I knew this story from the Dollop but they really made a joke out of most of it, building to the “religion is silly” punchline without much further to take away. I love this video for really digging into mid 19th century american radicalism. Spear is essentially advocating for utopian communism, was friends with Garrison, put his life on the line for the abolition of slavery, and fought for the rights of prisoners above all else.

Reminds me a lot of the utopian stuff Matt Christman loves to discuss. These people who fully believed they could save humanity, who saw acutely the same suffering Marx did, but took a different path. Much like Robert Owen, who Spears quotes at one point, he is still worthy of respect and analysis.

almost every single like modern account of john spear, every time you hear him being talked about it’s as a joke right. He’s almost always being you see the phrase “new england’s dr frankenstein” or calling him frankenstein or some kind of madman all the time. Right that’s all, that’s the only way he’s ever talked about now and you know i can’t myself tell you that the guy was all there right; of course i can’t and i can’t tell you though some of the stuff i’ve been reading you isnt a little bit amusing right, but at the end of the day it may be funny to think “oh look at that crazy guy walking up the hill with that machine he thinks he’s going to bring life to it he thinks it’s going to be his new electric baby” right but you know what john speer thought when he was going up that hill?

He thought that he was going to save the world he thought that he was going to create a new society for all of us that was completely just this was a man who who has seen the absolute ugliest depravity of human society he has been assaulted threatened everything he has seen horrors that most of us will never see right can you really look a man like that in the eyes a man who has devoted his life to helping others and laugh at him i don’t think so he john spear was trying to create a free limitless source of energy and power for him for his kids for his kids kids for you for me for our kids for everybody for all time and now 150 years later all we can really do is wish that it had worked

Of course I would say we CAN make that work, but not through his new motive power. We can do it by living up to even half the shit he did in life, and fighting to make that world. I think part of that nuttiness comes from seeing such depravity and seeing how little people give a shit. It makes you either break down, look for a divine source to fix things, or be John Brown and be that divine source yourself and grab a machete.