Cultural Marxism
The Doom of Language
By Robert F. Beaudine
Posted October 2011
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Cultural Marxism The Doom of Language By Robert F. Beaudine Posted October 2011 |
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Throughout history, ideas have been used for good or for evil. They have also led to the greatest evil – war. This is reflective in a nation’s language.
By the end of 1932, Germany was in upheaval. The unemployment rate soared to 43%. As the Nazis rose to power, new ideas emerged; new words were introduced; old words were discarded and others changed. “Juden verboten” became a popular phrase as the Juden, the Jews, were blamed for all their ills. They were denied basic rights as citizens, and most activities were verboten.
In 1933, when Adolf Hitler consolidated power with the “Enabling Act,” modern art and architecture were condemned. Many artists fled their homeland, as art became a tool of the regime. The Reichstag was privately mocked as the most expensive glee club, as their members sang paeans to their Fuhrer.
The Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, defined the new order and foretold the consequences, “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.”
The regime was “fascist,” a word coined in 1921. This obscured their ideology – “national socialism” – a clever term somewhat palatable to their fellow nationalists in the military and industry. They telescoped this into “Nazi” to further hide its origins from the world. When scholars claim this was a regime of the far right, they are either duped or dishonest.
Under the Nazis, their prominent leaders were well-read. Goebbels boasted of his library, complete with all the works of Edward Bernays, most notably his Propaganda. He implemented Bernays’ program with great success. When this was discovered after the war, propaganda was redefined as P.R., “public relations.”
For their fanatical followers and the rest of the masses who decided to stay, anti-intellectualism was decreed. Books were burned, the media censored. French words were purged from their vocabulary. Free speech became dangerous, as even children were spies for the state.
The universities became centers to regiment thought. In a nation acclaimed for its scholarship, this betrays either their madness or a diabolical agenda – the blueprint used by all the totalitarian dictators.
Eventually, many renowned scholars fled and brought their unique heritage to America.
Verbal Engineering
In 1949, George Orwell, unfurled his vision of a nightmarish future in 1984. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.” Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, learned something about his world: When words are eliminated from the common vocabulary, the thinking of the common people becomes limited.
Later, his novel showed how perceptions are manipulated when the definitions of fundamental words are changed, i.e., peace becomes defense which then becomes war – a classic illustration of Hegel’s dialectic. Here, the thesis – or status quo – refers to the current usage of the word. When it undergoes a slight change in meaning towards its antithesis, a new synthesis is born. If enough incremental changes occur, eventually the antithesis is established.
Because the term “Hegel’s dialectic” is missing from our common vocabulary, many of us have no awareness of this process in continual motion. Instead, we think every change occurs naturally.
By definition, a change towards the antithesis is adverse to that element of society who would “conserve” the status quo – the conservatives who revere their traditions and institutions.
In today’s world, many of our most important institutions and traditions – and the foundational words associated with them – have been so dramatically engineered towards the antithesis that conservatives no longer support the status quo.
The Philosophical Roots of the Social Sciences
Spanning the 18th Century of Western Civilization, the Enlightenment was an intellectual revolution based on reason. It produced two predominant types: Those who rejected all authority outside of reason, including religion and its divine right of kings, and those who remained true to Christianity. Because free speech was not a right, the most radical writers published anonymously.
Science rapidly unraveled the mysteries on Earth and in the sky above, and led to the belief that continued discoveries would enable humanity’s triumph over nature.
This also created despair for some Christians. As science flourished, many Medieval “truths,” i.e. the sun revolved around the Earth, had been proved as myths. Some Christians lost their faith. Yet, many leading scientists remained true to their faith. Science had not destroyed the authority of the Bible, only the misinterpretations.
In 1751, the first volume of l’Encyclopedie was published in France. Over the next twenty-one years, twenty-seven more volumes followed, edited by the brilliant French atheists, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. Diderot admitted their aim was “to change the way people think.”
In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom wrote, “This project was a conspiracy, as d’Alembert said in the Preliminary Discourse of l’Encyclopedie, the premier document of the Enlightenment. It had to be, for, in order to have rulers who are reasonable, many of the old rulers had to be replaced, in particular all those whose authority rested upon revelation. The priests were the enemies, for they rejected the claim of reason and based politics and morals on sacred texts and ecclesiastical authorities.”
In 1798, the British professor, John Robison, wrote in Proofs of a Conspiracy, “A formal and systematic conspiracy against Religion was formed and zealously prosecuted by Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Diderot, assisted by Frederic II, King of Prussia … their darling project was to destroy Christianity and all Religion, and to bring about a total change of Government.”`
These conspirators claimed l’Encyclopedie had assembled all the accumulated knowledge throughout the ages. After initial censorship, it became the foremost reference source for knowledge, which spread their ideas undermining civil and Christian authorities.
The 19th Century French philosopher and founder of modern sociology, Auguste Comte, embraced Enlightenment thinking, of the type that rejected religion. His philosophy, logical positivism, claimed science as the only reliable approach to truth. Empirical observation leads to verification which leads to truth. Religion had to be abandoned.
American philosopher, Thomas Ellis Katen, explained, “Thus the positivist realm becomes a kingdom of thingdom and an ‘off-limits’ sign is put on areas of life most meaningful to men … when men’s souls cry out for an image of unity, the logical positivistic philosophy offers only further fragmentation.”
The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, offered no help. He upended metaphysics in the late 19th Century and ended Germany’s Western tradition in philosophy. Nietzsche announced to the world that “God is dead!” which gave humanity the freedom to create their own values. He said philosophers had a moral duty to create the new myths for society. He also declared all scientific achievement was the result of a “will to power.”
Allan Bloom wrote, “The history of liberal thought since Locke and Smith has been one of almost unbroken decline in philosophic substance.”
The Science Behind the Social Sciences
The most popular social sciences – sociology and psychology – were conceived as sciences but do not resemble science in its popular conception, except in one respect – revelation was rejected as a source of knowledge.
Each expands with every new theory postulated alone or attached to an observational and/or statistical study. But there is little science underlying all their vast proclamations. Innumerable definitions, generalizations, abstractions, and assumptions mask the truth that most of their causal constructions are hypothetical.
These social sciences were established and staffed by Progressives and became their scholarly haven.
The two most influential foundational thinkers were sociologist Max Weber and psychologist Sigmund Freud.
In the German tradition, Max Weber wrote convoluted sentences typically over ten lines long and invented or redefined words. He coined “Protestant ethic” and “lifestyle,” and helped change the definition of “charisma.” With his definition, charismatic authority became the new force for change within any given organization.
Weber studied all the great religions, the resulting economies, and the values they promoted. When he claimed that all religions were myths, their values became relative. This led decades later to the Values Clarification approach used in our public schools today.
Weber was an antipositivist who thought ethos must reject what reason demands because of the widespread irrationality of society. In Economy and Society, he wrote, “Under the conditions of mass democracy, public opinion is communal conduct born of irrational ‘sentiments.’ Normally it is staged or directed by party leaders and the press.”
He also wrote, “We know of no scientifically ascertainable ideals. To be sure, that makes our efforts more arduous than in the past, since we are expected to create our ideals from within our breast in the very age of subjectivist culture.”
Freud was also concerned with the irrational. He searched the unconscious for answers to our brutal behaviors. He used the German term for “soul,” but his conception was godless. To Freud religion was myth.
The British psychoanalyst, James Strachey, seemed justified when he mistranslated Freud’s “soul” as “mind” – leading British and American psychologists felt psychology should be categorized as a medical science, and the “soul” was distinctly unscientific. Strachey’s translation redefined Freud with a spurious scientific consistency, typical of Progressive deception.
Sigmund Freud had a poor view of the masses of humanity, with their untreated neuroses and animal instincts. In The Future of an Illusion, he wrote, “Among these instinctual wishes are those of incest, cannibalism, and lust for killing.”
Earlier he wrote, “For masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the individuals composing them support one another in giving free rein to their indiscipline.”
He added, “It is only through the influence of individuals who can set an example and whom masses recognize as their leaders that they can be induced to perform the work and undergo the renunciations on which the existence of civilization depends.”
When psychologists observe and describe human behavior, they resemble scientists, but when they explain human behavior, they propagate hypothetical opinion.
Several observations are apparent: The more popular psychology becomes, the more widespread our problems have become. The more couples are referred to marriage counselors, the worse our divorce rate gets. Our problems are not being solved by our psychologists or the pop-promoters of this pseudoscience, like Abby and Ann Landers.
There could be a simple reason: If God exists, much of the social sciences become theoretical nonsense, which means society is harmed by their neglect of “the soul” and their mockery of religion.
The Frankfurt School
Another ominous event occurred in 1933. With the rise of Nazism, the “Frankfurt School” fled Germany, settled in Geneva for a year, and then temporarily relocated to New York City as an affiliate of Columbia University. Founded by Marxists in 1923 as the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University, it was modeled on the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.
Their philosophy built upon Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and his radical successor, Martin Heidegger, who carried forward much of Nietzsche’s extremism into the 20th Century. Their social sciences relied on Freud and Weber. And they drew upon the revolutionary theories of Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci and Hungarian Socialist Georg Lukacs.
Gramsci was shocked that the Bolshevik Revolution didn’t inspire their oppressed fellow workers in Europe to rise up in rebellion. While in a prison cell, he discovered that Judeo-Christian values was the problem and must be destroyed before revolution was possible.
Gramsci called for a methodical approach to infiltrate, capture, and reform education, the press, the cinema, theatre, the government, and the church, what he called “the long march through the institutions.” He said Capitalism had a cultural hegemony through violence and coercion, both political and economic, but also ideologically, which is where the battle lay.
Lukacs, perhaps the most brilliant Marxist theorist of the 20th Century, was more discerning regarding mass uprisings. All the successful revolutions were engineered by a small cadre of intellectuals. In 1922, he met with the early Frankfurt founders for a week in Ilmenau, Germany. A year later, the Frankfurt School was conceived as a think tank that trained agents of change.
One of the directors, Max Horkheimer, developed Critical Theory as opposed to Traditional Theory. Critical Theory doesn’t offer any solutions. Instead, it criticizes in a concerted attack until it creates an atmosphere of crisis. Crises lead to changes – opportunities to incrementally engineer society towards cultural Marxism.
The Frankfurt elite, Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and later, Jurgen Habermas, used verbal engineering to facilitate their social engineering. They wrote extensive attacks on the Judeo-Christian institutions and traditions, and redefined them as evils.
They rebranded the foundational words. “Private property” and “profit” became selfish pursuits. “Individualism,” “personal industry,” and “self reliance” became oppressive, as the world was divided into two types of people, “oppressors” or “victims.” Religion became the greatest evil – a superstition that led to intolerance and war. Nationalism was the second greatest evil and also led to war.
The Frankfurt School studied the psychological techniques of the Nazis. One result, Adorno and three Berkeley scholars wrote The Authoritarian Personality, which was widely acclaimed by our social scientists. It was later debunked as left wing propaganda. Allan Bloom called it meretricious fabrication. Among other theoretical heresies, it redefined fatherhood as tyrannical. This was a triumph for feminism as women became an oppressed class.
This verbal engineering set in motion the long march to undermine the love of God, family, and country.
From 1937 to 1941, Adorno worked for the Radio Research Project alongside future president of CBS, Frank Stanton and three other social scientists. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, its purpose was to study the effects of the mass media and develop more effective methods of mass persuasion.
Meanwhile, Edward Bernays, the premier of propaganda, used his uncle’s psychology – Sigmund Freud’s – coupled with that of B.F. Skinner to create a consumer society. Eventually, the masses became too concerned with their own interests to have time for the deeper concerns, like those of their civilization.
In 1946, Kurt Lewin, the founder of social psychology, laid the foundation for sensitivity training as he pioneered applied psychology. He fine-tuned the methods that overcame the “resistance to change.” This spawned the National Training Laboratories in 1947, located in Bethel, Maine, far from everyone’s comfort zone. In a group setting, the training takes three steps to change the trainee’s perception. First, they attempt to bypass the natural defense mechanisms and dismantle the “mind set” using peer pressure and other psychological techniques. That leads to the change, a transitional period of confusion. Then the new mind set is “freezed” in step three, and comfort levels return to normal.
This training disorients the recipient and then reorients them in a relative world. In 1962, in their manual “Five Issues in Training,” the NTL defined their training as, “coercive persuasion in the form of thought reform or brainwashing.” Since then, the NTL has expanded and developed specialized labs for industry, universities, churches, and community organizers.
Lewin associated with the Frankfurt School scholars, but he was also the director of the Tavistock Clinic in 1932.
Tavistock
In 1920, the secretive Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology was established in England and soon renamed the Tavistock Clinic. There are few public records – Tavistock was likely a creation of British Intelligence. Some researchers claim that Sigmund Freud was the first director. Certainly, his influence was supreme. They initially specialized in the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers, which revealed insights into humanity’s breaking point and became a topic of intensive research.
In June 1940, John Rawlings Rees, the director of Tavistock Clinic, revealed their agenda in a speech titled, “Strategic Planning for Mental Health.” He said,
“We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church; the two most difficult are law and medicine … Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence … If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people, I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity … Let us all, therefore, very secretly be fifth columnists.”
“Fifth column” was coined in 1936 and refers to a conspiracy that sympathizes with the enemy and engages in subversion within a society.
In 1947, with a Rockefeller Foundation grant, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was created as another agency for change. Their primary interest was applied psychology on a global scale, also called “psy-ops.” They established research facilities at universities and think tanks in the U.S. and across the globe to analyze all the methods of mind control including hypnosis, electromagnetic radiation, psychotherapy, pharmacology, propaganda, and drugs both legal and illegal – they worked with the pharmaceutical giants like Sandoz and Eli Lily. The mind control research behind MK Ultra did not originate in the CIA. The British were actively engaged before the CIA was born, and Tavistock became the bridge between the two intelligence agencies.
In 1955, Bernays wrote The Engineering of Consent which detailed the propaganda campaign that led to a US-engineered coup in Guatemala. This reference book became the Tavistock blueprint to overthrow any country that would not align with their long term goal of one-world-government.
The Tavistock elite analyzed all the media, including radio, music, movies, magazines, pop-art, and TV. In August 1959, Fred Emery, a Tavistock senior staffer, wrote an article titled, "Working Hypotheses on the Psychology of Television." He stated, “The psychological after-effects of television are of considerable interest to the would-be social engineer.”
According to Dr. John Coleman, a disgruntled intelligence agent, Tavistock created the love affair between our youth and the Beatles. It is impossible to understand the frenzy and mass hysteria created by the Beatles without knowledge of mass-psychology and mass-manipulation. Coleman claimed the crowds had been tutored by earlier news footage. When the Beatles first arrived in JFK airport in 1964, busloads of girls from a local Bronx school had been paid to scream hysterically. They duplicated this effort for the first few events, and this trend perpetuated, as all good fads do.
If Dr. Coleman is correct, then the amazing coincidences behind America’s early Rock and Roll scene become more logical. As investigative journalist David McGowan has documented, our early musicians all bypassed the three centers of music in Detroit, New York City, and Nashville to assemble in Laurel Canyon in California, where there was no live music scene and no music producers. They eventually created their own scene, most likely with a little help from their friends at Tavistock.
More surprisingly – or perhaps not – most of these musicians came from families immersed in military intelligence, including Jim Morrison whose father was an Admiral. (Others included Frank Zappa, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Cory Wells, Mike Nesmith, John Phillips, Cass Elliott, Joni Mitchell, and Jackson Browne, to name a select few.)
One of the founders of the Rand Corporation, Albert Wohlstetter, also made Laurel Canyon his home and conducted seminars there. The Rand Corporation is a think tank affiliated with Tavistock, not coincidentally.
Perhaps a future social scientist will propose a theory that explains how such a mass awakening occurred at the same time as the arrival of Rock and Roll. This revolutionary music helped radically change an entire generation … and each succeeding one.
The Tyranny of the Social Sciences
The positivistic philosopher might agree with Henry Ford’s claim that history is bunk, because history cannot be empirically verified. The world historian would disagree. History is much more dangerous – it can be used as an agent for change. History is typically written by the victors. As each succeeding victor revises it, history can lose its validity and become propaganda for the State.
Orwell portrayed this in 1984, when Winston Smith was asked to repeat a Party slogan: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
By 1960, sociology was the most popular course of study in American Universities, and Progressive ideas spread across our campuses.
As our social scientists analyzed new territories, our history had to be radically rewritten. They discovered that our founders were not freedom fighters at all. Sure, they risked the penalties of high treason – hanged until unconscious, then revived, disemboweled, beheaded, cut into quarters, and boiled in oil. But they risked their lives because they were oppressors who longed for power.
In America, we didn’t need a bonfire to destroy the books that supported our cultural heritage. Earlier generations had rejected the historical revisions in the 1940’s and 1950’s, but this time the public was too busy to notice.
In 1960, “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” was coined, but no one claimed authorship. It began a few years earlier as a slur among our social scientists. In 1964, WASP was popularized when sociologist E. Digby Baltzell published his critical work “The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America.”
The creation and negativity behind WASP is a manifestation of the language rules that’s become known as political correctness. For decades, political correctness was undefined and remained covert. But its ideology was well-defined. In the Sixties, it helped shape the counter-culture.
The Frankfurt School provided the ideas for the new youth movement, while the Tavistock Institute provided the distractions – movies, music, and drugs. Rock and Roll reinforced their rebellion, gave them a new language, and the freedom from all restraints. It seems Freud was right. The masses have no love for instinctual renunciation.
The Frankfurt alum, Herbert Marcuse, became the most popular thinker of the New Left. As Allan Bloom noted,
“Herbert Marcuse appealed to university students in the sixties with a combination of Marx and Freud. In Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man he promised that the overcoming of capitalism and its false consciousness will result in a society where the greatest satisfactions are sexual, of a sort that the bourgeois moralist Freud called polymorphous and infantile.”
In 1965, Marcuse justified intolerance when he wrote Repressive Tolerance:
“The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed … what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.”
Our universities took it further and refused to hire conservative professors.
In 1946, when Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills translated some of Weber’s essays, “lifestyle” became an American word. Actually, they translated two German words as “lifestyle,” but that’s a semantic issue. In the early 1960’s, “lifestyle” became popular, as it legitimized a variety of once-deviant behaviors. Everyone was free to be whatever they wanted to be. As long as there was a label, there was a valid lifestyle.
Because we no longer study “etymology” – the history of words – we are unaware of the social engineering that results from verbal engineering.
Competition and Tolerance American-Style
The “inferiority complex” was discovered in 1922 by Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler. It took time to filter into our society. Recently, our community sports directors discovered that “competition” created winners and losers, and being labeled a loser was cruel. So, when many children begin organized sports, some teams no longer keep score, everyone gets a trophy, and no one’s self-esteem is harmed.
Our children’s math scores illustrate this phenomenon. In 2006, they ranked 25th in the world, far from its supremacy. But this doesn’t worry them, because their self-esteem on mathematical matters is supreme. They believe they are brilliant.
When the market place proves their inadequacy, they will instinctively blame the market place as the problem. Their teachers had forewarned them that “Capitalism” was the root of many modern evils: exploitation, materialism, pollution, and greed. Their textbooks depicted a dog-eat-dog kind of “competition.”
So, competition – one of the fundamentals of life – has become a negative word among our youth. Its replacement – mediocrity – is the flimsy word building a toppling structure on Socialism.
It is illogical to instill in our youth a smug overestimation of their abilities and folly to teach them that our fundamental economic system is the problem – unless another result is desired. Charlotte Iserbyt makes a strong case in her aptly titled “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.”
Our youth are also taught to be tolerant of all the different lifestyles. Through public education, our children are exposed to a wide world of varied and vibrant cultures, each with their own values, truths, and ways of life. “Truth” becomes relative, akin to “belief,” which quenches any desire for personal enlightenment because no truth is valid.
To ensure this lesson is learned, our students endure the psychological training called Values Clarification. The experts claim that students arrive with value confusion. Values Clarification gives children the authority to create their own values from the available array. Whatever they like, they are autonomous, free of parental authority and any traditional values. Vice can become virtue as long as it is valued.
The ancient Greek historian, Herodotus, established the opposite tradition. He searched the world to find the good and the bad in each culture. These truths, he reasoned, would enlighten his own culture. Our educational experts claim this approach is absurd. Because there is no ultimate authority on good and evil, we must respect all ways of life.
Political Correctness
In the 1930’s, both Stalin and Hitler perfected the language rules of political correctness. People literally risked their lives when they spoke.
In the early 1990’s, when our media overtly and eagerly adopted the new language rules called “political correctness,” rule violators risked their jobs and suffered the media’s wrath.
Patrick Buchanan explained the ideology behind these rules,
“Political Correctness is Cultural Marxism, a regime to punish dissent and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance.”
Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson wrote, “Critical Theory, as applied mass psychology, brought forth a ‘quiet’ psychic revolution which facilitated an actual physical revolution that has become visible everywhere in the United States of America.”
Multiculturalism is a product of political correctness which breeds diversity and divides our nation. Our cultural melting pot used to meld immigrants into Americans. Today, except for the oppressive ruling class, most citizens define themselves as hyphenated Americans: Hispanic-American, Chinese-American, African-American, Native-American, et cetera. No longer are we united by one language and one culture.
Our founders envisioned a commonwealth of freedom extending from coast to coast. Commonwealths, by definition, are established for the “common good,” which our founders defined as freedom from tyranny and the protection of unalienable rights – bestowed by God – those of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This meant there were natural limits because of natural law. The pursuit of the fruits of labor was limited when it infringed upon other’s unalienable rights.
Multiculturalism requires a new definition of “common good,” one for a godless society where rights are granted by governments. The left think tank, Center for American Progress, claims that government is essential when people pursue their dreams. They redefined the common good as governmental policies that benefit everyone while balancing self-interest with the needs of the entire society. Perhaps that explains why Texas removed “the common good” from their public education’s textbooks. The common good has become a progressive term that refers to entitlements for the disadvantaged, but also includes big bailouts for our megacorporations.
Higher Education American-Style
When our universities openly endorsed political correctness, the free speech of one sector of society was verboten. Constitutional flag-wavers became bigoted chauvinists whose ideas were dangerous and unwelcome – they supported Nationalism and Capitalism and the traditional rule of elite white men. In the reign of tolerance, this was intolerable. The universities banished their ideas.
The two primary goals of all totalitarian states is to reduce independent critical thought, and eliminate individual moral responsibility. Our universities have been instrumental in this success. Over twenty years ago, Bloom lamented, “What happened to the universities in Germany in the thirties is what has happened and is happening everywhere.”
As our universities evolve for the worse, they are becoming irrelevant. In the distant past, “college graduates” had studied the broad spectrum of knowledge – philosophy, theology, history, science and the arts. They had mined the human record for the hidden gems of genius. The great books of the great thinkers were commonly discussed: Homer, Herodotus, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Justin Martyr, Origen, Tertullian, Eusebius, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Milton, Luther, Pascal and Descartes, Swift, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Shakespeare, Rousseau and Voltaire, even Goethe, to name a few from the olden days.
Because we’ve eliminated whole branches of learning from our universities, we’ve crippled our awareness. A liberal education used to teach independent thought, which led many students to continue their education throughout their lives, which enhanced their ability to think critically and creatively. This is intolerable today because it would create dissent from the tyranny of public opinion, which destabilizes a totalitarian State.
Sex American Style
Throughout America’s history, sex outside the marriage was considered immoral. In the Sixties, sex was liberated among our youth. Eventually, much of the rest of society was engineered into acceptance. (Many more qualified writers have detailed the specifics.)
Today, sex is a natural feature of modern life and a popular term of discussion. We have become sophisticated and discuss sex unabashedly in every detail regardless of the company. Something private has been made public and in the process, “love” became “lust.”
Because of this preoccupation, most conversation is spiritually dead, focused on two topics – trivial matters and sex.
Psychologists studied the appeal of the sex story. In the past, men would separate from the women, and a few would entertain the others with their exploits. As genders were redefined, naturally women had to be included, and those with bravado try to outdo the men.
The Doom of Language
Our most prominent psychologists and sociologists are deliberately engineering our society toward cultural Marxism by changing our most important institutions and traditions – and the associated language. They are creating a culture of hopelessness and despair. They assume when nihilism prevails, we will be ready for their Socialistic solution.
They have used their discoveries to perfect the methods of mass-persuasion and mind control. This is reflective in the ideas and the language they have given us.
Ideas can be more powerful when the masses have no clue, as all the successful dictators have shown. Changes can be manipulated right before their eyes.
When new ideas become popular, words are created to express the changes, while others are modified or discarded. Words change naturally, but sometimes they change deliberately to further a cultural agenda.
Today, “truth” has become relative. Values are “self-actualized.” And Fromm’s “soulless automaton” is epidemic. “Guilt” is no longer a motivation for change. It is unhealthy. Freud’s “sublimation,” with its association with “repression,” was finally freed. “Man” was an animal and had learned to behave like one.
The “soul” has been banished from education, the media, and modern art, and is rarely cultivated. American writer, Saul Bellow, lamented, “We live in a thought-world, and the thinking has gone very bad indeed.”
“Charisma” has changed into its opposite. It used to be a spiritual word derived from the Greek word, “charis,” which means “grace” from God. Sometimes this grace was endowed upon a leader, which enabled him or her to lead with divine sanction and express his views more powerfully.
Today, many of our leaders strive for self-enrichment. Some of these are called charismatic because they stir up our emotions and compel us to follow. They rejected “public servant” in favor of self-service and receive no inspiration from our grace-giving God.
When the common vocabulary is missing the vital words and ideas from the Great Books of genius, awareness will remain narrow. And those who neglect their language and their heritage will be unaware that they are missing anything.
Every word acquired in memory and every etymology studied increase awareness. Every great book that is read enhances awareness. “Orwellian” can be understood superficially by a trip to the dictionary, but the real journey to understanding begins by reading Orwell’s work.
The noble words of our forebears have fallen silent. In the past, inquiring minds would gather together and discuss religion or politics in light of their historical traditions. Today, there is no inquiry, no curiosity, and no shame as these topics are banned from ordinary conversation as controversial.
Our social scientists have long studied human behavior, our language, beliefs, and habits. Some have sold out to industry and use their knowledge to develop better propaganda and advertising campaigns.
Others are more perverse and work with the Progressives of Frankfurt and Tavistock to develop more powerful methods to influence both our behavior and our thinking. They’ve infiltrated our education, our churches, our government, the mass media, even the arts.
Recently, many patriots have been aroused from their sleep and now fight on the political front with some apparent success, but this seems to have little overall effect. As they fight this skirmish, the all-out war rages around them in all the other arenas of life. We might be surrounded, but this is no time for the faint-hearted. There is no time for retreat. Our brave warriors must no longer fight on one front. It is time to engage the whole battlefield with all our might, mind, and spirit, and let our Lord lead us to victory.
In the olden days, the common language was never taken for granted. Many learned to read specifically so they could study the Holy Scriptures. Their lives were much harder, but their minds were more pure. This Book inspired many of the greatest heroes of history. Some were blessed with charisma – in its original sense. If more of us were engaged in the study and contemplation of this Greatest Book, we would produce more leaders who follow them in this greatest tradition. And our nation would once again be blessed.
Robert Beaudine is the author of the novel Based Upon a Lie, which you can purchase as an ebook. Visit his website, facebook page or email him at: robert@baseduponalie.com.
Copyright 2011 – Robert F. Beaudine. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
"Be ready in season and out of season. ... For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables. But you be watchful in all things..." 2 Timothy 4:2-5