Devil Departments

Of all the evils that Satan or Lucy as the gender-confused devil prefers to be called unleashed upon the world in the twentieth century, human resources management or HR and public relations or PR are among the most insidious.   A couple of socio-economic transformations – first from a rural society with an agricultural economy to an urban society with an industrial-manufacturing economy, then from an owner-managed industrial-manufacturing economy to a corporate economy managed largely by professionals trained in management – the private sector equivalent of bureaucrats –with both steps thought up in hell and overseen on earth by the devil himself, brought about the establishment of HR and PR departments.   See James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941) for an account of the second of these transformations.  HR and PR are specialized fields within the more general field of professional management and the departments which bear these names are filled by people who have been trained in these specialized fields.   The theory on which professional management training, including HR and PR training, is based is the theory that the knowledge of how to properly run a company is technical knowledge, that is to say, knowledge that can be reduced to a technique – a set of instructions which followed will invariably produce the desired result – that can be written down in a manual, preferably in terminology distinct to the particular technique – technical language – so as to keep the secrets of the technique among the trained.   For an outstanding critique of technical knowledge in general, see the title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics (1962).   On top of the problems that are common to every kind of training in technical knowledge, however, there are a lot of things that are distinctly wrong with training in HR and PR.   Foremost among them is that it resembles the viruses, radiation, and other contagions that turn people into the walking, brain-devouring, dead in the ever-growing plethora of films, graphic novels and video games about a zombie apocalypse.

 

While that comparison may seem a little over-the-top, HR and PR types are notorious for wearing phony smiles plastered over their faces all the time and constantly projecting cheerful and friendly demeanours beneath which lie cold, calculating, minds that would not hesitate either to stab you or their own mothers in the back if they thought it would advance the company’s interests or their own careers (HR) or to throw anyone under the bus or tell any lie no matter how big if it will create the image they are looking for (PR).   HR and PR positions basically require the person who fills them to be soulless and training in these fields is a good way to kill the soul.

 

With HR the soulless nature of it is advertised in its very name.   Think about what the words “human resources” mean.   They mean regarding and treating human beings as if they belonged to the same category as land, money, trees, petroleum, or any other sort of material asset that businesses own and utilize.   The alternative expression “human capital” that is sometimes used makes this even more explicit.   While “human resources” was actually coined in the nineteenth century (by John R. Commons in The Distribution of Wealth in 1893), and the thing which we now use the expression to denote became recognizable in its present form around the time of the first World War, it was around the second World War that the thing was joined to its name and the name entered general circulation and usage.   It is interesting, is it not, that this was a little over a century after the British Empire outlawed the Atlantic slave trade, committed its navy to eradicating the trade, and abolished slavery within its borders, and a little under a century after the United States abolished slavery as an ex-post facto justification for the bloody internecine war she fought with herself in the first half of the 1860s.   Today, progressives rail against slavery more loudly and more often than the abolitionists ever did, in the hopes of convincing weak and foolish governments to tax people who have never owned slaves in order to pay people who never were slaves, on the absurd and utterly false grounds that slavery was the cause of all the problems facing people who have the same skin colour as the slaves most people think of when slavery comes up regardless of whether their ancestors were slaves or not.   At the same time corporations, by naming the department that is the intermediary between upper level management and labour “human resources management”, have demonstrated that in their way of thinking their workers are their property and that it is labour-contracted-for-between-free-agents that was abolished in reality, slavery in name only.   San Jose State University Professor of Economics Jeffrey Rogers Hummel appears to have been on to something when he entitled his history of the war between the American states Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1999).

 

In 1922, the philosopher Martin Buber published his Ich und Du, the translation of which was published in 1937 as I and Thou.   His thesis was that to each of us as a subject, “I”, everything else is either an object, an “it” which we experience and/or use, or a “thou” with which we relate as another subject.  Impersonal objects cannot properly be thous, but primitive people often treat them as such.   Modern people make the opposite mistake.   Other people can be either its or thous but to modern people they are far more often than not its rather than thous.   It is perceiving and relating to others as thous, however, that makes our lives meaningful and makes each of us fully “I”.   The ultimate and eternal “Thou” is God Himself.   HR zombies are trained to address people as thous in their endless, empty, and meaningless jargon, while in reality treating them as its.  

 

It has been observed over the last decade or so that the sort of left-wing lunacy that we once thought was safely confined to the asylums that are the campuses of academe is now being aggressively promoted in the corporate world.    Many corporations now require their employees to undergo diversity, inclusion, and equity training which is a form of brainwashing with progressive propaganda.   Companies in which the portion of their workforce that regularly interacts with the public faces an increased threat of bodily harm due to criminal violence now sometimes add insult to the risk of injury by requiring their workers to take “de-escalation training” as if it were their employees’ fault that some punk, just released on bail and high on meth, assaults and robs them and as if the garbage techniques taught in such training would work in such a situation.   It is through HR that this sort of madness has infected the management of so many companies.

 

PR is no better than HR.   Public relations, as we know it today, goes back to just before the First World War when Ivy Lee was hired by J. D. Rockefeller Jr. to be the spin doctor for his family and their oil company.   What Lee was to PR in practice, Edward Bernays, Lee’s friend and the nephew of Sigmund Freud on both sides of his family, was in theory.   In 1945 his Public Relations was published.   According to Bernays, PR was not just old-fashioned advertising, but a scientific method of analyzing public opinion and, utilizing insights drawn from psychology and sociology as well as the means of the new mass communications technology, reshaping public opinion.   It is no coincidence that this closely resembles the subject of his earlier, influential, work Propaganda (1928).   Indeed, the most significant difference between PR and propaganda is that listening to public opinion as well as shaping it is essential to PR.   This does not make it less mendacious and manipulative than its close relative.   On the contrary it makes it a more effective tool of mass manipulation.   It is also the reason why in today’s “cancel culture” PR departments insist that that someone be thrown under the bus every time the “woke” mob demands that person’s head as a sacrifice.   It is why todays PR firms are less interested in helping their clients present themselves in terms of the excellence of the goods and services they offer than they are in presenting them as the most devoted adherents of the cult of feminism, anti-white race hatred, and alphabet soupism on the block.  

 

It makes one positively nostalgic for the good old days when they pursued more worthy and benign efforts like promoting the oil and tobacco businesses.  

 

Let HR and PR return to Lucy in the hell whence they came.   They have already done enough to make earth resemble that place.

The Greeks and Jews Have Words For It

Suppose you were running for public office. Let us say that you wanted to be the mayor of your local city. You decide that you want to be remembered as the mayor who made the streets safe for everyone and so you build a reputation for yourself as a crusader against speeding. Lowering speed limits, especially in residential areas and school zones, is a major plank in your campaign platform. You are elected, and throughout your first term, whenever something you have done comes under negative scrutiny, your response is to lecture people about the need for safe streets.

Your term ends and you decide to run for re-election. You saw your popularity sag towards the end of your first term. The campaign is underway when all of a sudden disaster strikes. Somebody has uncovered a video from years back that shows you taking part in a drag race – not RuPaul’s kind but the sort that involves motor vehicles – right in front of the city’s largest kindergarten. The video shows you winning the race, and certainly not abiding by the speed limit.

You decide that the best way to minimize the damage is by immediately acknowledging the race and apologizing for your past behaviour. Shortly after, however, yet another video surfaces in which you can be seen recklessly speeding and swerving in front of the nursery school. Then another video is revealed showing you weaving through the playground in your sports car, barely missing the swing set and careening away from the slide before crashing into the tetherball.

You slink back home to hide, convinced that all is over. Then, to everyone’s amazement and not least your own, your chief opponent proves incapable of capitalizing on the implosion of your self-built reputation, and you manage to scrape through and get re-elected.

All of your enemies are bitterly disappointed but they console themselves by saying “Well, at least we won’t have to listen to another of his lectures on speeding again.” Less than a year later they discover just how wrong they are.

In the next town over, a motorist is caught on video speeding around a corner, where he runs into a cyclist sending him flying off of his bike and into the wall of a nearby building. Had he been a pedestrian, it is likely that nobody would have made a very big deal out of it. It was a cyclist, however, and all the various bicycle clubs that make up the powerful bicycle lobby are hopping mad. This is not some lousy pedestrian the motorist has killed, it is one of their own, and they are not going to take it. They organize a bike protest outside city hall which ends with them burning the place to the ground. (1)

While many – probably most – in your position would consider it wiser to keep their mouths shut in this situation, you take it as an opportunity to give another lecture about how unacceptable the status quo of cyclists being run down by motorists is, how all residents of your city have a role to play in confronting systemic speeding and how speeding isn’t just a problem in the next city over, and that there is a lot of work left to be done to eliminate speeding. You don’t say a word about your own past history as a speed demon. When asked about it specifically, you give an evasive answer.

What would be the most appropriate word to describe this attitude of yours?

You have probably recognized by now the real life scenario to which the hypothetical one described above is alluding. If not, I will spell it out for you. Captain Airhead, who is sometimes derogatorily referred to as Justin Trudeau, and who was first elected Prime Minister of Canada in 2015, throughout his rise to power and the first term of his premiership, seldom did anything else but virtue signal to the world about how “woke” he was. He presented himself as the indefatigable foe of sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and every other phobia and ism to ever spring out of the ungodly union of Marx and Freud, but above all, racism. When the next Dominion election came around in 2019 his reputation had already been damaged by repeated examples of his own goofy, idiotic, and embarrassing antics, followed by a much more serious corruption scandal. Then, when the election campaign was underway, three photographs and a video were revealed showing him in skin-darkening makeup. In the video he is wearing full body blackface – legs and arms as well – with a padded crotch, acting like an ape. In other words, behaving in a way that people who hold to his own purported worldview would regard as horribly racist. Astonishingly, in spite of all of this, the Liberals won re-election albeit with a reduction to a minority government. One June 1st, in his daily video selfie, he talked about the riots erupting south of the border - he called them "peaceful protests" - expressing his solidarity with them, accusing our country - not himself - of being racist against blacks, and vowing to extirpate racism and discrimination.

Ideological progressives have, amusingly, been calling him out on this ever since. They accused him of making empty promises and uttering meaningless platitudes, and demanded that he come through with some real action. Given everything that was revealed about him less than a year ago, he was practically inviting this response. It is like he has never heard the old apopthegm "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Personally, I hope that his progressive detractors are right and that all of his talk was just empty promises and meaningless platitudes. In my lifetime, I have seen the basic freedom to think and speak your mind, which in a Commonwealth realm ought to be held sacred, shamelessly, needlessly and severely curtailed in Canada and something that resembles the thought control methods of the Soviet Union - brain washing, special police and tribunals, etc. - established, all in the name of fighting discrimination and racism. All of this is, in my opinion, a much greater evil than the one it is intended to combat. We need less of this sort of action, not more.

My point, however, is that it takes a very particular kind of gall for someone in the Prime Minister's position to accuse other Canadians and, indeed, the country herself, of racism. Even last year, when he was apologizing for all of his transracial cosplay - racist by his standards not mine - he kept trying to twist it into a teaching moment for all of us.

We don't really have a word in English that is adequate to label this sort of gall. Arrogance is the closest thing we have. It is tempting, since the Prime Minister’s speech was made on the first day of "Pride month", to use the traditional English name for the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, but this word has become so weak that it can no longer really do justice to what we are talking about. Even the Latin Superbia won’t do since it is too easily confused with the cognate English adjective that is a term of praise denoting superlative quality or excellence. So we shall have to turn to the ancient Greeks and the Jews, who each have a word that describes Captain Airhead's attitude perfectly.

The Greek word is ὕβρις which can be transliterated into English as either “hybris” or the more common “hubris”. (2) This word in its everyday usage could mean “outrage” or even “violence.” In its technical meaning, which is the relevant meaning here, it denotes a kind of insolent, overweening, pride that invites divine judgement and leads one foolishly and blindly to his own self-destruction.

The other word is chutzpah. This word, the first syllable of which is pronounced like you are trying to get rid of something stuck in your throat, is Yiddish, belonging to the tongue of the Ashkenazi Jews which combines elements of Hebrew and German. In this case the word is derived from a Hebrew word that means “impudence.” It denotes a defiant, cheeky and insolent audacity that knows no shame whatsoever. It can express either disapproval or admiration – or, probably more accurately, both at the same time. Leo Rosten defined, or rather described, it as “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.” (3)

While these words are not exact synonyms of each other, they both fit the attitude of the Prime Minister to a tee, and much better than the closest English equivalents.




(1) Anticipating that cyclists may take offense at how they are depicted in this paragraph and object, I here and now unapologetically associate myself with the remarks and prejudices of the late Samuel Marchbanks: “Had to do some motoring today. I have two characters, my Pedestrian Character, in which I am all for the Common Man, the freedom of the roads, and the dignity of Shank’s Mare; and also my Motorist Character, in which I am contemptuous of the rights of walkers, violent in my passion for speed, and arrogant in my desire to kill anybody who gets in my way…I have never ridden a bicycle, I am the enemy of cyclists in both characters. If I am walking, they sneak up behind me and slice the calves off my legs with their wheels; if I am driving, they wobble all over the road, never signal, and seem to be deaf, blind and utterly idiotic. In spite of their stupidity, cyclists rarely get themselves killed; the roads are slippery with defunct cats, squashed skunks and groundhogs, and hens who have been gathered to Abraham’s bosom, but I have never seen a mass of steel, leather windbreaker and hamburger which was identifiable as the cadaver of a cyclist.” - This is from the last Thursday entry, in the Winter section of The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, which was first published in 1947. In 1985, it and the Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949) and Marchbanks' Garland which is an abridgment of Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack (1967), were edited into an omnibus entitled The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks and it is in the 1987, Totem Press paperback edition of this, that I found the quoted words on pages 52-53. Samuel Marchbanks was the pen-name used by Robertson Davies when he was editor of the Peterborough Examiner.
(2) The Greek letter upsilon looks like our Y in its capital form and like our u in its minuscule form. It was pronounced by a sound we don’t have in English, that which is represented in German by a u with a diacritical umlaut on top. The standard way of transliterating the German letter in English is with the diphthong ue, but this is seldom if ever used for the Greek letter.
(3) Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1968, p. 93.

Modern Man Reaps the Insanity he has Sown

As Western man entered the Modern Age, he began to regard those things which had been central to his worldview but which cannot be directly perceived by the senses as being less real and therefore less important than those things which are directly available to him through the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Whereas previously he had accepted that God, as the Creator and Source of the physical world available to man through his senses, must therefore be more real and more important than that world, modern man reasoned that what is most real and important to us is that which we can observe directly and that God, if He exists at all, is out there somewhere doing His own thing and of little consequence to us. While St. Paul had traced to its inevitable terminus the route which this train of thought must travel in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans, modern man ignored his warning, jumped aboard that train nonetheless, and has been travelling it ever since.

Modern man has both gained and lost by his decision to travel this path. By concentrating his attention on the physical world he has gained sufficient knowledge of that world to manipulate it to accomplish his ends – and so has managed to prolong his life, to make his labour easier and more efficient thus increasing both his productivity and his leisure time, and to combat scarcity and sickness. These gains are not to be sneered at or lightly dismissed and the fact that they are immediately present to us and observable makes them strong evidence indeed on behalf of the project of modernity.

Now let us think about what we have just noted about the gains of modernity. If such benefits to modern man as prolonged life, better health, abundance of material goods and leisure are evidence on behalf of modernity what is it that they are testifying to on modernity’s behalf? The answer is that they are testifying to modernity’s possessing the quality of being positive, beneficial, or good. Here we encounter a dilemma. If we are required to prove modernity to be good by pointing to the evidence of how it has benefited us this means that goodness is a standard to which modernity is held accountable, which means that goodness is higher than modernity, more important, and therefore more real than modernity and all of its benefits. Yet goodness is not something that we can look upon with our eyes or hear with our ears or otherwise directly detect through our senses. We perceive it indirectly in the many ways it manifests itself in the world of the senses but we approach it directly only through the avenues of faith and reason. In other words the very fact that we find it necessary to prove modernity to be good by pointing to the ways in which it has improved and enriched our lives is a contradiction of this fundamental tenet of modernity that it is the physical world of matter and energy, that we observe through our senses, that is real and important, and that the God Who created that world and such invisible and intangible qualities as goodness itself are less real and less important.

What this tells us is that although we have obtained real, tangible, benefits from modernity, benefits which must not be casually waved aside as if they are nothing, these benefits do not prove the ideas that comprise the foundation of modernity to be true. Truth is another one of those invisible and intangible qualities like goodness, which can be approached through faith and reason, but only perceived indirectly. While modern man talks much about truth, professes a high regard for it, and claims to possess it in greater quantities than men in previous eras, he has altered and reduced its meaning, almost beyond recognition, in accordance with his new understanding of what is real and important. To modern man, “truth” is merely the quality of accurately describing in our speech, what happens in what modern man considers to be the real world, the physical world. While modern man may have more facts at his disposal than ever before, he has lost the larger part of the very meaning of truth itself, and so truth must be marked down on the loss side of the ledger of modernity. In this we see that the losses of modernity, must not be lightly dismissed either. This is a sobering thought when we consider that if we have lost the concept of truth in its fuller sense, we may very well have to count among the losses of modernity the information and standards we need in order to properly weigh the gains against the losses and to determine whether the former are worth the price of the latter.

The end of the modernity project all along has been the subjection of reality to the will of man in a universe where man has usurped the place of God. The elements of the physical world are directly available to man – therefore, since man has declared himself to be the centre of everything, they are the most real and the most important. The elements of the physical world are themselves ranked in importance according to their utility, i.e., how useful they are to man and we now concentrate our intellectual activity in the accumulation of the knowledge and the development of techniques which maximize that usefulness. Man used to find meaning in life, existence, and the world around him by searching and striving for goodness, truth, and beauty, (1) which were what they were in themselves and were regarded as being more real and important than the physical, visible, and tangible elements of reality. Modern man, rather than searching for meaning, projects it upon the world around him, by, for example, creating and choosing values rather than cultivating virtues.

It is illuminating to consider the way in which modern or postmodern man has now moved beyond treating the invisible and intangible as less real and important than the physical and observable and is now treating elements of physical reality in the same way. The obvious example of this is sex.

Sex is very much an observable, physical, element of reality. It is a trait that human beings share with many other living creatures, plant and animal. We come in two kinds, male and female, each with a distinctive physiognomy, each of which produces its own gamete which must unite with that of the other for reproduction to take place. With some animals, male and female come together only for short periods, at certain seasons, to reproduce. With human beings, however, male and female couple with each other for the long term, and all human societies and cultures have ceremonies in which this coupling is formally recognized, establishing unions that come with responsibilities and rights. In part this is because human children are born helpless and dependent, a condition in which they remain for a long period of time, making a long term partnership between their mother and father the optimal way of ensuring that they are raised to maturity. In part it is because we are self-aware individuals and as such we form intellectual and emotional bonds with the other self-aware individuals with whom we mate, thus elevating the sexual union to something that transcends the merely physical.

Sex is such an obvious part of the reality we know that it would seem incredible that anyone could think of it in the way so many modern minds think of beauty, as something that has no meaning or existence, except that which we choose to endow it with ourselves. Yet that is exactly the way some people appear to be thinking of it!

Suppose that someone you know was to come home one evening, announce that he is a chicken, move out into the chicken coop, make himself a nest, and sit there trying to lay an egg. Would you try to get him psychiatric help? Or would you say that if he considers himself to be a chicken that must be what he is, condemn everyone who does not accept his avian self-assessment as being bigoted, and head out to the coop every morning in search of eggs?

I think it is safe to say that most, if not all, of us would consider the first to be the sane and rational option. A man is not a chicken nor by any act of the will, no matter how forceful and inventive, can he make himself into a chicken. Yet today, if a boy announces that he is a girl, or a girl that she is a boy, there are many who would say that the rest of us are under some sort of moral obligation to go along with this. Three years ago, the Ontario legislature passed Bill 33 or “Toby’s Act”, which amended the provincial Human Rights Act to protect people from being discriminated against on the grounds of their “gender identity” or “gender expression”. Protecting people from discrimination on the grounds of “gender identity” or “gender expression” is euphemistic language for telling everybody else that if a man says he is a woman or vice-versa they have to accept this and treat he/she/it accordingly. What this meant in practice was that people who identified as members of the other sex would be allowed to use washrooms designated for the use of that sex. There are plenty of good and valid reasons for having sex specific washrooms, but these were swept away as being of no consequence so that a miniscule fraction of society would have the “right” to make everyone else pretend that men who say they are women and vice-versa are what they say they are, even though they no more are what they say they are than the man who says he is a chicken is what he says he is.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Ontario’s Bill 33 was merely proof of the extreme flakiness of the Dalton McGuinty Liberals and that this sort of thing couldn’t happen elsewhere. It has been happening all over North America. The problem is far deeper than a dispute about who gets to use what washroom. There are cosmetic surgeons today, who claim to be able to change a person’s sex. If a technique were discovered whereby a beak and feathers could be successfully grafted on to a man this would still not make him a chicken. No more so, does removing a man’s penis and testicles and building an artificial vagina make him into a woman. This “sex reassignment therapy” is made available as a treatment for “gender dysphoria”, which is the medical designation for the condition of being so convinced that you are the sex other than the one you were born into that all the evidence that this is not the case causes you to suffer emotionally. The doctor who proposes as “therapy”, for the man who thinks he is a chicken, a jelly doughnut, or Napoleon Bonaparte, that we change reality to conform to the delusion would be regarded as being crazier than his patient. Yet our governments regard sex reassignment therapy as a legitimate treatment, pay for it with our tax dollars, and register it as having changed the person’s sex in the eyes of the law.

This sort of madness does not come upon a people overnight. This collective denial of the reality of sex took place in a series of stages, in each of which, under the guise of accomplishing a social and political reform, an element of the reality of sex was denied, until finally, cumulatively, the reality of sex was denied in its entirety.

The first stage was feminism. The so-called women’s movement began in the nineteenth century as a response to industrialization. The early feminists believed, not without justification, that the changes wrought by mass factory production and urbanization had undermined the security of women thus creating a need for legal protection in the form of recognized rights to own property, pursue a professional education, and a career. This seemed reasonable enough and so we accepted the justice of these demands. The problem was that feminism demanded something other than justice, it demanded the equality. The cosmetic similarities between the two are such that the deeper differences are often overlooked. Had feminism made the case that women had been harmed by industrialization through a loss of their security and were therefore entitled to compensation in the form of legally recognized rights this would have been a demand for justice. By demanding equality, however, feminism demanded that society accept a fiction, the fiction that there is no substantial difference between male and female, man and woman. Justice requires that people be treated right, be given their due, whereas equality requires that people be treated the same, which is not the same thing at all. As feminism has evolved from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, it has continued to march under the banner of the equality of the sexes, but the demands of the harpies and harridans who rule the roost in present day academia, unlike those of the early suffragettes, do not bear even a superficial resemblance to justice.

So in feminism, we have the first stage, the denial of substantial difference between male and female. The revolution was the second stage. The sexual revolution, which had been the dream of libertines for centuries, began in the 1950s and 1960s after the theoretical foundation for it was laid by Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the “research” of Alfred Kinsey, and has been ongoing ever since. The basic idea behind the revolution was that with new scientific discoveries and inventions, particularly of effective contraceptive technology such as the birth control pill, sexual activity had been divorced from reproduction, and so all traditional rules governing sexual behaviour from cultural mores to religious dogmas to government decrees had been rendered outdated and obsolete. This too, was a denial of part of the reality of sex. By saying that the invention of contraception had separated sex from reproduction invalidating the old rules, the sexual revolution denied that for human beings sex had always been more than mere animal reproduction. In doing so it cheapened both the reproductive and the non-reproductive aspects of sex. By saying that the reproductive aspect of sex was something that could and should be made optional by contraceptive technology the sexual revolution reduced the reproductive aspect of sex from the exalted level of being the means of our survival as families, societies, and a species to being the unwanted consequences of the act of carnal gratification. The sexual revolutionaries debased the word love, which traditionally denoted sexual union and the attraction that leads to it as conceived of as being higher than mere bestial copulation, by stripping it of that which made it higher, its connotations of self-sacrifice and self-denial, and making it mean the virtual opposite, mutual self-gratification. In the end, what emerged from the sexual revolution was a concept of sex in which it was less than animal reproduction and not more, as evidenced by the way the phrase “it is just sex” is now used to casually dismiss any attempt, however slight, at reasserting the old standards.

The third stage was the gay liberation movement. What began decades ago as the fairly reasonable demand that people who are attracted to members of their own sex be allowed to go about their private lives without fear of police raids, violent attacks, and other persecution has evolved into an intolerant, bullying, demand that state and society, at every level, in every way, and in every institution, both accept homosexuality and reject and persecute anyone who does not. Much could be written about this transition from a call to let us be to a refusal to let others be but it is the movement’s denial of a reality about sex that concerns us here. Here is that reality: Human beings are a sexual species, which means that male and female must unite for reproduction to take place, which means that the natural order is for male to be attracted to female, and for female to be attracted to male, and not for male to be attracted to male, or female to female. For whatever reason, some people find themselves attracted to members of their own sex, and while we should treat such people with compassion, kindness and tolerance – provided, of course, that they agree to the quid pro quo of reciprocating these attitudes toward others which the self-appointed spokespeople on their behalf appear to have little interest in doing - it is a plain and simple denial of reality to claim that attraction between members of the same sex is equal to opposite sex attraction in the natural order of things, which claim is what the gay liberation movement is now insisting that everybody accept or be branded a heretic and treated accordingly.

The fourth stage is, of course, the one we began this discussion with, in which a person’s sex, male or female, is no longer something that just is, that one is born with, but what a person decides it to be, and if they decide that their sex is something different from the one they were born with, the rest of us have to accept it, and go out of all of our ways to accommodate their delusion.

We have traced this denial of a reality that is immediately present to us in the physical world available to our senses through the stages of several social and political movements from feminism through the sexual revolution through the gay liberation movement to the present stage. This process, by which we have come to deny a part of reality that is right before our eyes, could not have come about, had modern man not first denied, the greater reality of those higher verities, goodness, truth, beauty and ultimately God Himself, that cannot be looked upon directly, but which nevertheless are there to be seen indirectly, reflected in the world around us. By rejecting the reality which we cannot look upon directly, we have lost our hold on that which we can see all around us, and are now reaping the insanity we have sown.

(1) It will seem strange to many to say that beauty is not visible but it is nevertheless true. You do not directly see beauty as it is in itself, you see beauty in a beautiful person or object, that is to say, indirectly.

The Facts of Life (and Death)

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
– Rudyard Kipling, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”, (1919)

On June 24th, 2011 the legislative assembly of the State of New York voted to allow so-called “same-sex marriages”. This decision that will come into effect later this month. Once again we are reminded that we live in a post-Sexual Revolution world.

Progressives are predictably and boringly proclaiming this to be the latest victory in the cause of liberty, tolerance, and human rights. In reality it is the latest triumph of ideological blindness over reality.

The ideas of classical liberalism are notoriously out of touch with the real world. Individuals are not prior to societies but are born into families which are the simplest, most basic, form of society, from which more complex societies are built. Societies are not fundamentally voluntary-contractual nor is it desirable that they be reorganized on a voluntary-contractual basis. The most important relationships in any society are relationships of blood, love, and friendship, none of which are contractual and the most important activities and events in the life of a society occur not in the marketplace or the halls of government, but in the home. The purpose of government is not solely or even primarily to protect the “natural rights” of the individual. Indeed, the entire concept of universal natural rights that are not prescriptive, i.e., rooted in the customs of a particular society, is philosophical nonsense unless one makes the claim that God is the source of those rights, yet the theory of natural rights is most loudly asserted by deists, agnostics, atheists, religious apostates, and others who support the complete secularization of society. Democratically elected governments are not more conducive to justice and personal liberty than dynastical monarchies –the exact opposite is far closer to the truth.

As wrong-headed as the founders of liberalism were, none of them believed that the practical unfolding of their ideas would mean that democratic-bureaucratic governments would have to fundamentally redefine a basic social institution like “marriage” so that homosexuals could be considered “equal” with heterosexuals. Most of them would probably be very shocked to hear that such a decision was being hailed as a triumph of their ideas. John Stuart Mill, if he had been able to peer into the future and see this day, would undoubtedly have jumped up and down in anger, pulled out his hair, and burned his manuscripts rather than publish them.

How then did we arrive at where we are today?

In the early 20th Century intellectuals from various fields attacked traditional Western sexual morality. The father of psychoanalysis, Dr. Sigmund Freud, argued that neuroses are caused by too severe repression of basic instinctual drives such as the sexual libido, on the part of the individual super-ego shaped by parental authority and the cultural super-ego’s ethical system. (1) Dr. Margaret Mead, one of the first cultural anthropologists, in her first book Coming of Age in Samoa, claimed to have found a culture in which virtually complete sexual tolerance and freedom led to an easy adolescent transition to well-adjusted adulthood and a peaceful, non-violent society.(2)

In the second half of the 20th Century, the Sexual Revolution took place. The intellectual leaders of the revolution, were men like Herbert Marcuse, the author of Eros and Civilization. (3) Marcuse, an intellectual of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, took Freud’s theories and added a Marxist dimension of class conflict to them (sexual repression was a tool of the oppressors to keep the working class in subjection).

The Sexual Revolution demanded “liberation” from the “oppressive” sexual morality of the past (Christian sexual ethics). Sex, the argument went, was there to be enjoyed, if you don’t like it don’t do it, but don’t try to tell others what to do because it is none of your business, it is a completely private, personal matter.

That refrain is still being sung today.

A Caricature of the Past

For most of the people who joined the sexual liberation movement it was not about psychology or class struggle, however, but about “having fun”. Sex was fun, and traditional rules unnecessarily got in the way of that fun.

Thus, to the young people looking for “free love” in the 1960’s – and the decades after – the Roman Catholic Church, the Puritans, the Victorians, and everyone else associated with traditional, middle-class, sexual morality were all party-poopers, whose sole purpose and enjoyment in life, was preventing other people from having fun.

The sexual revolutionaries seldom took the time to examine what traditional sexual morality actually said or what the reasoning behind it was. Even today, one still hears the traditional Christian view of sex summed up by its opponents as “sex is sinful”, or, if the sexual libertarian is somewhat more informed “sex is a necessary evil, justifiable only for procreation, the enjoyment of it is sinful”.

No orthodox Christian Church ever taught any such rot.

That is, however, how one would expect the Christian doctrine to look to someone who has embraced the dangerous view of sex which traditional morality warns against. That is the view that sex is primarily, or solely, a matter of personal enjoyment, and that its procreative aspects are at best secondary.

To deliberately separate procreation from sex and to make the latter the servant of one’s personal enjoyment, orthodox Christianity teaches, is to embrace death over life.

That orthodox Christianity is right about this is empirically verifiable.

Birds and Bees 101

What is sex?

The word “sex” is often used in reference to the physical expression of erotic love. In this usage “sex” is shorthand for “sexual intercourse”. It is more proper to speak of sex as a characteristic or trait of a species of living beings. Some species are sexual, others are not. A sexual species is divided into two sexes, male and female, which produce distinct gametes (sex cells) which unite to produce a new member of the species. In some species this takes place outside the body. In other species it occurs within the body of one of the sexes. In human beings it occurs inside the body of the female.

Sexual intercourse is the way this takes place. Like many other species, the human sexes are equipped with complementary genitals. Two things are complements of each other when they form a whole when brought together. Male and female genitals are functional complements. The human male has an external, tube shaped, sex organ, the penis, which is connected to the testicles which produce the male gamete. The corresponding organ in the human female is an internal cavity in which the penis is placed. The cavity is called the vagina – which is the Latin word for “sheath” if the way the two organs are complementary to each other is still unclear to anyone.

Human sexual intercourse occurs when a man places his penis inside a woman’s vagina. When the two sex organs rub against each other it produces sexual pleasure, which causes the male to ejaculate sperm into the vagina, which then swim into the uterus and up the Fallopian tubes in search of an egg. If the timing is right – for the ovaries release eggs according to a set cycle, not whenever coitus leads to an orgasm – the sperm will fertilize an egg, and the combined gametes will becomes a zygote, then an embryo, which will attach itself to the uterus and develop into a foetus.

I have given you this refresher in basic reproductive biology because there are two obvious conclusions which must be drawn from all of this which the dominant political ideology of the day forbids us to draw.

The first, is that the reason human beings are sexual, and thus capable of entering into and enjoying sexual intercourse, is not the personal sensual gratification of individuals, but the reproduction of the species.

The second, is that while the pleasure of sexual intercourse can be simulated by placing the penis in some other orifice not intended for that purpose or by sticking something other than a penis in a vagina, these activities are not sexual intercourse (for that expression requires the bringing together of male and female to possess any meaning) and are not equal to sexual intercourse, but are rather inferior imitations of it.

An Important Distinction


I said that the purpose of sex (the distinction between male and female) and sexual intercourse is reproduction and not the personal sensual gratification of individuals. This is not the same thing as saying that it is wrong to enjoy sex (the aforementioned way in which the traditional position is caricatured by sexual libertarians).
It does, however, say a tremendous amount about contemporary thinking on sex.

If our being sexual beings who possess the capacity for sexual intercourse is for the purpose of the reproduction of our species and not for our personal gratification then it is obviously wrong to say “sex is a private matter and none of your business”. The exact opposite, as a matter of fact, is the case.

If our sexuality exists to serve the reproductive needs of our species – and it does – then the say of the species, society, and family are all more important than that of the individual when it comes to sex. For their survival depends upon sex – the survival of the individual does not. The individual person sustains his existence through a separate process of cell division and replacement that occurs entirely within his own body. The family, however, survives through sexually reproducing a new generation, and the same is true of all higher forms of social organization, and ultimately of the human species itself.

This is why parents put pressure on their grown children to marry and produce grandchildren. The survival of the family is at stake. We would see this more clearly if we had not, unfortunately, reduced the concept of the family to its nuclear minimum.

The sexual revolution took place alongside the development of efficient contraceptives. It would be a pointless “chicken-and-egg” argument to debate which produced which as the two occurrences mutually influenced each other. In developing contraception mankind used technology to artificially make sexual intercourse into what the sexual libertarians wanted it to be – something which is all about personal gratification, or “having fun”. The development of contraception was at best a highly morally questionable use of technology. At worst is was a purely evil pact with death on the part of our societies.

When Eros = Thanatos

Everything seems to have happened at once. The development of effective contraception, the sexual liberation movement demanding that traditional, middle-class, Western, sexual morality be replaced with something closer to “free love”, the feminist attack on motherhood, and the general attack on fatherhood. All of these things were inseparable from one another.

They all took place immediately after the spike in Western fertility that occurred after World War II. The “Baby Boom” began in the late 1940’s, a year or two after Germany and Japan were defeated, and extended into the middle of the 1960’s. The exact years vary from country to country. The explanation for the rise in fertility is fairly straightforward. Great Britain, Canada, the United States, and the other Western countries needed to replenish their populations after the global conflict had severely depleted them.

The Baby Boom ended, however, in the midst of the sexual revolution. Fertility rates dropped in Western countries – generally to below population replacement level – and have for the most part remained low ever since.

The populations of Western societies are aging rapidly and the ruling classes of those societies, instead of promoting natalism to encourage reproduction, have opted to replace their people with immigrants instead.

Western societies, in other words, are dying.

Traditional Christian morality is vindicated. To deliberately eliminate procreation from sex and lower it to the level of personal gratification, is to turn your back on life and embrace a culture of death.

Matters have only gotten worse since the 1960s. The invention of effective contraception was followed by the demand for legal abortion, and where legislatures were slow to act, that demand was met by courts of law. Now we have the demand that societies grant acceptance, recognition, and status to same-sex couples equal to that given to couples consisting of a potential father and mother with those making the demand inanely insisting that it would be “unjust” to deny this to same-sex couples because it is their “right”.

Our societies are dying, and the same progressive nincompoops who have insisted against observable and obvious fact, that society should have no say in sex, the means by which a society sustains its existence, are demanding that our societies treat as “equal” to procreative, heterosexual, marriage, a sterile imitation of such, which drastically lowers the average life expectation of those who engage in it (a fact ignored by the progressive health freaks who have crusaded to drive tobacco smoking from every public building and in some cases the outdoors).

What about Overpopulation?

At this point someone is likely to bring up the question of overpopulation.

Is it not irresponsible to condemn contraception and non-procreative sex when there is a risk of exceeding the carrying capacity of our ecosystem thus condemning large numbers of people to the sickness, war, and starvation that overpopulation brings on?

It is tempting to easily dismiss this concern as nonsensical scaremongering. In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, (4) Paul R. Ehrlich predicted that all sorts of disasters would occur in the next two decades as a result of overpopulation, and the prediction turned out to be about as accurate as those made by Harold Camping. We should, however, resist this temptation. Deplorable as Ehrlich’s irresponsible, eco-fearmongering was, the fundamental concept of ecological limits is sound. Human beings are not infinite beings and we do not live in an infinite world. We are limited beings living in a limited world.

Traditional Christian sexual ethics, however, will not produce overpopulation. Far better than any artificial, state program of population control drawn up by soulless bureaucrats, traditional ethics guides people between the Scylla of overpopulation and the Charybdis of underpopulation. Christian moral restraint was, in fact, the solution proposed by the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, the Anglican priest whose 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population written in response to the progressive optimism of William Godwin predicted an overpopulation crisis. (5) As is the case with Ehrlich a century and a half later, Malthus’ forecast of famine, disease, and war brought on by overpopulation had failed to materialize. This is because his calculations were based upon extrapolations from the then current rate of population growth and rate of growth in agricultural production which failed to take into account advancements in agricultural production which Malthus had not foreseen. Malthus’ basic theory, however, that once a population grows beyond the capacity of its resources to feed it, its numbers will be reduced in extremely unpleasant ways, is sound. The naïve notion that advancements in science and technology will always be able to ward off the consequences of population growth in excess of available resources involves a foolish faith in mankind’s limited abilities – especially foolish in that at science and technology “progress” the economy is transformed along with them so that what were once luxuries, become “needs”, which increases our overall consumption of resources.

This is yet one more reason why the idea that sex is an entirely “personal” matter in which society should have no say is wrong.

20th and 21st Century prophets of an apocalyptic doom by overpopulation have generally not followed Malthus in recommending moral, sexual, responsibility. Instead they have embraced the culture of death – contraception, abortion, in some cases infanticide, and euthanasia. These things, however, are no solution. They create the opposite problem – shrinking and aging populations in dying societies.

The tendency, in the 20th and 21st centuries has been to think of population size and ecology in global terms and to regard immigration as a partial solution to both the problems of societies who are not adequately reproducing themselves, such as post-Baby Boom Western societies, and the problems of societies that are poor and crowded, such as Third World countries. This is not a solution to either problem, however. When a society adopts replacing its people as a long-term alternative to reproducing them it accelerates its march towards its own death. (6) Furthermore, when a society sees emigration as the solution to crowding, that reduces the incentive to reproduce responsibly.

Dr. Garrett Hardin, who was Professor of Human Ecology at the University of California in Santa Barbara recognized that immigration was no solution and that “thinking globally” was part of the problem. He recommended that societies look upon themselves as lifeboats, with limited resources, adrift on the sea, arguing that population problems could only be solved on a local scale rather than a global one. (7)

Dr. Virginia Deane Abernethy, Professor of Psychiatry and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, in her book Population Politics demonstrated that foreign aid and immigration add to, rather than solve the problem of overpopulation in poor countries, by refuting the Demographic Transition Model which argues that as fertility rates decrease after a society transitions to a modern standard of living. She demonstrates, to the contrary, that the historical pattern throughout the world is for fertility rates to rise with the standard of living. The experience of Western countries in the 20th Century would seem to conflict with this, but Dr. Abernethy argues that the deciding factor is optimism/pessimism about what the future holds for prospective children. The long period of below population replacement level fertility in Western countries, she attributes to pessimism in the middle classes. If this seems questionable, remember that the rising levels of consumption in recent decades have not been brought upon by an equivalent rising level of income (real wages were in fact in decline for the middle classes for much of this same period) but by easy credit and debt. (8)

Dr. Abernathy also shows, interestingly, how traditional ways of life, Western and otherwise, include cultural brakes on population growth that help prevent overpopulation. Where the Demographic Transition Model predicts lower fertility as a result of the transition to modernism, Dr. Abernethy shows that modernism, by removing such brakes, tends rather to have the opposite effect, contributing to overpopulation. (9)

Which brings us back to Rev. Malthus. Why did he argue that traditional Christian moral restraint was the best way of maintaining a balanced population level?

The basic Christian sexual ethic is that sexual intercourse is reserved for married couples. In traditional Christian societies, marriage was not something two individuals just decided to do on a whim. It was customary for a man to seek permission from his prospective bride’s father to marry her. To obtain that permission the man generally had to prove that he was capable of supporting her and their future offspring.

When it is considered sinful and shameful to have sexual intercourse outside of marriage and when marriage requires paternal consent that is ordinarily conditioned upon evidence of ability to provide it is highly unlikely that a population will grow beyond the carrying capacity of its territory. It is true that there was never a time when these rules were kept perfectly, and that individuals will always trying to find ways to get around the rules and beat the system. That is not a good argument for getting rid of the system, however. Just because it may not work perfectly does not mean it doesn’t work at all.

Christianity’s rules about keeping sexual intercourse within marriage and its support for the patriarchal family and paternal authority, work to prevent overpopulation in societies that adopt these rules. Christianity’s rules against deliberately removing the potential for reproduction in sex via contraception, abortion, or homosexuality, work to prevent underpopulation in societies that adopt these rules.

The Attack on Fathers

Wyndham Lewis wrote that “The male, the Father, is in all these revolutions, the enemy.” (10) Neo-Marxist revolutionary thinker Herbert Marcuse would seem to agree: “The primal father, as the archetype of domination, initiates the chain reaction of enslavement, rebellion, and reinforced domination which marks the history of civilization”. (11) This is as true of the Sexual Revolution as any other, and perhaps more so than of others. An attack upon traditional Christian rules regarding sexual behavior will inevitably be connected with attacks upon motherhood and fatherhood.

We have seen above how closely paternal authority and the Christian sexual ethic are connected in producing reproductive responsibility. We have seen how the abandonment of traditional Christian ethics leads to either underpopulation or overpopulation. What does the abandonment of paternal authority produce?

In North America today, the segments of our societies which have high percentages of mother-led, father-absent households tend to be characterized by multi-generational extreme poverty, dependence upon government assistance, illiteracy, violence, and crime. These are the characteristics of what we might call an “underclass” as opposed to merely a lower class. This is not to say that every family headed by a single-mother is going to exhibit these symptoms. It greatly depends upon whether this kind of situation is the exception or the norm within the community to which the family belongs. It does show, that the presence and leadership of a father is important.

Among black Americans, for example, the level of absentee fatherhood is one of the key distinctions between those living in poverty, in crime-ridden sections of the inner-city on the one hand, and the black middle class, previous generations of poor blacks, and rural blacks on the other. That this is a major contributing factor to the social problems these people face is difficult to deny, and comedian Bill Cosby and politician Barack Obama have both spoken out about it.

What does that have to do with Sex?

If it seems that absentee-fathers is a topic rather far removed from the one we started with, remember what I said about sex at the beginning. Sex is more than just the activity we call sexual intercourse – it is a basic character trait of our (and other) species. The traditional view of sex that we have been defending is not just a set of rules about copulation. Our society has traditional expectations of the members of each sex. Motherhood is part of what is expected from women, and fatherhood is part of what is expected from men. The revolution demands, in the name of the “freedom” of the sexless, generic, individual, both release from traditional moral expectations with regards to sexual behavior and release from gender role expectations for males and females alike. The revolution insisted that these things were all matters to be experimented with and tampered with and that no negative consequences to such experimenting and tampering would ever occur.

The state of New York’s recent decision is simply the latest in a set of triumphs for that revolutionary way of thinking. Progressives mock at the idea that there could be any detrimental effects upon society from pretending that an erotic relationship between a man and a man (or between a woman and a woman) is a marriage worthy of being treated as equal to a true marriage by the state and society. There is a sense in which they are partially right – this sort of thing is more a symptom than a disease, an indicator of damage that has already been done. (12)

The progressives, however, in their moment of triumph remain blind to the basic facts of reality.

Every human being is born to a mother after having been sired by a father. Human beings are not born capable of fending for themselves but require years of raising which is best done by a mother and a father in cooperation. The primary purpose of sex, both the activity and the trait, is the reproduction of the species. Since the species, society, and family depend upon sex for their continued existence whereas “individuals” do not, the species, society, and family all have a stake in sex which sis greater than that of individual persons, particularly individual persons who wish to reduce it to being an instrument for their personal sensual gratification. The use of technology and medical science to make sex purely about “having fun” is an abuse of technology that leads to death for families and societies. The natural sexual use of a penis is to place it inside a vagina and the natural sexual use of a vagina is to be penetrated by a penis. These two organs are clearly designed to function together in this way – it is their nature, and it is in this sense that we say this is natural. While the sensual effect of this can be simulated in other ways by two members of the same sex, this is not natural. It is a fallacious and dishonest counter-argument to point to examples of same-sex coitus observable among non-moral animal species because this is a completely different meaning of the word “natural”, i.e., “in nature”. Human beings are the moral animal species, meaning that we are supposed to be guided in our behavior by something higher than instinct and what other animals may or may not do, and preferably higher than the pursuit of personal pleasure. It is foolish therefore to argue that those who prefer, for whatever reason, to copulate with members of their own sex, are engaging in an activity/relationship that is equal to the natural relationship of a man and woman.

The purpose of this essay has been to show just how ridiculous, absurd, and nonsensical is the progressive claim that sex is a “private matter” that does not concern anyone other than the copulating couple themselves. What is absurd about the idea of sex as a purely “private matter” is the idea that it has no effects on or consequences for anyone other than the couple themselves. This notion is absurd, because sex and reproduction, is a matter of life or death, for the family, the society and the species, although it is not a matter of life or death for the couple themselves. Describing sex as a “private matter” can also simply mean that it is to take place in private away from the eyes of other people. It would be foolish to argue with this. Saying that the species, society, and family have a greater interest in sex than the particular couple does not, therefore, translate into the idea that the species, society, or family should have an agent in the bedroom to ensure the groups’ interests are represented.

Resurrecting the Christian sexual ethic, outside of the subculture to which modernism and liberalism have reduced the Western Church (and it needs resurrection in large areas of that subculture as well) can not be accomplished by anything short of a miracle. A widespread revival of religion may be the only practical hope our society has of returning to sanity. This cannot be accomplished by political efforts and the actions of the state.

This does not mean there are no political steps which traditionalists can take to partially alleviate the problem. Take the matter of education for example. Our opponents accuse us of wanting to commandeer the schools to try and force our moral agenda on the students. To refer to Dr. Freud again, they are projecting, for this is exactly what the progressives have done. They hide this fact in plain sight, by using terms like “rational” and “scientific” to cloak their agenda. It is, however, no secret that progressives have turned the public education system against the authority of parents and the Church, the traditional moral authorities most likely to wish to and try to instill in their children the ethics we have been defending. This is the point of what is misleadingly called “sex education” in the schools. It is also the point of the current form of public education itself in which schools are less seen as local institutions answerable to the parents of the community than as education branches of centralized, bureaucratic, states. Insisting upon the devolution of educational authority back to local communities and to parents would be an appropriate and helpful political step we can take, as alternative forms of education are not affordable to everyone who does not want their children brainwashed by the progressives and their ally the democratic/bureaucratic mass state.

With regards to laws and morality, the efforts of most social conservatives have been seriously misguided in the last three or four decades, because they have allowed their efforts to be shaped by a belief in popular democracy and in the existence of a silent “moral majority”. Popular democracy, in the sense of referring all issues to plebiscites, and insisting upon “majority rule”, is no friend of the civilized order and liberty, conservatives claim to believe in.

As with the educational system, so with public legislation, traditionalists and other social conservatives should concentrate their efforts on breaking the monopoly on power held by the central state. Abstract ethics are fairly useless apart from a social order that embodies and transmits those ethics, and a social order that embodies and transmits the ethics we want, is one in which real authority is diffused throughout society, and embodied in such traditional authority figures as fathers in the family, clergy in the Church, teachers acting in loco parentis in locally controlled local schools, elders in the community, etc. The authority of such figures has declined as the central state has become increasingly democratic and bureaucratic and in the process of becoming such has sought to concentrate all power in itself.

The diffusion of authority throughout society, in such traditional authority figures, would both strengthen the traditional social order that the democratic/bureaucratic central state of mass society seems determined to kill, and promote and safeguard real personal liberty, as opposed to the kind of “personal liberty” the sexual revolutionaries have demanded, the true character of which, Aldous Huxley warned us about decades ago. (13)

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more. - Kipling

(1) Dr. Freud had a great deal to say about sexuality. In his Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie which was first published in 1905 and heavily revised throughout Freud’s life, his most sensationalist and controversial theories on the subject can be found. The standard English version of this work is the translation by James Strachey entitled Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. This book would be controversial, if it came out for the first time today, for completely different reasons than when it was first published (the author would be in danger of prosecution for hate crimes over the first essay). Tempting as it is to discuss at great length Dr. Freud’s theories as to how the development of our sexual identity since early infancy shapes our behavior as adults, I refer to this book only because of its statement of the libido theory. Of greater interest is Freud’s Das Unbehagen In Der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents) first published, in German and in English, in 1930. By the time this book came out, late in Dr. Freud’s career, Dr. Freud had moved from the conscious/subconscious model of the mind which features strongly in his early theories to the structural model of id-ego-superego. In this model the id consists of basic natural instincts that are guided by the pleasure principle. Ego, which gradually develops, is the part of the mind which analyzes its surroundings and makes decisions based upon rational self-interest, repressing the demands of the id in accordance with the reality principle. The superego, is the moral part of the mind, which suppresses both the instinctual demands of the id and at times the rational self-interest of the ego in accordance with a set of rules regarding right and wrong behavior instilled in the mind by parents, teachers, and society in general. In Civilization and its Discontents Dr. Freud draws an “analogy between the process of civilization and the path of individual development” and asserts “that the community, too, evolves a super-ego under whose influence cultural development proceeds” (p. 88). He identifies ethics as a set of demands, the cultural super-ego has set up, concerning “the relations of human beings to one another”. (p. 89). Dr. Freud criticizes the super-ego, both individual and cultural, for being too severe in its demands, producing a revolt in the form of neurosis. Interestingly, the command he choses to highlight as an example of this is “love thy neighbor as thyself”, which he argues is the cultural super-egos answer to the problem of aggression, but which “causes as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself” (p. 9) because it is a standard impossible to fulfil. Dr. Freud deliberately refuses to answer the question he has raised of whether civilization, which he argues cannot exist apart from this process, is worth it. The editions of both of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Civilization and its Discontents consulted are the James Strachey translations of both, the former in the 1965 Avon Library edition, the latter in the 1961 W. W. Norton & Co. edition.

(2) Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, (Dell Publishing: New York, 1968). The first edition was published by William Morrow and Company in 1928. The focus of Dr. Mead’s study was the adolescent girl in a tribal society on the island of Ta’u in the Samoan archipelago. The chapter that is most relevant is chapter seven entitled “Formal Sex Relations”. It reads like an attempt to evade the obvious in order to bolster an ideological point. Only a paragraph before she asserts the Samoans “complete skepticism” towards Christianity’s “moral premium on chastity” she has already stated that virginity is a “legal requirement” for the taupo, the ceremonial princess of a village (pp. 81-82). Dr. Mead says this is an exception to the “free and easy experimentation” she claims is the norm in these villages. “These girls of noble birth are carefully guarded; not for them are the secret trysts at night or stolen meetings in the day time. Where parents of lower rank complacently ignore their daughters' experiments, the high chief guards his daughter’s virginity as he guards the honour of his name, his precedence in the kava ceremony or any other prerogative of his high degree.” (p. 83). If ideology is behind the way in which Dr. Mead presented her findings, however, there is a question of what that ideology is. A comparison of the last paragraph of her introduction and that of the foreword contributed by her mentor Franz Boas, would suggest two different possibilities. Dr. Mead wrote “And from this contrast we may be able to turn, made newly and vividly self-conscious and self-critical, to judge anew and perhaps fashion differently the education we give our children” (p. 25). By this she meant that we should lighten up on our strict rules against sexual experimentation. Dr. Boas, however, wrote “The results of her painstaking investigation confirm the suspicion long held by anthropologists, that much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilization” (p. 10). By “long held by anthropologists”, Dr. Boas meant long held by himself. Boas was himself the founder of the school of anthropology that thought that way. Trained as a physicist in Germany, he worked as a geologist before moving to the United States, where he became professor of anthropology at Columbia University. Physical anthropology was already well established as a discipline at the time, in the United States, but physical anthropologists tended to take the nature side, in the “nature vs. nurture” debate. At that time, the nature side was prevailing due to the influence of Charles Darwin and his cousin Sir Francis Galton. Dr. Boaz was a life-long opponent of this view. Dr. Mead’s book helped him to establish the environmental/cultural alternative within his new discipline of cultural anthropology at about the same time that the behaviorism of John Watson and B. F. Skinner, which promoted a similar view of human nature, was taking over the discipline of psychology. The environmentalist view would dominate the social sciences until seriously challenged by Noam Chomsky, Edward O. Wilson, and others in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. In 1983 Margaret Mead in Samoa: the Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth by New Zealand anthrpologist Derek Freeman was published by Harvard University Press. This book demonstrated how the society Dr. Mead wrote about, simply didn’t resemble her depiction of it in many important aspects. Dr. Freeman would later record an interview with a woman who had been one of the Samoan girls who had given Dr. Mead much of her information.. She admitted to making much of the stuff up. This became the basis of Dr. Freeman’s follow up book entitled The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research published by Basic Books in 1999.

(3) Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), originally published by the Beacon Press in 1955. Of Freud, Marcuse writes “The concept of man that emerges from Freudian theory is the most irrefutable indictment of Western civilization—and at the same time the most unshakable defense of this civilization.” (p,. 11) Dr. Freud, as we have seen (note 1) deliberately left the question of whether civilization was worth the repression he claims is essential to it, open. Marcuse, on the other hand, was openly a revolutionary. He was a member of the so-called “Frankfurt School”, i.e. the Institute for Social Research, a neo-Marxist thinktank founded at the University of Frankfurt in 1923, which relocated to Columbia University in the United States for a few decades beginning in the 1930’s. Marcuse became an American citizen and did not return to Germany when the Institute moved back to Frankfurt in 1951. The Frankfurt School specialized in what they called “Critical Theory”, which was an attempt to further the cause of Marxist revolution by undermining the legitimacy of the culture which held bourgeois society together. To do so it incorporated ideas from a broad spectrum of intellectual disciplines, including Freudian psychoanalysis. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse borrowed ideas from Freud, while challenging Freud’s basic viewpoint that civilization can only be achieved through the repression of the basic instincts of the id. He believed in a "non-repressive culture" which "aims at a new relation between instincts and reason" (p. 180) His answer to Freud's position that "the lasting interpersonal relations on which civilization depends presuppose that the sex instinct is inhibited in its aim" (p. 183) is that his "non-repressive instinctual order" will involve "not simply a release but a transformation of the libido: from sexuality constrained under genital supremacy to erotization of the entire personality" (p. 184). This is just the same old progressive belief that human nature is malleable putty for the social engineer to play with. The phrase "erotization of the entire personality" does seem to describe, however, a change which the Sexual Revolution has brought about. The beneficial results of this, which Marcuse so confidently predicted, have not appeared, although negative consequences are apparant all around us.

(4) Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).

(5) Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, 1798). The first edition was published anonymously. It would be later expanded and revised a number of times. It can be read online at: http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPlong.html.

(6) Gerry T. Neal, “The Suicide Cult”, February 5, 2011, http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/02/suicide-cult.html

(7) Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor”, Psychology Today, September, 1974. http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_lifeboat_ethics_case_against_helping_poor.html

(8) Virginia D. Abernethy, Population Politics, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000), first published by Plenum Press in 1993. See chapter 3 “Belief as Part of the Problem” for the refutation of the Demographic Transition Model. See chapter 15 “History Does Not Stop” for her analysis of post-WWII fertility trends. In this chapter she demonstrates both how the post-WWII Baby Boom contradicts the predictions of the Demographic Transition Model and how the decline in fertility after the Baby Boom can be explained by economic pessimism. For the latter, see especially the section titled “Fertility and Moderating Expectations” on pages 201-202. Dr. Abernethy writes “Family-size preferences fell when upward mobility stalled, schools got overcrowded so that new ones had to be built, and taxes rose to pay for new schools and other infrastructure. Women saw themselves as victimized and infantalized by constant childcare, but nursemaids were beyond most budgets. Most people in the 1960s saw their standard of living rising at a slower rate. They sensed that children cost a lot relative to their present and future value. Soon, middle-class couples concluded that two children were about right.” She then goes on in the next section to show how welfare-state social programs have created a “very marked biomodal distribution” in fertility rates – “low in the middle class and substantially higher among the poor.”

(9) Ibid. See chapter 4 “Cultural Brakes” and chapter 5 “Where to look for balance”.

(10) Wyndham Lewis, The Doom of Youth, (New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1932) p. 48.

(11) Marcuse, op. cit., p. 15. See also chapter five "The Origin of Repressive Civilization (Phylogenesis), particularly page 55 and following.

(12) Gerry T. Neal, “Love and Marriage”, August 19, 2010, http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2010/08/love-and-marriage.html

(13) I am referring to Huxley’s Brave New World. One of the major themes of this novel, stated directly in the author’s preface to the 1948 edition, is that “As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase.”

The Authority of Fathers

Authority has been in decline in Western civilization for centuries. The liberal dogma of individualism is widely accepted as received truth, despite the many ways in which it conflicts with observable reality. The authority of kings as God’s ministers of justice, the Apostolic authority of the Church, and the authority of all other traditional, social institutions, has been badly eroded. This is true even in the case of the most basic social institution of them all, the family. Parental authority in the family has come under severe attack, an attack which has intensified over the last century. This is especially true of patriarchal authority – the authority of fathers.

God said “Honour thy father and thy mother”. We have dedicated one day of the year each to our parents with which to honour them with our lips. We honour our mothers in May. Now, on the third Sunday of June, it is our fathers turn to have a day of their own. Having “honoured” our parents, we consider our duty to be done, and promptly ignore them for the rest of the year. For some reason I think this is not what God had in mind when He issued the first commandment with a promise.

Much of the blame for the recent decline in respect for fathers and their authority must be laid at the feet of television. The invention of television was a tremendous step in the development of propaganda techniques. It made it possible for moving pictures and accompanying sound to be broadcast throughout a region and viewed by people in their own homes. Television's potential as an instrument of social change was immediately apparent to social engineers and political radicals.

How are fathers usually depicted on television? Does television support the traditional role of the father as an authority figure in the family?

No. If a television program is about a traditional, middle-class, nuclear family, the father figure is typically portrayed as a boorish buffoon, the least intelligent person in the family, who only asserts his fatherly authority when he is obviously in the wrong. If, by chance, television portrays a father differently, that father is usually a sensitive “new male” and a political liberal or the family as a whole is an “alternative family” of some sort.

Can there be any doubt that this is done on purpose to undermine patriarchal authority?

This raises the question of why anyone would want to undermine the authority of fathers, creating instability in the family, leading to social chaos. The fact that someone does is indisputable. The question is why.

The answer to that question ultimately lies in the reason why the authority of the father in the family is important to society. Before we look at that, however, we should note that there is a prominent left-wing movement in society which has historically defined itself in opposition to father-authority. This same movement attacks motherhood as being an inferior choice for women to the pursuit of ambition and self-fulfillment in a professional career outside the home.

This movement is called feminism.

Feminism and Patriarchy


The technical term for the authority of fathers within the traditional family is patriarchy. This word comes from combining the Greek word for father with the Greek word for “rule”. Patriarchy, is the nominal enemy of the feminist movement.

I threw the qualifier “nominal” in for two reasons. The first reason is that what feminists mean when they use the word “patriarchy” is not what the word actually means. We will return to that momentarily. The second reason is that a good argument can be made that the real enemy of feminism is not patriarchy at all but rather femininity.

If that statement sounds outrageous to you then please bear me out as I attempt to explain what I mean by it. While the feminist movement cloaks its goals in the language of “rights”, “equality”, “dignity” and other such vapid totem expressions (1) its true goal, if we can judge from the positions it takes, the actions it calls for, and the policies it supports, is to eliminate femininity and masculinize women. Feminists accuse their opponents of believing that men are superior to women. This, however, is a classic case of what Dr. Freud called projection. The belief that men are superior to women is in fact the core belief of feminism.

Look, for example, at the absurdly titled “Women’s Liberation Movement” of the 1960’s. This movement demanded a number of things, such as universal government-provided daycare and the full legalization of abortion.

What did feminism hope to gain from such things?

It is the nature of things, that the consequences of sexual intercourse are not divided equally between men and women. A man can walk away from it with no lasting consequences other than moral and spiritual ones. This is not true of a woman. Pregnancy occurs within the female body and if a woman becomes pregnant that means nine months of bearing the growing child within her womb, and then, because the child is born dependent, a much longer period of nursing and raising the child.

The traditional way in which society addressed this situation was through moral and civil regulations that demanded that men shoulder their fair share of the burden of raising the next generation. Society demanded that men marry the women who bore their children and that they provide for their wives and children.

Feminism, however, took the radically opposite position that the situation should be alleviated by having government daycare freely available to all mothers and by allowing women to terminate their pregnancies at whim. Thus, a woman would be able to walk away from sexual intercourse with no lasting consequences other than moral and spiritual ones, just like a man.

What clearly lies behind the feminist position here is the idea that it is far better to be a man – to be able to walk away from sex with no baggage – than to be a woman. Therefore in the name of equality, the government must artificially make it possible for a woman to be like a man.

Feminism, which purports to be a serious movement seeking the redress of injustices against women, is in reality little more than a feminine equivalent of the mindset of a poorly raised, hormone-driven, adolescent boy.

There was, of course, another motivation that lay behind feminism’s demand for tax-funded daycare and abortion. If women were allowed to terminate unwanted pregnancies whenever they so desired and to have government institutions raise their children for them, then women could pursue careers outside the home and not be hindered, in competition with men in the workplace, by the burden of raising children.

This, however, just further illustrates my point. Feminism’s idea that finding self-fulfillment in careers outside of the home would be better for women than staying home and being wives and mothers is a manifestation of the idea that men are superior to women. For what was feminism saying here if not that the work men did outside the home in order to support their families, was more meaningful and important, than what women did in bearing and raising children?

In all of this feminism displayed an immature mindset that is only explicable as a counterpart to the irresponsible attitudes that were becoming popular among the male population at the time, brought upon in part by the naïve progressive notion that advances in the development of technology had rendered the maturity and responsibility society demanded of both sexes in the past to be obsolete.

Wisdom is something that people gradually gain as they mature and get older. This is as true of societies as it is of individual persons, and for this reason it is the uttermost foolishness to disregard the accumulated wisdom of the past. Society’s traditional response to the difference between the sexes in natural consequences to sexual intercourse was not based upon the idea that men had gotten the better end of the deal than women. For that idea would itself have to include the idea that it is more desirable to live entirely for yourself and to sleep around with no commitments to anyone than to settle down and raise a family. That is an idea which reflects immaturity and selfishness rather than wisdom. Traditional societies were wisely, more concerned with making men behave maturely, responsibly, and wisely, than making it easier for women to behave immaturely, irresponsibly, and foolishly.

Traditional societies also displayed wisdom in assigning roles to men and women. These roles differed from society to society and at different stages in the development of a particular society in accordance with economic, political, and social circumstances. Whatever the circumstances, however, the difference between the role assigned to men and that assigned to women was centred around the basic fact that women get pregnant and bear children which they give birth to and nourish, and men do not. Societies guided by ancient tradition are too wise to treat this difference as trivial. Whatever else women might do can never be more important to a society than the bearing and raising of the next generation. Therefore, whatever role a society assigns to women, it will be one that does not hinder or interfere with motherhood.

Thus, in a society which survives by hunting and gathering, the role of gathering is assigned to women because it allows them to stay near the camp with the children and the role of hunting is assigned to men. When agriculture becomes the dominant means of survival the roles change to accommodate the new economy as they do again when mercantile trading and industrial manufacturing are developed. These changes affect the kind of labour required of both men and women. What does not change is that the labour required of women is that which least conflicts with motherhood.

Feminists refuse to see the wisdom in this. Instead, they see traditional gender roles, including the roles of father and mother, as a system of societal organization designed to benefit all males by oppressing all women. This is what feminists mean when they use the word “patriarchy”. (2)

Patriarchal authority is essential to Western Civilization

The term patriarchy, however, more accurately refers to the authority of fathers than to a supposed millennia-long conspiracy on the part of all men to oppress all women. The authority of fathers has come under attack, not only from feminists, but from revolutionaries of all stripes. Painter, novelist, and social critic Wyndham Lewis, wrote in the 1930s that the father is the enemy of all revolutionary movements because he “has been cast to represent authority”. (3)

A father’s authority exists and is exercised within the family. The family is the basic building block from which all societies are built. It is the smallest, most organic, form of social organization that exists. Other offices of authority within Western societies tend to be patterned after a father’s authority. Sir Robert Filmer, in his Patriarchia, argued from the authority of fathers to the natural authority of kings.

Wyndham Lewis was therefore correct. The father, as the traditional authority figure in the traditional family, is the embodiment of all traditional authority in Western society and therefore the primary target of those who see traditional Western civilization as standing in the way of progress.

The attack upon patriarchal authority has never been stronger than at the present moment. The current campaign to glorify the single mother is a blatant attempt to declare fathers to be superfluous and unwanted. After traditional motherhood was bashed for decades, as being an inferior, boring option to the glamour of an ambitious career now motherhood is presented to women as an empowering choice – especially if it is out of wedlock and by artificial insemination.

Fathers are not redundant and unnecessary however. Studies have shown what common sense has always told us – that children are happier and far more likely to develop into responsible, law-abiding, socially-integrated adults, if they grow up in a home with both a father and a mother. Sometimes circumstances are such that this cannot be the case but it is madness to encourage women to deliberately have children without a father and to consider a father “optional”. That the deception of the non-importance of fatherhood has been able to spread at all is due to the modern state’s having turned itself into a surrogate husband/father.

Unfortunately there is no strong movement of resistance to these attacks nor any indication that one is about to arise. The “conservative” response to feminism today consists largely of complaints that its original “good” intentions have been de-railed by anti-male radicals or worse, attempts to use feminist ideas to bolster support for military action against the Islamic world. The “men’s movement” is a masculine equivalent of feminism. It is devoted to the idol of equality and speaks only the language of “rights”. Some Christian men’s groups have shown an interest in promoting traditional fatherhood. Many however, seem to be little more than support groups.

It is here that we see the single largest reason for the decline of fatherhood and patriarchal authority in the family and in society. Other than individual voices, both male and female, the traditionalist side has largely given up.

Why has this happened?

Authority and Responsibility

Authority and responsibility always go together. The word “father” describes a position that comes with both authority and responsibility. Traditionally, fathers would raise their sons to follow after them, in both shouldering the burden and responsibility of fatherhood, and exercising its authority wisely.

Responsibility is less appealing than authority, however, and at some point the liberating effect of technological advancement combined with the accumulation of a couple of centuries worth of liberal individualism to undermine the willingness of a great many men to take up the duties and responsibilities and burdens of fatherhood. Many of these still wished to exercise the authority – but found that in abandoning their duties they had given up their authority as well.

John Lukacs wrote:

In the 1960s American women found the predominance of the male fettering not because it was real but because it was unreal. They could not stomach those prerogatives of the male—including not only professional or intellectual prerogatives but also the protection habitually offered by the latter—that dated back to earlier centuries, when men were indeed strong. Now they saw—or, rather felt—that the men were weak. Just as the “revolt” of youth in the 1960s was, in reality, often a reaction not against “authoritarian” but against permissive fathers whom they could no longer respect, women, too, despite all of the silly slogans of “male chauvinism,” reacted against the assumption of strength and power on the part of their male counterparts, who were often weak. To be queen of a house in the times of a constitutional (that is, bourgeois) monarchy was one thing; but who would want to keep up the formal duties and the manifold responsibilities of a queen when the man of the household was but a chairman of a committee? (4)

Fatherhood still represents both authority and responsibility, and it is for that reason that so many men who dislike feminism, do not wish to stand against it from the position of defending traditional fatherhood.

Any other position, however, has already capitulated completely to the enemy.

(1) By “vapid totem expressions” I mean essentially meaningless terms that we are expected to mindlessly genuflect before whenever they are invoked by the enforced, secular, orthodoxy of the day.

(2) The feminists are not the only ones to use the word “patriarchy” to refer to a general system of male dominance. Dr. Steven Goldberg, who was the Professor of Sociology at City College of New York, in his The Inevitability of Patriarchy: Why the Biological Difference Between Men and Women Always Produces Male Dominance (William Morrow: New York, 1973) later expanded into Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance (Open Court: Chicago, 1993) uses the term patriarchy in a specialized, and therefore carefully defined, sense. He used it to refer to when all or the majority of the upper hierarchical positions in a society are occupied by males – which he argues occurs in every society. He documented the latter point from the studies of anthropologists and provided a theory as to why this was the case. He argued that societies will vary in what roles and positions are awarded the highest status, but that whatever those roles and positions are, men will have a greater interest in obtaining them then women, because men are biologically more aggressive than women. Since women are attracted to men with status, power, and wealth the incentives to compete for the highest positions will always be greater for men than for women.

(3) The quotation comes from The Doom of Youth, published by Robert M. McBride & Company of New York in 1932. This is a polemical collection of essays directed against the cult of youth. It was reissued in 1982 by Haskell House Publishers of New York.

(4) John Lukacs, A New Republic: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2004), p. 196.