Opium of the people

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Comments

  • That sounds perilously close to saying opium is the opium of the opium.
  • If a society fails to control its tall poppies, it might well find itself in the grip of an opium addiction.
  • mousethief wrote: »
    That sounds perilously close to saying opium is the opium of the opium.

    Well once you pop you just can’t stop.

    No, wait that’s Pringles.

  • RussRuss Shipmate
    Reality is complicated, and every soundbite a simplification. I'll take away from this thread the notion that "opium of the people" is a soundbite, and that simplification differs from other simplifications within the same passage.

    But what this particular soundbite is getting at seems to be the notion that religion and revolutionary politics are inherently competitors for the same niche in the human psyche.

    And therefore there's a tendency for neither to have a good word to say for the other.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    It seems to me that that might be so inasmuch as it chimes with Pratchet's observation via Granny Weatherwax that if people thought a bit less about how great the next world is they might think a bit more about improving this one.
  • KarlLB wrote: »
    It seems to me that that might be so inasmuch as it chimes with Pratchet's observation via Granny Weatherwax that if people thought a bit less about how great the next world is they might think a bit more about improving this one.

    Or the great imaginary worlds conjured by literature, music, films, games and TV.

    Authors, readers, viewers, players, drugtakers, churchgoers. We all want to be elsewhere. Anywhere but here.

    Faith is supposed to have better side-effects, but like everything else, it can and does, go badly wrong.
  • KarlLB wrote: »
    It seems to me that that might be so inasmuch as it chimes with Pratchet's observation via Granny Weatherwax that if people thought a bit less about how great the next world is they might think a bit more about improving this one.

    I think that's definitely what Marx was getting at.
  • I think it's the reverse. He's saying that if this world were better ordered people wouldn't feel the need to make up another one.
  • OhherOhher Shipmate
    I think it's the reverse. He's saying that if this world were better ordered people wouldn't feel the need to make up another one.

    The problem is, better ordered according to whom? Most human societies order themselves hierarchically. We're forced into this by virtue of having an unusually lengthy maturation process un which others set limits for us until we acquire judgment. And even when that ultimately occurs, we don't all develop the same judgment.

  • I have a work colleague who spent years in a refugee camp in Kenya. She says that Australia is heaven on earth.
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