Forget Byron (or that German horse-hugger), because it seems Karl Marx was the 19th Century writer that was most insane.  It seems that , after so very long of asserting that the founder of communism was a madman, we’ve finally proven it.

Karl Marx suffered from a skin disease that can cause severe psychological effects such as self-loathing and alienation, according to a British dermatologist.

Self-loathing, alienation, and he had bad skin?  He’s sounding more like an angst-ridden acne-riddled teenager by the second.  If you’ve read any poetry written by your average depressed emo, you won’t be surprised that his writing was shit.

In 1867 he wrote to Friedrich Engels of the boils “on my posterior and near the penis”.

Teeheehee.  I know, I’m very mature.

“In addition to reducing his ability to work, which contributed to his depressing poverty, hidradenitis greatly reduced his self-esteem. This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing.”

Given how socialist countries have fared economies, I think the depressing poverty may have been caused by the fact he’s a loony leftist from beyond the moon, but I digress.  His ’self-loathing and alienation’ is the key.  He loathed himself.  He loathed himself.

I can never quite understand how one can hate oneself; we can criticise aspects of ourselves, but to hate oneself altogether is a fundamentally, well, stupid position.  We’re individuals, we can do what we want (we might be locked up for it, but we can still do it).

We reserve the right to loathe other people - although that’s something we choose not to do unless one’s name is Jong-Il, Robert, Fidel or Hugo - but oneself is the last person one should despise, as it’s the one person over whom one has complete control.  If one does descend into self-loathing, it is certain that one must also loathe the process by which oneself is created: freedom.

Since this loathing of himself, hence of freedom, was “a reaction reflected … in his writings”, we can now explain an awful lot of the literary diarrhoea that emanated from the man’s mind.  He came to his conclusions based on the preconception of freedom as destructive, due to his own perception of his own self as being destructive.

Such is the basis of the world’s most successful system of slavery: a few skin boils on the arse, an insane German man, and his loathing of all that makes slavery so abhorrent: the self.

NB I’m not a psychology or medical student, so I can’t say with complete authority that Marx’s writing was hindered by the insanity brought on by hidradenitis.  I can say, as an economics student, that it was hindered by some sort of insanity.