle of entry. The video presents seven meanings of the metaphor, which help explain what I've been hearing lately: People crave their opium. They crave it so much that they increasingly organize their lives around this central need, and much of what they do and fail to do seems explicable as a consequence of their desire for the dope. Not only do they need to secure an uninterrupted supply, but they also need to mask the side-effects of this addiction. The intensity of the craving is unsurprising if we consider the seven meanings of Marx’ metaphor.
‘Opium des Volkes’: Seven Meanings of the Metaphor
1. Hallucinogens
Both opium and religion are hallucinogens. They create illusions and inverted worlds — in Hegel’s words, verkehrte Welt. They create a false consciousness that causes people to normalize the inversion of their world. Opium and religion appear to reveal deep truths that, in the rear-view mirror, appear as shallow distractions from reality. As Moeller says:
Religion is bad philosophy and bad science, a rather low-quality theory of everything. Or, as Marx says quite harshly, “Der Geist geistloser Zustande”, which can be translated as a spirit of cluelessness, the “inverted consciousness of the world”.
2. Stimulants
Both opium and religion are stimulants and euphoriants.
They not only induce a false consciousness of what is seemingly true and moral, but [they also] combine this illusion with emotional elation and joy. They produce, as Marx says, enthusiasm. Based on the Greek word for God, it literally means “possessed by God”.
3. Panacea
Consider opium and religion as panacea. Human beings do not respond well to Band-Aids. We will not rest until we fulfill our eternal longing for the one drug to heal what truly ails us.
According to a paper in the scientific journal Neurology, “ancient Greeks, Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Romans, Arabs, people in the Middle East, Europeans from Renaissance to now knew opium as an ever-approved next-door medicine, a panacea for all maladies.”
4. Sedatives
Opium and religion are sedatives. They may produce short-lived highs, but they also make us sleepy, compliant and passive. For this reason, Marx argues that “the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism”, and it’s the beginning of the path of revolutionary practice.
5. Endemic
Opium and religion are endemic phenomena, particularly among working people.
Opium was cheaper than alcohol, and the working classes saw it as an effective hangover cure. By the 1870s and 1880s, addiction was so widespread that a new word to describe the phenomenon entered the English language — ‘morphinomania’, named after Morpheus, the Greek God of sleep and dreams — a rather romanticised name for a dreadful addiction.
6. Addictive
At 9:30 in the video, we come to a meaning of the metaphor that warrants special emphasis: Opium des Volkes is addictive. We do not consume it as much as it consumes us. It takes over our lives. As Moeller says,
In my view, the worst aspect of both religion and drugs is their suffocating effect. They become a sort of second coating, overshadowing literally everything a person does. Addicts of religion are existentially overpowered by it, similar to drug addicts.
7. Psychedelics
Finally, Moeller turns to opium and religion as psychedelics. Marx may not have explored this meaning of his metaphor, but Moeller distinguishes it from the hallucinatory effect of opium. Just like opium, religion is a trip into “non-ordinary mental states”.
In conclusion, starting at 11:50, Moeller points to the middle way between addiction and abstention:
Complete sobriety can be just as suppressive as addiction, and radical opposition to religiosity can become another kind of fundamentalism.
In a way, civil religion can be even more perfidious than ‘real religion’ because its believers often don’t realize how fundamentalist they are, albeit in a secular way. Civil religious fundamentalists are like addicts in denial.
Takeaway Messages
Problem Statement
To me, these seven meanings of the metaphor suggest a clear problem statement: Our opium supply is badly polluted. What complicates the problem is that our ability to distinguish the pollutants from the good stuff is tragically impaired, and our confusion poses a threat not only to our well-being but also to our lives.
New Section
I touched on this threat in my preceding post on the distinction between cults and non-cults; see "What I've Been Hearing - Part 5". But this is just the beginning. To continue this exploration, I added "Second Drafts" as a new section to this Substack for posts in which I pick up where I left off in one of my first drafts. I’m currently writing a ‘second draft’ inspired by a response from Sean Prophet, the publisher of ExoProphet: Notes from the Algorithmic Age.