>>2825621>yeah no, go read some booksit's not enough to just read some books. you have to question what you read, think critically about what you read, not just mindlessly consume it thinking that it will make you smart. your brain isn't just an empty bucket that you are supposed to fill with ideas from the books of so-called Great Men. and the so-called Great Men who wrote the books were not prophets and their books are not a divine inspiration, they came out of their own mortal fallible human brains that had all the same faculties that your brain does.
books don't contain any answers, they only contain hints. even a reference book such as an english dictionary doesn't contain any answers, it doesn't contain the meanings of any words; it just contains hints, other words intended to guide your brain towards the meaning of the words. that's all language really is, a bunch of auditory or textual concrete hints called "words" that our brains rewire themselves to associate with abstract thoughts and ideas and then use for thought and communication. you could say that the meaning lies between the words, it's what your brain latches onto while hearing/reading the words, but it's not contained in the words themselves, language is not a perfect medium for encoding and transmitting intellectual content, it is a vague and poorly-understood biological process that is lossy and indeterminate and open to interpretation. there can be no such thing as an "authoritative text" of any kind.
i've read books by marx and engels and given them a lot of thought and ultimately decided that while i may share many of their obvious underlying moral sentiments that favor a more compassionate and equitable way of living for humanity (which they unconvincingly deny as being moral sentiments), i think that their theories amount to little more than a clumsy attempt to take so-called "social science" and dress it up as so-called "hard science" to give their theories more validity when presented to their peers in the 19th century intellectual community, which was composed entirely of affluent white european men with very little concern or empathy for the struggles of the social underclass, and the way they did this was through teleology, which is really just another more acceptable kind of appeal to human emotion.
teleology was even more pervasive in 19th century western thought and language than it is today and the industrial revolution in particular was a boon for teleology because you had all these major scientific and technological breakthroughs that were revolutionizing human civilization and even the most sober-minded skeptics of the era were not immune to the very strong emotions that these developments tend to evoke in people. if anything, scientifically-minded people are even more susceptible to it and it's something that they have to internally struggle with every day in their work - just as the scientist conducting an experiment feels a very strong temptation to believe that his hypothesis is correct and his experiment will be a success, there is a very strong temptation to believe that these new developments in the world mark some sort of turning point for humanity and that things are going to continue getting better and better, that this sudden flurry of technological breakthroughs is indicative of a linear progression towards some higher goal. marx and engels very much shared these sentiments, virtually everyone did at the time, many still do to this day. but ultimately, the belief that human society is a progression towards a higher goal is an emotionally-driven perspective based on feelings of hope and excitement and pride, it's just as emotional and "unscientific" as morality is.
marx and engels did have some ideas that could be considered revolutionary, namely their outright rejection of the Great Man theory, a feat that not many famous western thinkers have been able to accomplish, though they were not the first to do so. but Great Man theory, anthropocentrism, teleology, theism, all of these things are expressions of the same vanity-driven assumption, the assumption that the universe is anything other than utterly indifferent to the psychology of human beings. there is this very strong urge to project our human dreams and our human ambitions and our human sense of purpose onto the primal forces of nature which we assume are somehow separate from us in some way, and this current runs throughout all of western thought going all the way back to the greeks, all the way back to the ancient civilizations of mesopotamia who believed in anthropocentric gods and teleological cosmogony. western thought has never been able to fully shed these vain assumptions, not even the most brilliant scientific minds of the modern era, not even people like marx and engels who ridiculed teleological thinking in others yet were completely unable to recognize it in themselves.