Of course they will. That's the point.
It was The Gospel From Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space...[who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.
The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...:
Oh, boy - they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes.
The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that too, since the Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of the Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this:
From this moment on, He will punish anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!
So, I have had some drinks and am about to be very pretentious. But fuck, everybody's pretentious in their own way; the best you can hope for is to be pretentious in the service of the right ideas. I think the problem at the moment is that all the dramatic ideas floating around are heinous bastardry, in one way or the other. Call that a simplistic worldview, but it applies pretty well to the islamists who think blowing up an aeroplane is martyrdom, the neoconservatives and 'muscular' liberals (the ones still around) who think blowing up a wedding party is
collateral damage, and the white supremacists
who think Britain would be a lot better off without all those nasty brown people. Marxism is dead*, and liberalism is pretty uninspiring at the best of times. In any case, there's nothing quite like a meeting of a handful of grey-haired, grey-faced trade unionists still holding out hope for a popular uprising against a society that, to paraphrase an old situationalist slogan, won't let them die of starvation but risks them dying of boredom, to turn you off the future of socialism in Britain.
Possibly the problem is that my generation missed the boat for the 60s. The world is just as much of a
bordel now as it was then, if not more so, but there doesn't seem to be a sense that anyone's going to do anything about it, brief Hope For Change idolatry aside. Maybe it's just me, but the bastard spawn of late-stage capitalism** seem a bit too jaded to
start throwing paving stones. You can go on all the protests and the marches, write terrible songs, even (God help you) read the philosophy, but the inspiration just isn't there. In which case, maybe the best course of action is a retreat into bohemianism; have another drink and forget about it. Lose yourself in drink, drugs and sleeping with a different stranger every night of the week. So much for being realistic and demanding the impossible.
Of course, all the same problems Marx had about class and inequality and so forth still exist. I'm going to finish with a very immature joke about the class system in this country, which the old German probably did not have in mind when he was writing
Das Kapital. I know this to be absolutely true, because I just made it up. When I was at Dulwich, there was a local comp down the road. I think it's probably some manner of academy now. In between the two schools was a pub where, amongst others, the local girls would congregate. One night, a guy from Dulwich chats up one of these girls, and she responds favourably. He takes her somewhere private, and being something of a gentleman, asks if she would like to see his 'member'. She tells him to go for it, and he disrobes. The girl takes a look and, recalling her experience with the comprehensive-school contingent, says, 'Ohhhh. It's like a cock, only smaller!'.
* Note that this hasn't stopped the corpse from shambling around.
**
Watch this, and despair for everyone raised on MTV. Also the genre that spawned Public Enemy and Grandmaster Flash being reduced to rich white girls 'hip'-hoppin''. But, y'know, feel free to tell me that I'm not allowed to have opinions about that and that I should stick to indie-rock.