De-Christianization
Apparently, progressives regard attempts at chastity and sexual self-command among young men to be nascent fascism, which must be stamped out. Addiction to porn is mandatory.
Please read this article by Matthew B Crawford of Archedelia.
His is one of the most fascinating investigations into the roots of our modern moral decay imaginable.
Mr. Crawford argues that the Sexual Liberation movement, including the normalization of pornography and the sin of Onan, was part of a coordinated longterm attempt at psychological social engineering: our society was deliberately de-Christianized by the same men, using the same methods, as de-Nazified Germany post WWII.
This social engineering movement was based on a Freudian conviction that all attempts at self-command, at the traditional role of men as masculine, the traditional structure of family life and small town communities, and all local self-government, was fascist.
In psychological terms, everything not pro-revolutionary was pro-fascist.
(Please note the current political spectrum, running from Authoritarianism (Right) to Radicalism (Left), is based on the same one-eyed axiom that democracy is merely proto-fascism.)
The Freudian conviction held that all moral training by the family unit upon the young is sinister because honoring father and mother is authoritarian hence fascist. Love of virtue is authoritarian hence fascist. The conscience is not the voice of God in man, but the propaganda of Hitler.
The solution is the aggressive indoctrination and addiction on the masses to vice. The family unit stood in the way of mass vice, hence must be eliminated. Masculinity and femininity stood in the way of eliminating the family unit, hence must be eliminated.
Normalizing masturbation was prudent psychological mechanism to reach the social goal of dividing the sexes and denaturing them to create persons neither masculine nor feminine, but unisex and genderless.
This Freudian conviction was based on a contempt for the common man, and the fear of him, as a herd animal easily roused to stampeding into fascism. His opinions need never be consulted, as, in a real sense, he has none: he is merely a raw material for sophisticated propaganda efforts of mass-psychology to channel toward the progressive goal.
From this apotheosis of the expert to the role of divine prophet comes the current instinct of political correctness never to debate any topic: wrongthink is assumed to be a manifestation of irrational psychology.
The current attempts to groom your children toward sterile sexual perversion, robbing their lives of dangerous elements such as joy and meaning, is all very deliberate, well-funded, and has roots in social and political theory reaching back before the World Wars.
Below are choice quotes from the essay. The words below are Mr. Crawford’s.
Read the whole thing here.
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In the early Thirties, one wing of the psychoanalytic movement splintered off and became politicised under the leadership of Wilhelm Reich. Reich was convinced that fighting fascism would require a psychological transformation of the entire German population. Their susceptibility to authoritarian politics and attraction to the Fuhrer were due to the unhealthy festering of irrational forces in individual psyches, rooted ultimately in sexual “repression”. Through the efforts of Archibald MacLeish, arch-WASP literary man of the Ivy League and liberal activist, these ideas gained influence in the American security services during the war, and particular the OSS, which was planning for the reeducation of the Germans upon their defeat and subsequent military occupation. And, in fact, the US-led Allied High Commission took up this project of Freudian political therapy in its rule over the defeated Germans, which lasted until 1955.
To put the matter crudely, the Germans were going to have to start masturbating more. More seriously, the working-class family, with its sharply distinguished sex roles and ideal of a strong father, was found to be at the root of the political problem.
Psychoanalysis was to be used for revolutionary purposes. Conventional Marxists made economic conditions the focus of their science; the Freudo-Marxist focused on moral conditions. Where the consummation of the Marxist project brings the withering away of the state, Reich’s political therapy required nothing less than the dissolution of the superego, that “sham social surface” and impediment to the instincts, which are taken to be pure and good. Here, too, we see an echo of the French Revolutionists’ Rousseau-inspired cult of sincerity or self-exposure. Let it all out.
The public tyranny of capitalist domination and the private tyranny of conscience form a circle of mutual support, on Reich’s view. Revolution cannot succeed unless it works ruthlessly on the psychological level. Indeed, revolution carried out on the level of economy and politics alone leads to bourgeois “defense reactions”, the most disastrous of which is fascism.
It is in the family that repressive authority is incubated and reproduced. Someone less invested in moral revolution may object that it is in the family that our faculties of moral perception develop, a gradual training of the affections whereby the child begins to apprehend an objective order of good. If all goes well, he comes to prefer virtue over vice through the mediating guidance and concern — the authority — of his parents. Reich would entirely agree, but with an opposite thrust. That is, he agrees that the moral sense is a product of authority, but insists that authority can only be repressive, never generative. It is always exercised self-interestedly, never generously for the good of another. Morality is the very thing that needs to be liquidated in the revolution.
As Philip Rieff puts Reich’s point, “A revolution must sweep out the family and its ruler, the father, no less cleanly than the old political gangs and their leaders…. The destruction, then, of the ancient mystique of fatherhood defines the revolutionary task.”
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Reich wasn’t just one more radical crank, fascinating to intellectuals but of little consequence. In fact, he was part of a larger intellectual movement that gained a substantial institutional footing in the United States in the decade immediately after Second World War.
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In 1946, President Truman declared a mental health crisis in America, a watershed moment in the emergence of the therapeutic state. As Curtis put it, “the Second World War would utterly transform the way governments saw democracy, and the people they governed”. The American government, in particular, would turn to the Freud family for guidance on how to control the enemy within, convinced that “hidden under the surface of their own population were the same dangerous forces” that had led to the death camps. The inner lives of Americans were now something that needed to be managed. Anti-fascism in the United States would be a science of social adjustment working at a deep level of the psyche, modeled on the occupation government’s parallel effort in Germany.
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Following passage of the National Mental Health Act of 1946, its principal architects Karl and Will Menninger trained an army of hundreds of psychiatrists to fan out across America. In the late Forties, “psychological guidance centers” were set up in hundreds of towns, staffed by psychiatrists who “thought it was their job to control the hidden forces inside millions of Americans”, according to Adam Curtis. Thousands of counselors offered marriage guidance; social workers visited homes. As Robert Wallerstein of the Menninger Foundation put it in The Century of the Self, the operating assumption in these times was that “you could really change people. And you could change them almost in limitless ways.”
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In the early decades of the 20th century, liberals convinced that the mass of their fellow citizens were impervious to reason believed they “would either have to master the new techniques of advertising and propaganda, … or seek to minimise the influence of public opinion on policy, … and see to it that policy – making was conducted exclusively by experts.”
[…] On the policy front, Woodrow Wilson addressed the growing gulf between popular preferences and progressive policy goals (recently exacerbated by an expansion of voting rights to less enlightened elements in society) by transferring political initiative and discretion from the democratically elected legislature to the bureaucracies of the nascent administrative state, where matters could safely be decided by experts.
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Porn may function as a soma of the masses and in particular of the male— that toxic element in society that has lately attracted special interest from the organs of political therapy. Untoward eruptions of ascetic self-command are inconvenient to the governing anthropology; they would seem to cast doubt on both the need for, and the means of, social management. Reciprocally, for men and women both, the experience of self-command can create a taste for more, and possibly even lead to curiosity about a corresponding political possibility long thought obsolete — that of self-government.
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Read the whole thing here.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
