The Straight Red Line (5): Love of Islam, Loathing of Self

~ Continued from Part 4: the Founders ~

The touching words quoted yesterday (here in entirety) were uttered by the Subjectivist [1] champion of the Collectivist Counter-Enlightenment movement: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). I regret to say we have no winner of Hicks' groundbreaking tome "Explaining Postmodernism".

Rousseau set the tone of the premise of mankind basically being good but corrupted by his environment, that we have come to know so well in Leftist thinking. In Rousseau's vision the world's trouble is caused by civilization, Reason and its fruits, knowledge and science. He's often quoted as a philosopher of the Enlightenment, but it is quite clear he rebelled against all the tenets of individual Liberalism, Reason, secularism and limited government.

In Rousseau we find the very source of our trouble with Postmodernism, but also the answer to many a vexed question:

- "why does the Left ally itself with Radical Islam against the permissive Liberal society that is of their own making and of which they are the prime beneficiary?", and

- "why should Western civilization be considered so uniquely bad?" and related:

- "what's with the self-hatred", in these pages often termed "Down With Us", or Operation Western Auto-Destruct, so often confessed to by our Postmodern Multiculturalists and directed against white, rich, hetero-sexual, Christian men in particular and Western society in general.

Earlier I suggested to have discovered the source of self-loathing in the Positivism of Auguste Comte. But in Rousseau we have yet an earlier Ground Zero.

Disappointed Marxists often return to the grandfather of Collectivist Anti-Reason, but when the Leftist press recently sabled the film '300', about the three hundred Spartans that defeated the Persian Army in 480 Before Christ - driven by Pacifism and love of anything that doesn't answer to the white, male litany, in casu the Greeks - they forgot to check back on their Classics, the pure, emotional Rousseau.

As opposed to the degradation of Athenian decadent Civilization generated by Reason, Rousseau glorified the militaristic Spartans as pure, unspoiled, noble tribesmen - their callous practice of exposing babies to nature may have even inspired him to expose his own five children to the hardships of the Paris orphanage.

Because to Rousseau, the more advanced a civilization, the more corrupted and corrupting it is. As a paradigm of Rousseauian thought we can envisage the Noble Savage, or man's fall from Paradise: the snake of old was often used as a symbol of wisdom; read 'reason' for 'wisdom' (not to be confused!) and you have Rousseau in a nut-shell.

More of his ideas inspired by the image of noble savagery is the divorce of Eros and Agapi, so highly prized by contemporary man and woman; and a distaste for compassion with others which would only generate more decadent civilization: this is reminiscent of the view that drove the Russian Revolution: one cannot create a workers' Paradise with sentimentality, at which point usually the village headmaster was made an example of.

Rousseau also inspired in Marx the use of the Leftist dichotomy of the Oppressor versus the Oppressed; and seems to have been the source of Postmodern Fallacy Number One: the world as a pie, the view of the zero-sum game, where it is inappropriate and fatal.

Rousseau as the source of Western self-loathing can be found in the vision of the noble, primordial world that is destroyed by man's civilizing force: Reason, knowledge, science, technology, art, aesthetics, property, and economy; man not only destroyed this pristine environment (!), he also became soft, fat and lazy, and created a social conflict: a few winners on top and a whole lot of losers at the base of the pyramid of power.

It's this inequality that is so damning in Rousseau's erroneous total-sum game! Far from considering contemporary Western society an engine of equality and a creator of wealth, it is seen by the Rousseau followers as doomed, the epitome of social pathologies! Down With It ... à la Lanterne! Presently the problem is our destruction of the environment by technology: it doesn't save it, it despoils it.

The West prides itself for what it considers progress. But for anyone who has invested completely in a world view seen as evil, amoral and utterly failed, this gloating is unbearable. So the fight isn't over for the KGB's ideologically demoralised remnants. The capitalist world's moral values are attacked as utterly sexist, racist, dogmatic, authoritarian, cruel, uniquely civilized - uniquely bad!

If Reason makes no sense to what you're saying as Reality clearly shows otherwise, attack Reason as pernicious and superfluous, and persuade the world that Reality doesn't exist!

Rousseau as the source of the revulsion for civilization unmasks Fjordman's correspondent at the University of Helsinki for the Postmodern vile hypocrites that Multiculturalists at heart are: sending the message that retaining culture should be a human right, when in fact they mean to destroy anything that can remotely be considered a 'civilization', favouring instead the long-lost ideal: Marx' pseudo religious red paradise, or by default, Rousseau's wild tabula rasa of the tribal society, so pure and self-sacrificial, possibly Islamic (apparently not considered civil enough to be damned).

But then again, Postmoderns have a relation to language, that Muslims also have when lying to infidels: language, not as a means to transfer information, but as a means to a usually bloody end: it is about effectiveness. This is part of the confusion: to Postmoderns language is not about objective Truth, which to them doesn't exist any way. Therefore language isn't used as an instrument of precision, but as a propaganda tool. A word of advice: never, ever, take a Postmodern's words literally: what is being said habitually requires a good deal of deconstructing before its meaning can be discerned - which they will then go on to reject as non-existent.

To Rousseau religion was a imperative, as we have seen in yesterday's puzzle contest. He had the intention of cutting a few individual heads in the interest of society's stability as a whole. In Hicks' words: "... the state cannot ... pursue a policy of toleration for disbelievers, or view religion as a matter of individual conscience. It absolutely must, therefore, reject dangerous notions of toleration and the separation of church and state. Further: so fundamentally important is religion that the ultimate penalty is appropriate for disbelievers ..."

At which point we see the source of our Unholy Alliance of the Left and assertive Islam emerging on the horizon. As the cursed Western civilization was practically built by Christianity, this obviously rules it out. Now Islam on the other hand - due to the precise parallel characteristics of Collectivism, Anti-reason and Oppressor versus Oppressed - is the ideal candidate. The use of irrational terrorism is just an added attraction, as we shall see!

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ayatolla Extraordinair, far from being the Left's Mister Nice Guy, also has the honour of being the source of political justification to irrational violence, committed by Jacobin thugs during the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror; of the horrors that Marxist dictators inflicted upon their own peoples; and of various Leftist terrorist groups who - from the 1960's onwards, when it began to dawn on them that with the passing of the 100 million victim mark - the Totalitarian game was up.

Most people, myself included, with the fall of the wall in 1989, made the mistake in taking for granted that Communism had conceded defeat. But the KGB's ideologically de-moral-ized, brainwashed crowd never gave up: they weren't programmed to pack it in. On the contrary! After their contributions to the permissive society to corrupt it even further, the West is currently witness to their collusion with the forces of Radical Islam.

I think we need to carefully consider the ominous words of one of the Four Horsemen of the Communist Apocalypse, Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfort School in 1974, after the 'failed revolutions' of 1967 and 1968: "It will be resurrected in the universities".

~ To be continued in Part 6, the Collective: ... we have seen that Syria/Lebanon and Iraq found themselves - as French colonies during World War II - on the side of Vichy and Nazi Germany ... ~

Neo Totalitarianism (3): Indoctrination

"…through schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of government - one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interests of all people."

Harold Rugg, student of psychology and
a disciple of John Dewey, considered to be
a founding father of multiculturalism

Dr Sanity provides us with a wonderful if shocking piece on the history of totalitarian education. Needless to say that indoctrination is the appropriate description. The collection of historical quotes on the site of her colleagues, psychologists Sigmund, Carl and Alfred's is exemplary of what we are dealing with in respect of the totalitarian indoctrination of entire generations of students. What stands out is the shameless arrogance and the heartless brutality which at times, borders the pathological.

Noteworthy is how the source of this educational and pedagogical disaster, who is identified as Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) "was instrumental in creating the 'climate of collectivism' in philosophy (as (philosopher) Stephen Hicks has referred to it) that prevailed in Germany during the late 18th and throughout the 19th century. In this counter-enlightenment climate, the state was worshipped as the source of all reality ... Hegel, building on Kant, Rousseau and Fichte, would go on to write, "It must be further understood that all the worth which the human being possesses - all the spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." Some Europeans find it bizarre that Americans have the constitutional right to bear arms - well, here's their answer!

"Hegel's heirs went on to divide into left- and right-wing camps. The charge of the left was led by leftists like Karl Marx ... the right-wing Hegelians tended to stress the omnipotence of the state ... Both Hegelian offshoots summarily dispensed with free will and human freedom; and between them, they brought forth the philosophical abomination that we now call 'postmodernism'."

"The 20th century was the battleground where the two totalitarian branches of the collectivist philosophers vied for spiritual and physical control over humanity. The amount of death, destruction and misery they ushered in is perhaps unprecedented in human history."

"The goal for the last several decades has been nothing less than to undermine mankind's perception of reality itself. They have been most successful in this goal at all levels of education - elementary, high school and college."

"If you can convince children that objective reality is an illusion; that A does not equal A; that black is white; and that good is bad; if you can make them accept that everything is subjective and relative; then you have successfully breathed new life into doctrines that by all objective measures and standards led to the death and misery of millions of people. Through the careful manipulation of language, everything can be distorted, without the messy need to resort to facts, logic, or reason."

"For the children of postmodernism, what matters is not truth or falsity - only the effectiveness of the language used. Lies, distortions, ad hominem attacks; attempts to silence opposing views - all are strategies that are perfectly satisfactory if they achieve the desired effect - i.e., furthering the collectivist agenda. Ideas and reason make way for reification of feelings; and freedom is replaced by thought control and preservation of 'self-esteem' at all costs."

Is the phenomenon of dumbing down, the psychological immaturity and the distorted view of reality any wonder? A number of these distortions and errors in the processes of thought I've compiled in, which is at present, a list of 14 instances of postmodern fallacies (or the PMF, in short).

Those of you who think that English Departments still teach the finer points of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream had better think again. They are the unofficial faculties and laboratories of Postmodern Thought, i.e. Subjectivism (Relativism) [1], Positivism, Multiculturalism and Deconstructionism (Post-Structuralism). The founding father of the latter was Jacques Derrida, later a political aide to French Socialist leader Lionel Jospin.

Another case in point is Stuart Sim, Professor of Critical Theory - a strain of Marxist thought which can mean either this or that - at the University of Sunderland and author of "Empires of Belief" and "Fundamentalist World: The New Dark Age of Dogma".

Sim is a theorist who shudders at the mere thought of having to live in a mono culture (something which he has probably done most of his life ... and survived!) and who simply hates beliefs and dogmas, unless they happen to be his own. Recently I had the misfortune to try and fail 'fisking' an article of his hand, published on Signandsight, the description of which can be read in the post "Intellectual Flatulence!".

What postmodern thought is promoting and disseminating - in the Universities and into the world at large - is a species of sophistry which requires the suspension of the laws of nature, as described in the post "Post Postmodernism: What are the Options".

Hard to do? Not at all! Hoards of intelligent people have gone before. But a word of caution to those of robust physique, intrigued by the subject: don't go deeper into it than subsurface level if future cerebral activities of any significance are foreseen.

Dr Sanity's further produces some interesting thoughts on the ethics of capitalism (no, this isn't an oxymoron!). Very insightful is the idea, that since the essence of totalitarianism is the crushing of human free will - a requirement for making correct moral decisions - totalitarianism is fatal for morality. "The truth is that neither socialism nor communism nor any kind of religious fundamentalism is compatible with morality at all. Conduct may only be thought of as moral or immoral when it is freely chosen by the individual. It is only then that the moral significance of the action can be assessed." That one's for framing and hanging over the bed. By the way, this also proves the carelessness of equating Christianity with any form of totalitarianism: human free will is its core teaching.

"Conversely, how responsible for our moral choices are we, if living in a (semi) totalitarian world? In Western Europe since the 1960s the state has taken over the responsibilities, from parents and of physically mature individuals alike. In fact, this may be the reason people refuse to grow up into responsible citizens: attitudes and opinions on multiculturalism that are presently displayed, at times are nothing short of an irresponsible and immature intellectual game with people's lives!

But reverting to our educationers, it is of course the fact that these intellectual crimes are perpetrated on children which makes them so abhorrent. "Their total worth is only equivalent to their willingness to be fodder for the good the 'cause'." Yes, it is a totalitarian characteristic that all is subservient to The Cause and the end justifies the means, as we have seen.

And think about the havoc that in turn has brought on generations of people and on society in general! "Only those whose brains have been damaged by a defective educational system to begin with could adhere on the one hand to a philosophy advocating moral relativism and subjectivism, with (on the other) unapologetic dogmatic absolutism. What is outrageous is that anyone - anyone who is capable of thinking anyway - could take these postmodern, brain-damaged collectivists seriously." Now, there's a thought ....!

"The educational system should be a sieve, through which all the children of a country are passed. It is highly desirable that no child escape inspection."

Paul Popenoe, Behavioral Eugenist and co-author:
"Sterilization for Human Betterment"

~ To be continued: "The Ideological War Within the West", in which Fonte foresees the emergence in a few decades hence of an ideology described as transnational progressivism ... ~

In Search of the Origins of Postmodern Self-Loathing (II)

Part (I)

Part (II)

Auguste Comte completed his vast work in re of Positivism in 1842. Comte believed in no other source of human knowledge than the empirical method exclusively, and built a fuzzy agnostic pseudo-religion around it. Positivism is the opposite of relativism, it is materialistic and science as an idea gone haywire.

It is not a very great surprise that every French intellectual appears to be practically raised on it. De Lubac: "Every undergraduate in France knows "the law of the three states ... every branch of knowledge has necessarily to pass through three successive theoretical states: 1. the theological or fictitious state, 2. the metaphysical or abstract state, 3. and the scientific or positive state".

So in the earliest stages of man's development he began by conceiving phenomena as a result of continuous influence of supernatural agents, which Comte terms fetishism: found in animism - to which we seem to be reverting today, as Comte would have it, as we shall see - and for example in the Greek and Roman pantheons.

In a later stage, the metaphysical, man came "to regard such phenomena as produced by various abstract forces inherent in bodies but distinct and heterogeneous". This stage is found in the monotheistic religions 'of the Book', Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

And finally man considers phenomena as subject to a "certain number of invariable natural laws that are nothing but the general expression of the relations observed in their developments", in other words science: the third, or positive state. For this stage Comte later used the term 'sociology'; Auguste Comte is considered by some to be the father of sociology.

Comte seems to have had a total contempt for the contemporary dominant, secondary stage and would prefer to skip the phase altogether, which he deemed possible under certain circumstances. It reminds me of the remarks of Stuart Sim in his contribution to the polemics on Signandsight re The Multicultural Issue: "Personally, I'd like to see religion wither away as a force in human affairs ...". Sim means, secondary stage religion. Compare Comte: "Catholicism is rotten to the core, all theology is 'outmoded', and everything that comes from it is now in a state of hopeless decrepitude, etc. ...".

De Lubac: "When the generation of transmission had come to an end, a ceremony would 'finally inaugurate the new religious regime ...". In anticipation Comte had started his own calender (as we have seen in Mussolini a sign of megalomania): on 23rd Archimedes in the year 63 (22nd April 1851) Comte wrote: "I shall be preaching positivism at Notre Dame as the only real and complete religion".

Comte described the third state "as positive as any other science based on observation". Comte even came to perceive a fourth state, in which the mind frees itself even from science: the truly positive state. Perhaps predictably enough Comte's ideal fourth state results paradoxically in ... relativism! Comte saw those that reached this ideal state as "resolutely freeing themselves from the prejudice that leads us 'to place ourselves on a different footing from things' and 'to claim a special place in the universe". Sounds familiar?

Compare that with today's multicultural complaint based on relativism's tenets about Western ethnocentricity and the Christian view of our central place in the Cosmos. Auguste Comte saw it thus: Monotheism or the metaphysical state is opposed to both the first and the third stage, "so much so that the positive state can be considered as the reestablishment of the "normal state, interrupted during the Western transition ...". If that isn't true self-loathing, I don't know what is: Down With Us! It was with us, 160 years ago.

A measure of how just like relativism today, 'positive thought' pervaded Comte's contemporary intellectuals, De Lubac writes: "Right at the end of his life, he noted with satisfaction that his 'thirty years of work' had already secured the admission of this law by all thinkers really abreast of the times", much like today's relativist prophets are congratulating themselves with the pervasiveness of their own particular postmodern fallacy.

While much can be said about Comte's mistakes and the willful suppression of later discovered facts, De Lubac sums the main problems with positivism up as follows: "... his (Comte's) offence lies in ... wishing to reduce man to no more than the subject matter of sociology". The extraordinary things happening as a result of the fallacy when the mind is reduced to its object can be found here in two articles by my philosopher-hero Greg Koukl, "All Mind, no Brain" and "All Words in your Brain".

To wrap this up in the words of Henri De Lubac: "Having reached its final state of rational positivity ... the human mind abandons its quest of the absolute ... Comtean thought immured itself in the relative as a last resource after having found itself powerless to decide the question of the absolute. Separating 'positive knowledge' from 'belief', it took the terrestrial horizon as its boundary, without prejudice to what might lie beyond it ... Comte is said to have declared the problem of God unsolvable".

In Search of the Origins of Postmodern Self-Loathing (I)

I'm sure Dr Pat of the Sanity Squad would have one or two astonishing things to say about the origins of self-loathing, so common today in the West. But I approach matters from another angle. I beg to disagree with those who attribute it to a lack of confidence - because if so - then, what triggered the lack of confidence: this isn't an answer, but posing the question in another way.

Those who have gone a little deeper into the illogics of the ideology of multiculturalism and the underlying 'philosophy' of relativism, will be familiar with its bizarre tenet that Western civilization in general and Christianity in particular, are uniquely and inherently bad. I adorn philosophy with inverted commas, because I fail to see that it is even deserving of the term sophistry (for relativists: this was not meant as a compliment)! I have written extensively about relativism in The Lighthouse Blog. It only makes sense if the laws of science are temporarily suspended, so that logic is no longer a measure of true or false.

For some imperial reason best known to our European leaders, this piece of ideological junk has been elevated to the status of official sociological policy within the E.U. member countries, that being a bit of mystery in itself unless Eurabia makes any sense to you.

Americans must slowly prepare themselves for being subjected to possibly the worst excesses of the phenomenon, once the Democrats get their hands on the U.S. administration. This is at present the only thing standing between myself and the acceptance of the Eurabia Theory. Yes, I have single handedly promoted its status from conspiracy theory, to real theory. I'll come back to all that in later posts.

Okay, when the ideology of multiculturalism forces its way into you life, you're having to deal with the extraordinary notion that white occidentals are inherently more bad than other humans: something vaguely reminiscent of original sin, but exclusively for the Western hemisphere and its satellites.

Once you realise that an important basis of the multiculti hogwash lives on the molecular level - genes being so remarkably similar of all people, that they do not even want to make race distinctions anymore (hence the term multicúltural, as opposed to multi-racial or multi-ethnic), the unique exclusion of the Caucasion race can't be but another one of the ideology's breathtaking amount of paradoxymora [2]. This phenomenon is common as muck in relativism. To date it has given the adherents no rise to re-examine its tenets or its truth-value (but then, they don't believe in truth, so this attitude only stands to reason ....pfffff!).

Well, having wrestled with the question why occidentals should be inherently worse than say, Huns or Turks, I may have located a possible source for this idea. Henri de Lubac in his book The Drama of Atheist Humanism has written extensively about an Enlightenment precursor thought up some time, half way through the nineteenth century in ... you've guessed it ... France, that wonderful source of heaps of pernicious intellectualism. I shall be short about it, as details can easily be found in (online) reference works (for some major ones, visit The Lighthouse Store Room.

To be continued in Part II: Auguste Comte completed his vast work in re of Positivism in 1842. Comte believed in empirical knowledge only, and built a vast atheist pseudo-religion around it.