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Why Philosophy is The Opium of The Elite

Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley
2 min readOct 10, 2024

Today’s article takes inspiration from Marxist, Communist, left-wing economist, and political thinker Karl Marx, who commented that religion is the opium of the masses.

(My behind the paywall link.)

Regarding Karl Marx’s comment, he believed that religion is a means to control the actions and beliefs of ordinary people.

To describe the Marxist analysis of the common people, ordinary people are smart enough to know they cannot make their own decisions on who or what they want to be, so they must model the behaviour of an ideology or individuals.

That is a key reason celebrity culture plays a massive part in people’s decision-making in modern times: people are looking for models of how they should live.

Karl Marx

Philosophy is the opium of the elite because they don’t believe in religion.

In some cases, postmodernism and the collapse of belief in history and the past mean that the elite lacks a concept of morality.

We can see this in contemporary entertainment created over the last decade.

The overarching narrative of stories lacks a definition and understanding of good and evil; it lacks a sense of morality, which could be seen in the latest Star Wars TV series, The Acolyte.

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Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley
Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley

Written by Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley

I have been writing from 2014 to the present day; my writing is focused on history, politics, culture, geopolitics and other related topics.

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