'Endowed withe the Quality of Superstition'

Have you heard the old idea that all earthly and perhaps heavenly knowledge is to be found in a single volume, and readers are to spend a lifetime searching for that book, reading it, studying and annotating it, and committing its spirit to memory? It’s a seductive, vaguely Platonic (or Borgesian) thought because it suggests men and women are born with a missing part, but that part exists and can be recovered. It also endorses a certain laziness: If I need only read a single book, why waste time reading others? For some this obviously means the Bible. Or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Or The Art of the Deal, On the Road, the Quran or State and Revolution. Michael Oakeshott writes in Notebooks, 1922-86 (2016):

“Karl Marx is a remarkable writer. No other can turn possible truths into superstitions so rapidly & so conclusively. Every truth that came to him he turned into a falsehood. He is, possibly, the most corrupt writer who ever lived. It is not, therefore, surprising that he has become the apostle of the illiterate masses of the world – by ‘illiterate’ I mean those who can accept nothing but what has been endowed with the quality of superstition.”