Is it still the case that one cannot presume to be an informed citizen, or hope to be invited to the better cocktail parties, unless one has read Karl Marx? Perhaps I exaggerate. It was never strictly so, except in a few small enclaves around certain universities. While it is arguable that a familiarity with his ideas ought to be part of any literate person’s mental furniture, that argument would now properly issue from the history department rather than from the sociology, English, or even economics faculties. In any case, it would be fair to suggest that most people who take a humanities degree from almost any American college will as a matter of course have picked up at least a Cliffs Notes version of Marxism. In just this way I absorbed what I like to think is a fair idea of what he was up to. Over the years I have concluded that he got pretty much everything wrong, and thus my never having actually read him grows more comfortingly justified.

Nor, for that matter, have I read L. Ron Hubbard. In his case the choice was more easily and quickly made, and on reflection I find that I would cite the same reason in each instance: They both just made stuff up and expected others to believe it. What their works demand is not a willing suspension of disbelief, such as mere literature asks, or a critical reading, but a docile acceptance that what they assert is a fair description of the world. What’s peculiar is how many people have accepted them on those terms.

Each man left behind a movement guided by an elite bureaucracy that was eager to employ all manner of overt and covert means to an end and that soon realized that its own permanent power and prosperity was that end.

Marx was deadly serious, of course, and managed to make himself into a historic figure. Hubbard’s is a different sort of case. The career arc from writing very bad science fiction to establishing a curiously profitable religion based on what can only be called yet more very bad science fiction is pretty clear. So we might say that he got pretty much everything wrong, too, except that there is no reason to think that he believed a word of what he wrote.

As is well known, Marx was deeply influenced by, though later critical of, Georg Hegel’s brand of German idealist philosophy. But while he gave up the central tenet of what we might call capital-I Idealism in favor of materialism, he remained a man of ideas, and he retained the epistemological method of his predecessors, which might be summarized thus: to discover the true nature of reality, sit quietly and think very hard. Marx did a good deal of his sitting in the British Museum, where quiet is strictly enforced. What he thought hard about was chiefly history and economics, and what he concluded was that they are governed by certain laws that had thitherto eluded discovery.

It is interesting to imagine how he discerned those laws. The past might best be thought of as a gigantic Jackson Pollock canvas. The job of the historian is to decide which few of those myriad dots and splotches and swirly drips are of significance and then to describe how they are related. The possibilities are innumerable, and each one is quite simply an invention. What’s a fellow with strong ideas to do? It helps to be smart, of course, but smart alone will not do much more than generate yet another Ph.D. dissertation. To really put your marks on things you need confidence and a certain sort of blindness. Reinhold Niebuhr explained (in The Irony of American History):

The inhumanities of our day, which modern tyrannies exhibit in the nth degree, are due to an idealism in which reason is turned into unreason because it is not conscious of the contingent character of the presuppositions with which the reasoning process begins, and in which idealism is transmuted into inhumanity because the idealist seeks to comprehend the whole realm of ends from his standpoint.

What their works demand is not a willing suspension of disbelief, such as mere literature asks, or a critical reading, but a docile acceptance that what they assert is a fair description of the world.

Marx had that confidence, in the degree the Greeks called hubris and identified as the source of tragedy. He had that trick of mind that looks upon an idea that it has spawned and sees that it is good. Better than good: True, with a capital T, then, now, and for always. He sat there in the British Museum and decided the he, alone, saw the true pattern in the dots and swirls, and so he worked out the laws that had and must always govern all of human history. He never betrayed a hint of a doubt that he might be, in any way, wrong about anything. How could he be wrong, after all, about ideas that were so clear, so galvanizing, so congenial to his prejudices? The balance of his career was spent in organizing ways to forward the operation of those laws, although it is by no means clear why it is that any such iron and immutable laws would need the help of an impecunious journalist, or (once it had been properly instructed by himself) of a worldwide proletariat.

Try to put by the shock of bathos now as we shift our view from that quiet reading room in sooty 19th-century London to a sailing boat off the coast of post-World War II California. The fellow in the jaunty cap is Hubbard. He is thinking, too, if not very hard or quietly. He is dreaming up a system of mental discipline that he will later declare to be “a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire.” There’s your confidence, vast but not so much a case of hubris as of chutzpah. He will go on to found a movement that will call itself a religion when it is convenient but at other times will be “an applied religious philosophy.” In either case it will describe the whole of human history more or less as Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout might have, and it will make lots and lots of money.

During much of his long residence in London, Marx “could not bring himself to seek paid employment,” in the words of one biographer. We all know the feeling, of course, but few of us have the single-minded commitment to follow through on it as unwaveringly as he did. It is idle, one supposes, to wonder how the last century and a half might have been different had Marx decided to get a job and feed his children. Hubbard, by contrast, had quite a mixed career as a college dropout, as a Navy lieutenant who managed to bombard Mexico during the war, and as a pulp writer whose vast output strongly supports the reciprocity rule about quality. He was not, in short, a serious man.

We humans have a need to know, or rather a need to feel as though we know. What varies from person to person is the criteria used to judge when we actually do know a thing.

So: an overweening philosopher and a scam artist. What brings them together in an intelligible category? Each man proposed, without embarrassment, a total explanation for human life. Each man proposed a unique path to salvation. And each man left behind a movement guided by an elite bureaucracy that was eager to employ all manner of overt and covert means to an end and that soon realized that its own permanent power and prosperity was that end.

(Digression:  Back in the ’90s I once or twice met Heber Jentzsch, then and, so far as I know, still the president of the Church of Scientology. He made what amounted to a state visit to Encyclopædia Britannica, where I worked, to complain of the treatment of his organization in the encyclopedia. With his portly frame, ruddy complexion, tailored suit, ponderous gold jewelry, and overbearing manner he might very well have been the long-lost brother of our vice president of sales.)

Marx had that confidence, in the degree the Greeks called hubris and identified as the source of tragedy.

Above all, each man found willing believers, people who would accept or look past an obscure philosophy on the one hand and an absurd theology on the other to something beyond that was powerfully, overwhelmingly attractive.

We humans have a need to know, or rather a need to feel as though we know. What varies from person to person is the criteria used to judge when we actually do know a thing. Some of us are remarkably flexible on that point; others are more rigorous. But we all long to extinguish the feeling of not knowing, which is closely akin to the feeling of being insecure and vulnerable. When our criteria are lax enough, or when matters have rendered us desperate, we are apt to grasp at almost anything. If we are simple, something that consoles may suffice; if we are feeling put-upon, something that flatters our wounded vanity; if we are angry or resentful, something that permits us to feel righteous. Speak just so to a man’s inadequacies, and he may be yours.

An obsession with abolishing money, another with amassing it; tragedy and farce; two sides of a single fetish.

Robert McHenry is the former editor of Encyclopædia Britannica. His articles for The American include “What’s in a Name?,” on technology and anonymity, “When an Epoch Began,” on how IBM, the census, and Emily Dickinson define an epoch, and “About That Message to Garcia...,” on a signature American homily that offers lessons on initiative, loyalty, hard work, and enterprise.