Why Marxism Shifted From Economics To CultureWhenver I have mentioned “Cultural Marxism” in my articles and blogs in recent years it has always attracted comments from left wing trolls anxious to make sure my readers understood there is no such thing as 'Cultural Marxism' and talk of it is nothing but mere alt_right paranoia” used by “far right conspiracy theorists” to hide for their hatered of “multiculturalism, gay rights, immigration and feminism,” and their opposition to human rights and fair redistribution of wealth.
The idea that the development of identity politics over last few decades has anything to do with “sinister machinations of commies striving to enslave us under an all powerful central state government made up of unelected bureaucrats,” has been widely mocked even though we have seen United Nations agencies publishing policy documents such as Agenda 21, which proposes the abolition of private property (oh no, nothing Marxist in Agenda 21, it's just common sense don'cha know, to place all material goods in the ownership of the state and allow people to hire or borrow everything they need.
One must be “mistaken” and “foolish,” according to left wing activists, to believe that concerted efforts to build coalitions based on racial, national and gender identities to replace the economic “class” identities of classical Marxism is anything more than “dubious conspiratorial theories.” The vehemence with which criticisms of the left's authoritarian thinking are denied and attacks should in itself be enough to make us suspicious, given the fact that socialist leaders have openly written about this strategy for decades.
Take, for example, a 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, written by socialist thinkers Ernesto Laclauand Chantal Mouffe. The ideas that inspired the book were summarised in an article by Laclau and Mouffe published with the more telling title “Socialist Strategy, Where Next?” in the January 1981, issue of Marxism Today.
**********************************
The article begins with the authors proclaiming that the “socialist political struggle” was occurring in a new landscape. They argued that “the traditional discourse of Marxism, centered on the class struggle and the analysis of the economic contradictions of capitalism, has had great difficulty coming to terms.”
Laclau and Mouffe wrestled with how to overcome this challenge and effectively “modify the notion of class struggle” to include groups not easily categorized into an economic ‘class’, vis-à-vis their relationship to the means of production.
Their desire was to figure out how to incorporate “the new political subjects — women, national, racial and sexual minorities, anti-nuclear and anti-institutional movements, etc.” into a socialist movement traditionally identifying people by class.
This new revolutionary strategy that evolved over time, the authors observed, demanded “the possibility of conceiving political subjects as being different from, and much broader than classes, and as being constituted through a multitude of democratic contradictions which the socialist forces had to take into account and be able to articulate.”
This sounds an awful lot like Ron Paul’s Facebook post Doherty cites, which read:
“Marxists just shifted their ‘exploitation’ schtick to culture: ? women exploited by men; ? gays exploited by heterosexuals ? The old exploited by the young ? and vice-versa ? This list goes on and on.”Curiously, Doherty mentions the cartoon accompanying the post while avoiding the actual content of Paul’s words. Several paragraphs later, however, Doherty begrudgingly admits what has been exceedingly obvious to even casual observers for decades: “It’s true that campus leftists have shifted some of their attention from specifically economic concerns to ones based in cultural identity.”Directly after this telling admission, though, Doherty reverts to form by admonishing those that “pretend that the broad grievances of gays, blacks or women are based in communism rather than American history” simply “misunderstand the world around you.” Laclau and Mouffe, however, would beg to differ with Doherty’s casual dismissal of any link between socialist revolutionaries and identity politics. Indeed, they insisted that the only way to achieve their socialist ends was to create a new conception of the “exploited class,” one that would be identified not in traditional Marxist economic terms, but by “forms of domination different to that of economic exploitation.” Because, as the authors explained, this society “is indeed capitalist, but this is not its only characteristic; it is sexist and patriarchal as well, not to mention racist.” “These new political subjects: women, students, young people, racial, sexual and regional minorities, as well as the various anti-institutional and ecological struggles,” Laclau and Mouffe continued, “not only cannot be located at the level of relations of production…on top of this, they define their objectives in a radically different way.”Replacing an easily identifiable political ‘class’ like the proletariat that unites easily behind the “worker’s movement” created challenges for the new vanguard of the revolution, according to Laclau and Mouffe. With such a broad and diverse set of interests seeking demands for their respective groups (based on gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.) there is a risk of each separate group becoming autonomous and merely articulating their specific demands. A united front consisting of all these groups is needed to advance the socialist movement, for “the anti-capitalist struggle can only be strengthened by the addition of these new fields of struggle.” This creates an urgency to re-brand what socialism is perceived to be so each of these groups can internalize it, Laclau and Mouffe argued. This new unified socialist struggle “must consist of a vast system of alliances that are continuously redefined and renegotiated. But it cannot truly be consolidated without developing an ideological frame of reference, an ‘organic ideology’ to serve as cement for the new collective will.” Consider the effort to co-opt the feminist movement. “It cannot be simply a question of adding women's demands to the existing list of those demands considered as socialist; the articulation between socialism and feminism must involve a radical transformation in the way socialism is customarily viewed, i.e., simply as the socialisation of the means of production. And this in turn means a change in the order of priorities that are today seen as fundamental,” they argued. This new “organic ideology” and “change in the order of priorities” referred to by Laclau and Mouffe must “take into account the necessary scope of the struggle to suppress all relations of domination and to create a genuine equality and participation at all levels of society.” Or, to put it in more familiar terms, the new socialist revolution must shift the “‘exploitation’ schtick to culture: - women exploited by men; - gays exploited by heterosexuals; - The old exploited by the young; - and vice-versa.” Ron Paul had it right. Doherty is either ignorant or naïve to spurn those who recognize today’s identity politics as a tool in the modern socialist movement. Prominent socialist theorists like Laclau and Mouffe have openly divulged this exact strategy for decades. It’s not foolish conspiracy mongering or mere “clever rhetorical deck-stacking” to accurately identify the identity politics of ‘cultural Marxism’ as the preferred strategy of modern day socialists. The infiltration of state institutions and the hijacking of media, academic institutions, politics, the law, education and social policy by politically correct thinking and what George orwwell described in his novel 1984 as "Oligarchical Collectivism" is not as new as people might think. 'Cultural Marxism' as the bane of politically correct thinking and the institutionalised loathing of the values on which the merger of Graeco - Roman (often wrongly called Judeo - Christian) and Germano - Celtic culture, the renaissance, the enlightenment and the age of reason were founded in favour of a synthetic culture which, in everything but its rejection of religion, owes more to The Inquisition than to the liberal ideals on which mordern European and American civilisation were founded. The joining of a cultural element to Marxist economic ideology took place in the years of turmoil after World War One. The embedded article is a comprehensive analysis of the foundations of cultural Marxism and of how the arrogant self - righteousness of elitist intellectuals was married to the bourgeois angst of middle class guilt addicts (who a few decades earlier would have been Cristian evangelists campaigning against the immorality of the masses) to create a class of political and social activists who despise mainstream society and embrace society - skewing causes such as gay rights or Black Lives matter. The years after World War One were a simple, romantic, and golden time in America.California beaches became acessible to the masses, the affluent lifestyles of suburbia developed in an era of prosperity, and with its industrialised rivals, Britain, Germany, France and Italy crippled by the war in Europe the USA could revel in its new role as leader of the free world. There was poverty and ignorance of course, slum dwellers in industrial cities lived in appalling conditions, gangsterism prospered and in rural areas poor whites abused the black descendents of slaves as if they were members of an inferior species. But overall the future looked bright for Americas capitalist economy and its liberal sciety which was base on liberty and self sufficiency. "The Roaring Twenties" was an era of great economic prosperity in The Land of the Free. but in keeping with the first part of Austrian economist Josef Schumpeter's warning, America's capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. In 1929 Wall Street crashed and burned and the USA, along with the rest of the developed world, struggled throughout most of the 1930s. And during that period, though many prospered by benefitting from low interest rates and the growth of new industries, the seeds of western economic and cultural decline were sown. The roots of cultural decay, set in the rich manure of the academic establishment, go very deep. Over a century ago academics and members of the political and financial elites began to talk about the need for a new world order. Use that phrase in a public forum now and you will be called a conspiracy theorist, but the phrase was used by many influential early socialists including English Mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, US President Woodrow Wilson, Pope Leo XIII, King Edward VIII of England, Joseph Kennedy (father of JFK,) Kofi Annan (UN Secretary General) Martin Luther King, Henry Ford, David Rockefeller, H. G. Wells and Nelson Mandela. Check out all of them and many more at New World Order quotes. At around the same time a loose clan of ideologues inside Europe’s communist movement developed a vision for the future based on world view thinking and ideological collectivism, and the first calls for a world government were heard. Today, it is known as the Frankfurt School, and its ideals have perverted American society. Before WWI, Marxists held the idea that if (when) war broke out in Europe, working class men and women everywhere would "throw off their chains," rebel against the bourgeoisie and create a Europe - wide communist revolution. The problem with all Marxist theory is that it looks great on paper but never works well in reality (to be fair the same can be said of any economic theory.) When war broke out in 1914, instead of starting a revolution, the proletariat volunteered, put on their uniforms and went off to defend their countries and their way of life against threats created largely by the arrogance, stupidity and incompetence of their leaders. After the war ended, Marxist theorists were left asking, "What went wrong?" The declarations of war that kicked off World War Once should have been their moment, but they found that while workers were happy to support the unions in the fight for better pay and workers' rights, they did not fancy swapping the aristocratic devel they knew for the bureaucvratic devil they did not. Russian anarchist Mikhail bakunin had warned Karm Marx in 1870 that a communist government would quickly become as tyrannical as the old aristocratic regime it replaced. By the mid 1920s events in the Soviet Union were making clear the truth of this. Two very prominent Marxists thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century were Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács. Each had concluded that European working classes had been deceived by the economic success of Western democracy and the capitalist system. They were not collaborators but both reasoned that until democracy, capitalism and the communities that bound people in nations had been destroyed, a communist revolution was not possible. Gramsci's best known best known work introduces the idea of cultural hegemony, in which he outlines how the state and dominant class in capitalist society, which in Britain we would call the middle class (the professionals, managers and administrators, usually and wrongly dubbed the bourgeoisie by Marxists, use their domination of cultural institutions to maintain power. The bourgeoisie, according to Gramsci, develop a hegemonic culture using ideology rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. This Hegemonic culture spawns its own set of morals and values which become the "common sense" values of national communities and thus maintain the status quo. Cultural Hegemonic power is therefore the means by which the elite maintain the consent to the capitalist order which democratic governments neeed to have legitimacy, rather than using coercive power using force to maintain order as tyrants do. This cultural hegemony is produced and reproduced by the dominant class through the institutions that form the superstructure. Gramersci's contribution to cultural Marxism was to provide the argument for destroying the moral values and community bonds that hold communities together. The process of destruction has been visible since the 1960s and can be seen now as leftists, who have taken to calling themselves 'liberals' or 'progressives', attack conservative websites, deplatform or shout down speakers who oppose their point of view, demonstrate against and call for the sacking of university professors who, while being liberal in outlook, point out that it is not racist to oppose uncontrolled immigration, is not homophobic to decline to support same sex marriage and not Islamophobic to argue that Muslim immigrants be held accountable to the same laws as secular, Christian or Hindu members of society. In 1918, Lukács was made minister of culture in Communist Hungary following the break up of the Austro - Hungarian Empire. While serving in this office, Lukács formed the idea that if the family unit, the basic support unit of western society, could be broken and sexual morals were eroded, society could be broken down and the way prepared for a communist takeover. He implemented a policy named "cultural terrorism," which aimed to deliver these two objectives. A major plank of the policy the targetting of target children’s minds through propaganda in the form of lectures and stories that encouraged them to deride family values and reject Christian ethics. We have seen these very things happeninging in democratic societies with traditional education giving way to politicised lessons and teaching of distorted versions of history ehich always cast Europeans as the villains. In the lectures Lukacs promoted, graphic sexual matter was presented to children, and they were taught that sexual promiscuity was acceptable. Again we have seen recent parallels as the Gay, Lesbian and Transgender agenda has been introduced into schools. Does anybody still think Cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory? Lukacs was forced into exile when Romania invaded in 1921 and the communist government was overthrown and cultural terrorism went underground. The next development in Cultural Marxism had to wait until 1923 when the founder of cultural terrorism attended a "Marxist study week" in Frankfurt, Germany. There, Lukács met a wealthy, eager Marxist apparatchik named Felix Weil who was completely seduced by the idea of cultural terrorism and coercion by stealth. Until Lukács appeared on the European political stage classical Marxist theory was based solely on the economic changes needed to overthrow class conflict. Weil was enthused by Lukács’ and Gramersci's cultural angle on Marxism. Weil’s interest in the ideas of the two founders of cultural Marxism led him to use some of his wealth to set up a new Marxist think tank — The Institute for Social Research. It would later come to be known as simply The Frankfurt School (so if anyone tells you The Frankfurt School is a 'conspiracy theory', now you know it is not. By 1930, the school had come under the auspices of a new director Max Horkheimer. The thinkers began mixing the ideas of Sigmund Freud on mass manipulation of the human mind with the economic theories of Marx, and the cultural assaults of Lukacs and Gramsci and cultural Marxism was born. In the original version of Marxism expounded in Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, the 'workers of the world' were supposedly oppressed by the ruling classes. The central theory of Cultural Marxism proposed that all members of society was psychologically oppressed by the cultural and social institutions of Western Christian democracy. The Frankfurt School concluded that this new thrust to destroy the social and economic order would need new hate symbols to spur the change. The workers were not able to rise up on their own. The rise of The National Socialists in Germany was a stroke of luck. When Hitler seized power in 1933, Germany became a bad and place to be a Jewish Marxist, as most of the school’s faculty were. So, the school moved to New York City, the bastion of Western culture at the time. In 1934, the school was reborn at Columbia University (one of the colleges barack Obama claims to have attended, though his records remain sealed so we cannot know. Interesting though, in view of Obama's track record of trying to attach himself to symbolically important places in the rise of Amerian marxism.) From this new base, the ideas of Institute For Social Research members began to exert an infulence on American culture. It was at Columbia University that the school honed the tool it would use to destroy Western culture: the printed word. The alumni of The Frankfurt School published a lot of popular material. The first of these publications was Critical Theory. The theory was simple, so much so in fact it barely warrants the title theory: Marxists would attack the cultural edifices that held back the revolutionary spirit of the workers by criticizing every pillar of Western culture. Family, democracy, common law, freedom of speech, education and others that were seen as supporting the status quo would be targeted. The hope was that these pillars would crumble under the pressure. Next was a book co-authored by Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality in which the authors redefined traditional American views on gender roles and sexual mores as "prejudice," and opened, amongst other things, the way for a shift in the attitudes of feminism from simple and justified demands for equal pay and social status to the rabidly testosterone hating campaign to destroy men it has now become. Adorno compared them to the traditions that led to the rise of fascism in Europe. The effect of the book was to brand any strongly held opinion as authoritarianism. Such abuses of language are a favourite tactic of cultural Marxists whose attacks have caused many inoffensive words to become proscribed in polite society. For example, I was discriminating in my choices of wine until about fifteen years ago when I was told that discrimination identifies me as racist because only racists discriminate. I'm joking of course, Cultural Marxists can call me what they like, I'm still discriminating in my choices. Is it just a coincidence that the go-to slur for the politically correct today is “fascistâ€? *************************** After World War Two the Frankfurt School pushed its shift away from economics and toward Freud by publishing works on psychological repression. In the years between the twentieth centruy's two great wars there had been an upsurge of interestst in psychology, sociology and the possiblities of using mass manipulation techiques to control public opinion and shape perceptions. First, however, they had to persuade the masses to question traditional values and this was no small task. The working classes are by far the most conservative of all social strata and persuading them to accept that homosexual relationships were as valid as traditional marriage or that a family could function if the man stayed at home to cook, clean and look after the children was never going to be easy. Members of the school set about their task with enthusiasm, working on the age old priniciple of divide and rule. Their throughout the 1950s works first split society into two main groups: oppressors and victims. Arguing that throughout history reality had always been shaped by the groups who controlled traditional institutions (straight, white, Christian, European men,)they cast women, blacks, atheists and homosexuals as victims. From there, they floated outrageous ideas; prinicipally that sex differences did not exist, (for people who claimed they believed in science, they could be remarkably dismissive of scientific evidence that challenged the advancement of their agenda,) that the social roles of men and women were social constructs defined by the "oppressors." Other groups, ethnic minorities for example, were also reduced to mere social constructs. There was no difference between races (they were on firmer ground here, biologically at least,) Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Germany when WWII ended. Herbert Marcuse, another member of the school, stayed in America. In 1955, he published Eros and Civilization. In the book, Marcuse argued that Western culture was inherently repressive because it gave up happiness for social progress. The book called for “polymorphous perversity,†a concept crafted by Freud. It posed the idea of sexual pleasure outside the traditional norms. Eros and Civilization would become very influential in shaping the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Marcuse would be the one to answer Horkheimer’s question from the 1930s: Who would replace the working class as the new vanguards of the Marxist revolution? Marcuse believed that it would be a victim coalition of minorities—blacks, women, and homosexuals. The social movements of the 1960s—black power, feminism, gay rights, sexual liberation—gave Marcuse a unique vehicle to release cultural Marxist ideas into the mainstream. Railing against all things “establishment,†The Frankfurt School’s ideals caught on like wildfire across American universities. Marcuse then published Repressive Tolerance in 1965 as the various social movements in America were in full swing. In it, he argued that tolerance of all values and ideas meant the repression of “correct†ideas. It was here that Marcuse coined the term “liberating tolerance.†It called for tolerance of any ideas coming from the left but intolerance of those from the right. One of the overarching themes of the Frankfurt School was total intolerance for any viewpoint but its own. That is also a basic trait of today’s political-correctness believers. To quote Max Horkheimer, “Logic is not independent of content.†Recalling the Words of Winston (Not That One) The Frankfurt School’s work has had a deep impact on American culture. It has recast the homogenous America of the 1950s into today’s divided, animosity-filled nation. In turn, this has contributed to the undeniable breakdown of the family unit, as well as identity politics, radical feminism, and racial polarization in America. It’s hard to decide if today’s culture is more like Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World. Never one to buck a populist trend, the political establishment in America has fully embraced the ideas of the Frankfurt School and has pushed them on American society through public miseducation. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the beacons of progressivism, are both disciples of Saul Alinsky, a devoted cultural Marxist. And so we now live in a hyper-sensitive society in which social memes and feelings have overtaken biological and objective reality as the main determinants of right and wrong. Political correctness is a war on logic and reason. To quote Winston, the protagonist in Orwell’s dystopia, “Freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4.†Today, America is not free. -->Cultural Marxism Explainedhttps://worldaffairs.blog/2017/03/05/cultural-marxism-explained/ ( center Check out Syria – War of Deception, my new e-book on the Syrian war, the most consequential war of recent times) Liberalism in social issues in the last few decades can be essentially summarized as Cultural Marxism. Feminism, civil rights movement, gay movement, political correctness, mass and illegal immigration, and the current transgender movement are all products of Cultural Marxism (CM). The original Marxism – let’s call it Economic Marxism (EM) – was purely based on wealth/income inequality and it gained influence by stoking class warfare and envy. Cultural Marxism (CM) adopted the same principles but applied them to race, gender, sexual preference etc. EM: rich versus poor; CM: man versus woman, white versus black, straight versus gay and so on. Superficially, EM sounded good to the poor: destroy inequality, distribute wealth (Robin Hood theory), and make everyone alike. Of course, in the end, Marxism – in the form of socialism or communism – ends up making everyone equally miserable. Cultural Marxism also has the same end-result. And just like classic Marxism, CM is also very anti-religion and anti-spirituality. The essence of Marxism and Cultural Marxism (CM) are the same: Victims versus Perpetrators or Powerful versus the Powerless. The solution is always the same: make the powerful group weaker and the powerless group stronger. However, remember that even in a totally Marxist world, there will always be a group that’s wealthy and powerful. That’s the irony! CM is not about creating harmony. The essence of CM is divide and rule. It’s about chaos and resentment. If everyone got along with each other in a society, Cultural Marxists become useless. Thus, to justify their existence and hold on to their power, Cultural Marxists need constant conflict. CM’s strategy involves two tactics. First, rather than simply helping the “powerless†group, CM also attacks and weakens the so-called “powerful†group. This is done through laws, mass media, movies/TV/music, propaganda and social engineering. Second, CM constantly reminds one group of its “victim status†and the reason behind their misery: the “perpetrator†group. To keep the perpetrator group from revolting, CM uses guilt and coercion. CM started out in the 1920s by fueling sexual liberation and the battle of men versus women – this was the beginning of feminism. Rather than saying the rich were evil and had too much power and money, the new argument was: men had too much power and money. Patriarchy was evil. It was only fair that women should have equal power. If only women had all the power, money and freedom as men, the society would be great. Then, in the 1930s, because of Hitler, many leftist Jewish intellectuals from the “Frankfurt School†in Germany came to the U.S. It’s worth noting that after the creation of USSR in 1922, Germany came under the influence of Marxism as well. This meant rejecting religious morality. Thus, it was no surprise that cultural decadence became widespread — prostitution, drinking, drugs, orgies and homosexuality were rampant in big cities, particularly Berlin. Weimar Berlin Decadence When the German socialist intellectuals came to the U.S., they simply repackaged their Marxist views as psychological/ethical concepts which were half science and half morality. These sociologists were also highly influenced by Freud’s pseudo psychology that was obsessed with sexuality. They called their new idea “Critical Theory†and, in their own words, it aimed to develop a fundamental critique of society, which contemplates the need for an alteration of society as a whole. Their book in 1950, “Authoritarian Personality,†for example, had a huge influence on the American society (see pic at the end of the blog). Everything they proposed was anti-family, anti-Christianity and anti-tradition — patriarchy, Christianity, tradition, patriotism and God were all portrayed as authoritarian and oppressive. These messages also resonated very well, since it’s tempting to free oneself from social mores and norms (“let’s skip the church, do drugs and have a lot sex†will always get more followers than “go to church, don’t do drugs and limit your sexual activity.“) The problem with these pseudo-sociologists/psychologists was that they had sadly been persecuted in Nazi Germany and thus were obsessed with anti-Semitism and prejudice. Seen through this prism of victimhood, they saw Christianity and any amount of (white) racial pride or nationalism as dangerous. Their work is filled with words such as bigots, fascists, prejudice, ethno-centrism and anti-Semitism. For example, just Chapter 3 in this book is 100 pages long and is titled “The study of Anti-Semitic Ideology.†They were very smart but not smart enough to psycho-analyze themselves and see their own biases. Moreover, the fact that they were sponsored/funded by the American Jewish Committee only reinforced these biases. (BTW, if you doubt, how influential these people are, think about the reactions to Donald Trump. All the histrionic reactions and the language from the mainstream media are straight out of the works of Frankfurt School scholars.) In the following decades, every major social movement — sexual revolution, feminism, atheism, anti-nationalism, free speech, pornography, drugs, abortion, divorce, children out of wedlock, civil rights, gay rights and others — was based on the same fundamental principles outlined by the Cultural Marxists of Frankfurt School. CM revolution In one sense, cultural Marxists were simply contrarians who wanted to flip everything upside down. Many religious people view this as also “satanic,†in the sense of completely turning around the concepts of good and bad. Although there were some positive social changes due to CM, there have been many drawbacks as well. The detrimental effects of CM come from 1) The pace at which changes are introduced 2) Division and rancor among various groups 3) Weakening of the social bond and thus individuals 4) Economic malaise 5) Needless/Disruptive Social Engineering and 6) Unintended consequences. RAPID PACE: Rather than an organic and natural progression, CM forces changes down society’s throat. Even if you take women’s suffrage, it seems like a good idea that the US Constitution was changed in 1919 to guarantee women’s right to vote. However, by that time, 15 States in the U.S. already had full suffrage and many other States allowed women to vote in certain elections. Thus, even without the help of CM, women would have acquired the right to vote in the near future. Similarly, if you look at homosexuality and the new transgender movement, it is astonishing how social mores and laws that have been around for 10,000 years of human civilization are being overturned in a matter of 20 years. Gay marriages are now legal and the fundamental concepts of gender are being challenged (for example, California is now considering officially recognizing more than two genders; and kids as young as 5 are brainwashed to think they are of different gender. There are even laws in Canada that would jail parents if they don’t, for example, let their kid “choose†his/her own gender.) Mass immigration is another example of drastic societal change. In the 1960s, whites were 90% of the population in the U.S. By 1980, whites’ share declined to 80%. Today, under the age of 5, whites are minorities (under 50%)! Overall, whites are 63% of US population now. It’s not just that that the relative numbers are decreasing. Whites are having fewer kids. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of white children in America actually decreased by 4.3 million. Europe’s entire identity is also about to change — within a couple of decades, many European countries will have whites and Christians as minorities. Already, Muslim names are the most popular among new-born children in some European countries. DIVISION AND RANCOR: Has feminism really made the society or women’s lives better? It’s not an easy question, since feminism also resulted in rising divorce rates, delayed marriages, more poverty for women, and decreased fertility rate. (Poverty rates for women at historically high level in 2014!). Studies show that American women are much unhappier today than in the 1960s. The share of single men and women are the highest in the U.S. history, and people are finding it harder than ever before to find a suitable partner. Even with all the advancement for women, CM manufactures fake issues such as “rape culture†and “pay inequality†to fuel the victim mentality. Similarly, when Obama got elected, the media said that we have reached a post-racial America where race doesn’t matter anymore. Of course, America was “punkedâ€! After 8 years of Obama, we have Black Lives Matter movement and popular African American figures in social media (think Shaun King, Tariq Nasheed) who talk about “white supremacy†every day. In fact, anti-white sentiments are fueled by CM in academia and media now. People are brainwashed about “white privilege,†the need to eliminate “whiteness,†and much more blatantly racist ideas that can never be said towards any other group. WEAKENING OF INDIVIDUALS: CM has really weakened the fundamental institutions that held societies together for eons — family, religion, culture, race/tribe, national identity etc. The disintegration of these institutions has resulted in a society where many people fall through the cracks without help from families, neighbors, churches etc. It’s no wonder that 75% of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck and almost 1 in 4 Americans are on psychiatric drugs. Overall, feminism, multiculturalism, atheism, hedonism and consumerism have made people more vulnerable and disoriented. CM 2 ECONOMIC MALAISE: Divorce is one of the easiest ways to become poorer. It’s especially draining on men in the West, but everyone suffers. Fact is that feminism made divorce very easy. This was accomplished by 1) changing the laws for divorce and alimony/child support payments 2) creating welfare programs that replaced husbands with the government as the provider and 3) completely altering the social moral landscape regarding sexuality, adultery, marriage, children out of wedlock etc. Here is an example of the shocking changes in out-of-wedlock birth rates in 50 years, from 1965 to 2015: Out-of-wedlock birth rates Feminism also doubled the labor force and essentially lowered the wages for men. In the end, very few people benefited economically since now it takes two wage earners to support a family when one person could do it a few decades ago. Mass and illegal immigration also reduce wages across the board and increase crime and the number of people dependent on welfare. DISRUPTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING: CM disrupted a social order that was functional – albeit with many imperfections – for thousands of years. What people value, how people think and behave, how men and women interact and love one another, how fundamental social units (families) operate, what it means to be a community or a nation … all have been vastly modified and engineered by the elites in the past few decades. CM destroyed tradition and religion and replaced them with political correctness, morality according to corporate media, and Orwellian control by corporations and governments. Furthermore, mass immigration – what is essentially an invasion of Europe – is going to create enormous disruption and social chaos over the next two decades. It’s a ticking time bomb. As WikiLeaks revealed, even progressive leaders privately acknowledge the tremendous problems of mass immigration — they just won’t admit to it in public. Read this shocking email that describes the problems of mass immigration in Europe. Multiculturalism is good to some extent, but too much of it will only lead to a society without unity or purpose. Never in the history of mankind … multiculturalism, like we see now, has succeeded (or even attempted). UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: Elites don’t care about harmful unintended consequences of CM, since more the chaos, the better. If population decreases because of feminism, great, open the borders. If migrants in Sweden are committing rapes and murders, it only gives the elites an opportunity to experiment on how much mind control they can have on the Swedes (who are taught to pretend that everything is great). If Muslim immigration results in terrorist attacks, so be it — let’s use it as an excuse to increase mass surveillance and introduce militarized police. People are not even thinking through what gay and transgender movements will do the society in the long run. So how come Cultural Marxism has succeeded so well? Most people don’t perceive the effects of CM because it is marketed very well, with themes of noble reasons and causes the events seem to happen logically, one after the other (for example, transgender movement came right after the gay movement). There is also a clever 4-step process to establish the new norms. The steps involved are tolerance, acceptance, celebration and reverse intolerance. That is, first use a mix of guilt and appeal to tolerance. Then demand acceptance – that the new idea is as good as the old one. Then celebrate the new social construct as something great. Finally, establish the new construct as the normalcy and demonize all opposition. the changes are hailed as positive and progressive by the media, Hollywood and the political elites. This gives a false sense of security to people, especially those who are on the losing side political correctness coerces people from opposing it or even talking about it. Where do we go from here? There is definitely a backlash and people in Europe and U.S. are starting to rebel and push back against Cultural Marxism. Trump’s election and the Alt-Right movement are examples of this reaction. Although leaders in The Netherlands (Geert Wilders) and France (Marine Le Pen) failed to win the elections in 2017, their movements and parties are not going anywhere. The next twenty years may be the most crucial in the history of western civilization. REFERENCES: 1. Birth of Cultural Marxism – Frankfurt School 2. Cultural Marxism Explained in 7 Minutes (video)The Pensee UniqueThe expression was coined by Jean-François Kahn, editor-in-chief of L'Evenement du Jeudi,[2] in an editorial in January 1992. The phrase pensée unique is often used by political parties and organisations and in criticism. https://www.proz.com/kudoz/french_to_english/journalism/1478828-pens%C3%A9e_unique.html La Pensée Unique https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1995/01/RAMONET/6069 In today's democracies, more and more free citizens are feeling stuck with a kind of slimy doctrine that insensibly envelops all rebellious reasoning, inhibits, disturbs, paralyzes and stifles it. This doctrine is the unique thought, the only one authorized by an invisible and omnipresent police of opinion. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communist regimes and the demoralization of socialism, the arrogance, arrogance, morgue and insolence of this new gospel have reached such a degree that one can, without exaggerating, qualify this fury. ideological of modern dogmatism. What is unique thought? The translation into ideological terms with universal claim of the interests of a set of economic forces, in particular those of international capital. It was, so to speak, formulated and defined in 1944, on the occasion of the Bretton Woods agreements. Its main sources are the major economic and monetary institutions - World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, European Commission, Banque de France, etc. - who, through their funding, enlist in the service of their ideas, throughout the planet, many research centers, universities, foundations, which, in turn, refine and spread the good word. This anonymous speech is repeated and reproduced by the main bodies of economic information, including the "Bibles" of investors and scholars - The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist, Far Eastern Economic Review, The Echoes, Reuters Agency etc. - properties, often large industrial or financial groups. Everywhere, faculties of economics, journalists, essayists, politicians, finally, take over the main commands of these new tables of the law and, through the relay of mass media, repeat them to satiety. Knowing that, in our media companies, repetition is worth demonstration. The first principle of the unique thought is all the stronger because a distracted Marxist would not deny it: the economic prevails over the political. It is on the basis of such a principle that, for example, an instrument as important in the hands of the executive as the Bank of France was, without any notable opposition, made independent in 1994 and, in some away from political hazards ". "The Bank of France is independent, apolitical and cross-country," says indeed its governor, Mr. Jean-Claude Trichet, who adds however: "We ask to reduce public deficits", [and] "we pursue a strategy of money stable (1) ". As if these two objectives were not political! In the name of "realism" and "pragmatism" - that Mr. Alain Minc formulates as follows: "Capitalism can not collapse, it is the natural state of society. Democracy is not the natural state of society. The market, yes. (2) "- the economy is placed at the command post. An economy free, it goes without saying, the obstacle of the social, kind of pathetic gangue whose heaviness would cause regression and crisis. The other key concepts of the single thought are known: the market, idol whose "invisible hand corrects the asperities and dysfunctions of capitalism", and especially the financial markets, whose "signals guide and determine the general movement of the world. 'economy'; competition and competitiveness, which "stimulate and energize businesses, leading to permanent and beneficial modernization"; free trade without shores, "factor of uninterrupted development of trade, and therefore of societies"; the globalization of both manufacturing production and financial flows; the international division of labor, which "moderates trade union demands and lowers wage costs"; strong money, "stabilizing factor"; deregulation; privatisation ; liberalization, etc. Always "less state", a constant arbitrage in favor of the income of the capital at the expense of those of the work. And an indifference to the ecological cost. The constant repetition, in all the media, of this catechism (3) by almost all politicians, right and left (4), confers on it such a force of intimidation that it stifles all attempts at free reflection, and makes it very difficult to resist this new obscurantism (5). It would almost come to be seen that the 17.4 million European unemployed, the urban disaster, the general precariousness, the corruption, the suburbs on fire, the ecological destruction, the return of racisms, fundamentalism and religious extremism, and the tide of the excluded are mere mirages, hal Google Translate for Business:Translator ToolkitWebsite Translator3 - Le brouillard insidieux de la pensée uniquehttp://algoric.pagesperso-orange.fr/eu/tik/14/ti143-surfpyr/a3.htm The supporters of cultural Marxism and the Pensée Unique claim that fluididity argument and being able to see merit in differing points of view is intellectually dishonest. On the contrary, flexibility is basic common sense. It goes against the foundations og western culture, and we're not talking Christianity here but the roots of European civilisation in Greece, Dacia and the celtic and germanic tribes of northern Europe,) for our minds to be so closely conditioned by the "solid" reasoning, to which is added a practice now firmly rooted in the unique thought, of following the crowd and taking a binary stance on all questions. For example: free movement of people is good therefore anyone who opposes free movement and argues for controlled immigration is bad ("racist"). or Same sex marriage is desirable in the name of equality therefore anybody who does not support same sex marriage is a homophobic bigot. and finally (from feminists who have screeched about rape being the wost crime imagineable,) We must learn to tolerate rape by men from certain third world cultures in the interests of diversity because in thier culture it s not seen as wrong to rape an immodestly dressed woman. All of the above examples of moral relativism are obviously nonsense but such contradictions are common among the supporters of Cutural Marxism and politically correct dogma. We can use an analogy to illustrate the folly of such thinking. Imagine a manager addressing his staff on a rebranding exercise: "To drive the rebranding project, our public relations consultants recommend the staff present a more individualistic and profressive personality. Look at the lead consultant, he wears designer suits of unstructured linen and instead of dark blue or charcoal grey he chooses colours like teal, burgundy and sky blue, he wears casual shoes which are different our polished leather shoes, he drives a sporty 4x4 which projects a more confident and outgoing personality than our staid executive models, he always has the latest electronic gadgets. We should try to project our dynamic individualism by following his example in these things. The example may be quite ridiculous (although as a consultant I hoave worked in organisations whose managers were not all that different, but transpose the thinking to different situations, we assert our individualism by following the crowd, we cater to the individual needs of school pupils by offering a one-size-fits-all standard curriculum, we respect fashion victims for their daring rejection of convention, we follow the trend in choice of cars and consumer goods, we tailor our choises to elicit peer group approval. I have to admit here the consultant with the unconventional suits was myself, although I was not in public relations and would not be seen dead driving an urban 4X4, my choices of car are a comfortable, well maintained, sixteen year old executive saloon (sedan) for practical, every day use, and a weekend car, a 1960s, 70s or 80s classic, for the sheer joy of driving them. What the manager in the illustration, clearly a victim of the Pensee Unique, has failed to realise is that because the consultant projects the image he want to give his team, they too, bt blindly following the example, will also project that image. So unimaginitive, so dogmatic is his approach that he is simply askiing his team to swap one uniform for another. In fact he is probably so indoctrinated in the single idea he simply does not realise there is a uniform and he is substituting another, the manager is convinced that as he follows the consultant, for whom we may assume here the affectation is part of the sales pitch (in my case dressing unconventionally was in my nature but I was very aware of the effect I was having - people remembered me.)Rather than understanding that he assumes members of his team will take on the qualities of the person he admires. The same illustration works for opinions and attitudes, take on the trendy, socially acceptable set of values and one anticipates being as admired as those thought leaders among whom the values originated. According to Vladimir Volkoff, "it does not seem that the world has ever had such a politically correct political omnipresent, as insidious, as triumphant as ours ... It debunks all truths whatever they are and does not put any another instead ... is not based on a revelation, but on the impossibility of any revelation ... that he seeks to impose universality by various means: persuasion, logomachy, intimidation, the practice of the conspiracy of silence over diverging opinions ... (It is necessary) to fight it on its favorite grounds: - thought, which must be unique; - the tongue, which must be free and without inhibition; - compassion, which should not turn to sentimentality; - the media, which should not be enslaved by advertisers and demagogues. Politically correct dogma is also an enemy of the truth, which until now has been the declared goal of human knowledge, of doubt, which has been its faithful instrument: it is therefore through love of the truth and by the taste of the doubt, working together in the manner of a couple in mechanics, that we must seek to find this freedom of thought which was ours and of which it is not enough to deplore the loss ". To combat the insidious seduction of the unique thought, resist the false snse of security that comes from being one of the crowd, reinvigorate the critical spirit and the habit of always questioning authority, and restore the virtue of personal responsibility which are vital in terms of personal fulfillment and progress of civilization it is nececessary to rid oneself of politically correct thinking and the collectivism of Cultural Marxism. In our complex society, neither the isolated exploits of the diven genius or the collective efforts led by the super-manager, nor the herds of sheeple, the brainwashed clones churned out by the state education system can cure this malaise which afficts our society. To free future generations from the grip of this structured thinking and regain the dynamism which is generated by the energies realeased through interaction between different personalities, multiple skillsets and a wide variety of disciplines. If such a truly diverse and multiultural society of fluid, differentiated and connected intellgence scares those who reason that diversity is limited to skin colour and multiculturalism is achieved by transplanting uneducated, semi - literate and superstitious people from economically and socially backward third world cultures to the sophisticated societies of the western world, and then demanding the denizens of the more advanced cultures adapt to the values and traditions of the newcomers are willing to sacrifice the infinite potential of evolved communities for the sake of ideological purity. The fulfillment of human poetential can only be achieved through openness and autonomy in society. We, and our communities are interdependent, but progress depends on us having personal freedom, of thought of speech and to determine our own courses in life. Those university brainwashed types who are sure that they, cocooned in their faculties and offices, are better equipped to manage our lives for us than we are ourselves can only ever be right if future members of society are so deprived of the ability to think for themselves that they become no longer able to think for themselves.La Société des clones à l'ère de la reproduction multimédiahttps://www.actes-sud.fr/catalogue/philosophie/la-societe-des-clones-lere-de-la-reproduction-multimedia From living Egyptian statues to eighteenth century automata, from science fiction robots to creatures of the "artificial life", a long line of figures of the double has been constituted as so many symbolic testimonies of an anthropological adventure that has always been haunted. by the demiurgic desire to animate life a creation in the image of man. However, while the twentieth century did not inaugurate the process of duplication, it intensified its effects and expanded applications to the point of allowing human cloning. As early as 1936, the philosopher Walter Benjamin emphasized the consequences that the advent of technical reproducibility could induce, not only as regards the status of the work of art but, in the long term, as to the singularity of the time of the experience on which it depends the very possibility of the unpublished. Because, created in the likeness of his human model, the automaton - robot without history or clone without memory - is only a man who lost his time. Isabelle Rieusset-Lemarié's book endeavors, however, to explore the richness and metamorphosis of new artificial creatures: clones and puppets of synthesis, actors and virtual humans, avatars ... It also invites us to consider in all their ambivalence the stakes of our multimedia reproduction company confronted with the logics of standardization of cultural industries and biotechnological dangers, within a predatory market universe that respects neither cultural exception nor exception of the living. Have you noticed how, at a given moment, all the media, all the chroniclers, and all the politicians think and say exactly the same thing, are interested in the same events, propose the same explanation? Call this phenomenon of universal mimicry the Single Thought: it spreads like a virus in the atmosphere, obviously accelerated by social media. If you try to draw attention to other events, less media, less conventional or to provide contrary explanations on dominant facts - such as global warming, or the growth of inequalities, or the rise of nationalisms - you will be snubbed or ignored. If you are immune to this virus, you will be an outcast; to have peace, it is better to catch the virus like everyone else. Thinking for yourself We are very far, in our globalized world, the council that, in the 1680s, gave the Marquise de Sevigne in a letter to her daughter: "Just think or think wrong but think for yourself! The Marquise de Sevigne remains illustrious in the annals of French literature, but this advice to her daughter is forgotten. Do not think like everyone else, would it not also be a disease of the mind, another virus often called a spirit of contradiction? The English even have a specific term for it: contrarian. Perhaps, but the contradiction is necessary in the search for the truth: "what is true, wrote the philosopher of sciences Karl Popper, it is what can be shown false". In simple terms, knowledge arises only at the end of the demolition of the dominant assumptions, heckled. This is illustrated by the "Yet it turns" of Galileo. Let's leave the abstract reasoning to spot in our time, some peaks of fever of the Single Thought: We hear, for example, that nationalisms everywhere appear in reaction against globalization, here is the return to the tribe. In fact, in order to demonstrate the above, we compare different political phenomena in different civilizations, which obey various causes. Trump, Marine the Pen, Xi Jinping, same fight? It seems to me that everyone should be put in context rather than guessing a community of destiny. This so-called convergent upsurge of nationalism should also be placed in history: we are just emerging from a world where only nationalism and tribalism existed, whereas the singularity of our time is that for the first time globalization, truly universal, coexists, with tribalism, with difficulty, so much the fact is new. The rise of tolerance Similarly, and while "everyone" is rebuffing our ears with the rise of intolerance, I have pointed out, recently in this weekly column, how much the election of a Muslim mayor in London and a Christian mayor in Jakarta, were more astonishing and significant than the "return" of xenophobia; xenophobia has always been, whereas these two elections are only in our time. Another example is the growth of inequality: the thesis of the 1% of super-rich exploiting the remaining 99%. There, we confuse visibility and reality. Bill Gates is perhaps the richest man in history but at least he created something, of everyday use, the Windows software, while the super-rich of the past, The Maharajahs of India or the Istanbul Sultans had not created anything at all. The questioning by "everyone" of the 1% is a relic of vulgar Marxism which attributes the misfortune of some to the exploitation by the Other. To claim that inequality threatens growth, which is repeated by the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde International Monetary Fund, is not demonstrated and seems absurd at the moment when a universal middle class is emerging. The gap between individuals may be growing here and there but the gap between peoples is narrowing. We will finish, while we could go on indefinitely, with climate change as a single thought. I do not deny change since climate, by definition, is what changes. I do not deny the warming since it is measurable. But from there, the unique Thought suggests that the only cause is the emission of carbon dioxide, that is to say, industrialization, that is to say, capitalism: what remains to be demonstrated. It also remains to demonstrate that governments can act against this secular, probably cyclical, warming trend. It is clear that politicians in search of renewed legitimacy have every reason to believe it: the unique Thought is their relay. Single Thinking is not a quest for truth but an affirmation of the intellectual power and monopoly of interpretation by a globalized elite that is also anti-globalist these days. "Everyone claims to be searching for the truth," said philosopher Isaiah Berlin, "but if you find out, it might be uninteresting." Let's look for it anyway.A Society Of Clones And The Pensee Unique Virushttps://www.contrepoints.org/2016/07/09/259764-virus-de-pensee-unique Have you noticed how, at a given moment, all the media, all the chroniclers, and all the politicians think and say exactly the same thing, are interested in the same events, propose the same explanation? Call this phenomenon of universal mimicry the Single Thought: it spreads like a virus in the atmosphere, obviously accelerated by social media. If you try to draw attention to other events, less media, less conventional or to provide contrary explanations on dominant facts - such as global warming, or the growth of inequalities, or the rise of nationalisms - you will be snubbed or ignored. If you are immune to this virus, you will be an outcast; to have peace, it is better to catch the virus like everyone else. Thinking for yourself We are very far, in our globalized world, the council that, in the 1680s, gave the Marquise de Sevigne in a letter to her daughter: "Just think or think wrong but think for yourself! The Marquise de Sevigne remains illustrious in the annals of French literature, but this advice to her daughter is forgotten. Do not think like everyone else, would it not also be a disease of the mind, another virus often called a spirit of contradiction? The English even have a specific term for it: contrarian. Perhaps, but the contradiction is necessary in the search for the truth: "what is true, wrote the philosopher of sciences Karl Popper, it is what can be shown false". In simple terms, knowledge arises only at the end of the demolition of the dominant assumptions, heckled. This is illustrated by the "Yet it turns" of Galileo. Let's leave the abstract reasoning to spot in our time, some peaks of fever of the Single Thought: We hear, for example, that nationalisms everywhere appear in reaction against globalization, here is the return to the tribe. In fact, in order to demonstrate the above, we compare different political phenomena in different civilizations, which obey various causes. Trump, Marine the Pen, Xi Jinping, same fight? It seems to me that everyone should be put in context rather than guessing a community of destiny. This so-called convergent upsurge of nationalism should also be placed in history: we are just emerging from a world where only nationalism and tribalism existed, whereas the singularity of our time is that for the first time globalization, truly universal, coexists, with tribalism, with difficulty, so much the fact is new. The rise of tolerance Similarly, and while "everyone" is rebuffing our ears with the rise of intolerance, I have pointed out, recently in this weekly column, how much the election of a Muslim mayor in London and a Christian mayor in Jakarta, were more astonishing and significant than the "return" of xenophobia; xenophobia has always been, whereas these two elections are only in our time. Another example is the growth of inequality: the thesis of the 1% of super-rich exploiting the remaining 99%. There, we confuse visibility and reality. Bill Gates is perhaps the richest man in history but at least he created something, of everyday use, the Windows software, while the super-rich of the past, the maharajahs of the India or the Istanbul Sultans had not created anything at all. The questioning by "everyone" of the 1% is a relic of vulgar Marxism which attributes the misfortune of some to the exploitation by the Other. To claim that inequality threatens growth, which is repeated by the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde International Monetary Fund, is not demonstrated and seems absurd at the moment when a universal middle class is emerging. The gap between individuals may be growing here and there but the gap between peoples is narrowing. We will finish, while we could go on indefinitely, with climate change as a single thought. I do not deny change since climate, by definition, is what changes. I do not deny the warming since it is measurable. But from there, the unique Thought suggests that the only cause is the emission of carbon dioxide, that is to say, industrialization, that is to say, capitalism: what remains to be demonstrated. It also remains to demonstrate that governments can act against this secular, probably cyclical, warming trend. It is clear that politicians in search of renewed legitimacy have every reason to believe it: the unique Thought is their relay. Single Thinking is not a quest for truth but an affirmation of the intellectual power and monopoly of interpretation by a globalized elite that is also anti-globalist these days. "Everyone pr The Maharajahs of India or the Istanbul Sultans had not created anything at all. The questioning by "everyone" of the 1% is a relic of vulgar Marxism which attributes the misfortune of some to the exploitation by the Other. To claim that inequality threatens growth, which is repeated by the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde International Monetary Fund, is not demonstrated and seems absurd at the moment when a universal middle class is emerging. The gap between individuals may be growing here and there but the gap between peoples is narrowing. We will finish, while we could go on indefinitely, with climate change as a single thought. I do not deny change since climate, by definition, is what changes. I do not deny the warming since it is measurable. But from there, the unique Thought suggests that the only cause is the emission of carbon dioxide, that is to say, industrialization, that is to say, capitalism: what remains to be demonstrated. It also remains to demonstrate that governments can act against this secular, probably cyclical, warming trend. It is clear that politicians in search of renewed legitimacy have every reason to believe it: the unique Thought is their relay. Single Thinking is not a quest for truth but an affirmation of the intellectual power and monopoly of interpretation by a globalized elite that is also anti-globalist these days. "Everyone claims to be searching for the truth," said philosopher Isaiah Berlin, "but if you find out, it might be uninteresting." Let's look for it anyway. Google Translate for Business:Translator ToolkitWebsite Translator Existentialism – A Definition Existentialism in the broader sense is a 20th century philosophy that is centered upon the analysis of existence and of the way humans find themselves existing in the world. The notion is that humans exist first and then each individual spends a lifetime changing their essence or nature. In simpler terms, existentialism is a philosophy concerned with finding self and the meaning of life through free will, choice, and personal responsibility. The belief is that people are searching to find out who and what they are throughout life as they make choices based on their experiences, beliefs, and outlook. And personal choices become unique without the necessity of an objective form of truth. An existentialist believes that a person should be forced to choose and be responsible without the help of laws, ethnic rules, or traditions.Existentialism – What It Is and Isn’tExistentialism takes into consideration the underlying concepts: https://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/existentialism.htm Human free will Human nature is chosen through life choices A person is best when struggling against their individual nature, fighting for life Decisions are not without stress and consequences There are things that are not rational Personal responsibility and discipline is crucial Society is unnatural and its traditional religious and secular rules are arbitrary Worldly desire is futile Existentialism is broadly defined in a variety of concepts and there can be no one answer as to what it is, yet it does not support any of the following: wealth, pleasure, or honor make the good life social values and structure control the individual accept what is and that is enough in life science can and will make everything better people are basically good but ruined by society or external forces “I want my way, now!” or “It is not my fault!” mentality There is a wide variety of philosophical, religious, and political ideologies that make up existentialism so there is no universal agreement in an arbitrary set of ideals and beliefs. Politics vary, but each seeks the most individual freedom for people within a society. Existentialism – Impact on Society Existentialistic ideas came out of a time in society when there was a deep sense of despair following the Great Depression and World War II. There was a spirit of optimism in society that was destroyed by World War I and its mid-century calamities. This despair has been articulated by existentialist philosophers well into the 1970s and continues on to this day as a popular way of thinking and reasoning (with the freedom to choose one’s preferred moral belief system and lifestyle). An existentialist could either be a religious moralist, agnostic relativist, or an amoral atheist. Kierkegaard, a religious philosopher, Nietzsche, an anti-Christian, Sartre, an atheist, and Camus an atheist, are credited for their works and writings about existentialism. Sartre is noted for bringing the most international attention to existentialism in the 20th century. Each basically agrees that human life is in no way complete and fully satisfying because of suffering and losses that occur when considering the lack of perfection, power, and control one has over their life. Even though they do agree that life is not optimally satisfying, it nonetheless has meaning. Existentialism is the search and journey for true self and true personal meaning in life. Most importantly, it is the arbitrary act that existentialism finds most objectionable-that is, when someone or society tries to impose or demand that their beliefs, values, or rules be faithfully accepted and obeyed. Existentialists believe this destroys individualism and makes a person become whatever the people in power desire thus they are dehumanized and reduced to being an object. Existentialism then stresses that a person's judgment is the determining factor for what is to be believed rather than by arbitrary religious or secular world values.Existentialism - Inernet Encyclopedia Of Philosophyhttp://www.iep.utm.edu/existent/#H3 Existentialism is a catch-all term for those philosophers who consider the nature of the human condition as a key philosophical problem and who share the view that this problem is best addressed through ontology. This very broad definition will be clarified by discussing seven key themes that existentialist thinkers address. Those philosophers considered existentialists are mostly from the continent of Europe, and date from the 19th and 20th centuries. Outside philosophy, the existentialist movement is probably the most well-known philosophical movement, and at least two of its members are among the most famous philosophical personalities and widely read philosophical authors. It has certainly had considerable influence outside philosophy, for example on psychological theory and on the arts. Within philosophy, though, it is safe to say that this loose movement considered as a whole has not had a great impact, although individuals or ideas counted within it remain important. Moreover, most of the philosophers conventionally grouped under this heading either never used, or actively disavowed, the term 'existentialist'. Even Sartre himself once said: “Existentialism? I don’t know what that is.” So, there is a case to be made that the term – insofar as it leads us to ignore what is distinctive about philosophical positions and to conflate together significantly different ideas – does more harm than good. In this article, however, it is assumed that something sensible can be said about existentialism as a loosely defined movement. The article has three sections. First, we outline a set of themes that define, albeit very broadly, existentialist concerns. This is done with reference to the historical context of existentialism, which will help us to understand why certain philosophical problems and methods were considered so important. Second, we discuss individually six philosophers who are arguably its central figures, stressing in these discussions the ways in which these philosophers approached existentialist themes in distinctive ways. These figures, and many of the others we mention, have full length articles of their own within the Encyclopedia. Finally, we look very briefly at the influence of existentialism, especially outside philosophy. 1. Key Themes of Existentialism Although a highly diverse tradition of thought, seven themes can be identified that provide some sense of overall unity. Here, these themes will be briefly introduced; they can then provide us with an intellectual framework within which to discuss exemplary figures within the history of existentialism. a. Philosophy as a Way of Life Philosophy should not be thought of primarily either as an attempt to investigate and understand the self or the world, or as a special occupation that concerns only a few. Rather, philosophy must be thought of as fully integrated within life. To be sure, there may need to be professional philosophers, who develop an elaborate set of methods and concepts (Sartre makes this point frequently) but life can be lived philosophically without a technical knowledge of philosophy. Existentialist thinkers tended to identify two historical antecedents for this notion. First, the ancient Greeks, and particularly the figure of Socrates but also the Stoics and Epicureans. Socrates was not only non-professional, but in his pursuit of the good life he tended to eschew the formation of a 'system' or 'theory', and his teachings took place often in public spaces. In this, the existentialists were hardly unusual. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the rapid expansion of industrialisation and advance in technology were often seen in terms of an alienation of the human from nature or from a properly natural way of living (for example, thinkers of German and English romanticism). The second influence on thinking of philosophy as a way of life was German Idealism after Kant. Partly as a response to the 18th century Enlightenment, and under the influence of the Neoplatonists, Schelling and Hegel both thought of philosophy as an activity that is an integral part of the history of human beings, rather than outside of life and the world, looking on. Later in the 19th century, Marx famously criticised previous philosophy by saying that the point of philosophy is not to know things – even to know things about activity – but to change them. The concept of philosophy as a way of life manifests itself in existentialist thought in a number of ways. Let us give several examples, to which we will return in the sections that follow. First, the existentialists often undertook a critique of modern life in terms of the specialisation of both manual and intellectual labour. Specialisation included philosophy. One consequence of this is that many existentialist thinkers experimented with different styles or genres of writing in order to escape the effects of this specialisation. Second, a notion that we can call 'immanence': philosophy studies life from the inside. For Kierkegaard, for example, the fundamental truths of my existence are not representations – not, that is, ideas, propositions or symbols the meaning of which can be separated from their origin. Rather, the truths of existence are immediately lived, felt and acted. Likewise, for Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is essential to recognise that the philosopher investigating human existence is, him or herself, an existing human. Third, the nature of life itself is a perennial existentialist concern and, more famously (in Heidegger and in Camus), also the significance of death. b. Anxiety and Authenticity A key idea here is that human existence is in some way 'on its own'; anxiety (or anguish) is the recognition of this fact. Anxiety here has two important implications. First, most generally, many existentialists tended to stress the significance of emotions or feelings, in so far as they were presumed to have a less culturally or intellectually mediated relation to one's individual and separate existence. This idea is found in Kierkegaard, as we mentioned above, and in Heidegger's discussion of 'mood'; it is also one reason why existentialism had an influence on psychology. Second, anxiety also stands for a form of existence that is recognition of being on its own. What is meant by 'being on its own' varies among philosophers. For example, it might mean the irrelevance (or even negative influence) of rational thought, moral values, or empirical evidence, when it comes to making fundamental decisions concerning one's existence. As we shall see, Kierkegaard sees Hegel's account of religion in terms of the history of absolute spirit as an exemplary confusion of faith and reason. Alternatively, it might be a more specifically theological claim: the existence of a transcendent deity is not relevant to (or is positively detrimental to) such decisions (a view broadly shared by Nietzsche and Sartre). Finally, being on its own might signify the uniqueness of human existence, and thus the fact that it cannot understand itself in terms of other kinds of existence (Heidegger and Sartre). Related to anxiety is the concept of authenticity, which is let us say the existentialist spin on the Greek notion of 'the good life'. As we shall see, the authentic being would be able to recognise and affirm the nature of existence (we shall shortly specify some of the aspects of this, such as absurdity and freedom). Not, though, recognise the nature of existence as an intellectual fact, disengaged from life; but rather, the authentic being lives in accordance with this nature. The notion of authenticity is sometimes seen as connected to individualism. This is only reinforced by the contrast with a theme we will discuss below, that of the 'crowd'. Certainly, if authenticity involves 'being on one's own', then there would seem to be some kind of value in celebrating and sustaining one's difference and independence from others. However, many existentialists see individualism as a historical and cultural trend (for example Nietzsche), or dubious political value (Camus), rather than a necessary component of authentic existence. Individualism tends to obscure the particular types of collectivity that various existentialists deem important. For many existentialists, the conditions of the modern world make authenticity especially difficult. For example, many existentialists would join other philosophers (such as the Frankfurt School) in condemning an instrumentalist conception of reason and value. The utilitarianism of Mill measured moral value and justice also in terms of the consequences of actions. Later liberalism would seek to absorb nearly all functions of political and social life under the heading of economic performance. Evaluating solely in terms of the measurable outcomes of production was seen as reinforcing the secularisation of the institutions of political, social or economic life; and reinforcing also the abandonment of any broader sense of the spiritual dimension (such an idea is found acutely in Emerson, and is akin to the concerns of Kierkegaard). Existentialists such as Martin Heidegger, Hanna Arendt or Gabriel Marcel viewed these social movements in terms of a narrowing of the possibilities of human thought to the instrumental or technological. This narrowing involved thinking of the world in terms of resources, and thinking of all human action as a making, or indeed as a machine-like 'function'. c. Freedom The next key theme is freedom. Freedom can usefully be linked to the concept of anguish, because my freedom is in part defined by the isolation of my decisions from any determination by a deity, or by previously existent values or knowledge. Many existentialists identified the 19th and 20th centuries as experiencing a crisis of values. This might be traced back to familiar reasons such as an increasingly secular society, or the rise of scientific or philosophical movements that questioned traditional accounts of value (for example Marxism or Darwinism), or the shattering experience of two world wars and the phenomenon of mass genocide. It is important to note, however, that for existentialism these historical conditions do not create the problem of anguish in the face of freedom, but merely cast it into higher relief. Likewise, freedom entails something like responsibility, for myself and for my actions. Given that my situation is one of being on its own – recognised in anxiety – then both my freedom and my responsibility are absolute. The isolation that we discussed above means that there is nothing else that acts through me, or that shoulders my responsibility. Likewise, unless human existence is to be understood as arbitrarily changing moment to moment, this freedom and responsibility must stretch across time. Thus, when I exist as an authentically free being, I assume responsibility for my whole life, for a ‘project’ or a ‘commitment’. We should note here that many of the existentialists take on a broadly Kantian notion of freedom: freedom as autonomy. This means that freedom, rather than being randomness or arbitrariness, consists in the binding of oneself to a law, but a law that is given by the self in recognition of its responsibilities. This borrowing from Kant, however, is heavily qualified by the next theme. d. Situatedness The next common theme we shall call ‘situatedness’. Although my freedom is absolute, it always takes place in a particular context. My body and its characteristics, my circumstances in a historical world, and my past, all weigh upon freedom. This is what makes freedom meaningful. Suppose I tried to exist as free, while pretending to be in abstraction from the situation. In that case I will have no idea what possibilities are open to me and what choices need to be made, here and now. In such a case, my freedom will be naïve or illusory. This concrete notion of freedom has its philosophical genesis in Hegel, and is generally contrasted to the pure rational freedom described by Kant. Situatedness is related to a notion we discussed above under the heading of philosophy as a way of life: the necessity of viewing or understanding life and existence from the ‘inside’. For example, many 19th century intellectuals were interested in ancient Greece, Rome, the Medieval period, or the orient, as alternative models of a less spoiled, more integrated form of life. Nietzsche, to be sure, shared these interests, but he did so not uncritically: because the human condition is characterised by being historically situated, it cannot simply turn back the clock or decide all at once to be other than it is (Sartre especially shares this view). Heidegger expresses a related point in this way: human existence cannot be abstracted from its world because being-in-the-world is part of the ontological structure of that existence. Many existentialists take my concretely individual body, and the specific type of life that my body lives, as a primary fact about me (for example, Nietzsche, Scheler or Merleau-Ponty). I must also be situated socially: each of my acts says something about how I view others but, reciprocally, each of their acts is a view about what I am. My freedom is always situated with respect to the judgements of others. This particular notion comes from Hegel’s analysis of ‘recognition’, and is found especially in Sartre, de Beauvoir and Jaspers. Situatedness in general also has an important philosophical antecedent in Marx: economic and political conditions are not contingent features with respect to universal human nature, but condition that nature from the ground up. e. Existence Although, of course, existentialism takes its name from the philosophical theme of 'existence', this does not entail that there is homogeneity in the manner existence is to be understood. One point on which there is agreement, though, is that the existence with which we should be concerned here is not just any existent thing, but human existence. There is thus an important difference between distinctively human existence and anything else, and human existence is not to be understood on the model of things, that is, as objects of knowledge. One might think that this is an old idea, rooted in Plato's distinction between matter and soul, or Descartes' between extended and thinking things. But these distinctions appear to be just differences between two types of things. Descartes in particular, however, is often criticised by the existentialists for subsuming both under the heading 'substance', and thus treating what is distinctive in human existence as indeed a thing or object, albeit one with different properties. (Whether the existentialist characterisation of Plato or Descartes is accurate is a different question.) The existentialists thus countered the Platonic or Cartesian conception with a model that resembles more the Aristotelian as developed in the Nichomachean Ethics. The latter idea arrives in existentialist thought filtered through Leibniz and Spinoza and the notion of a striving for existence. Equally important is the elevation of the practical above the theoretical in German Idealists. Particularly in Kant, who stressed the primacy of the 'practical', and then in Fichte and early Schelling, we find the notion that human existence is action. Accordingly, in Nietzsche and Sartre we find the notion that the human being is all and only what that being does. My existence consists of forever bringing myself into being – and, correlatively, fleeing from the dead, inert thing that is the totality of my past actions. Although my acts are free, I am not free not to act; thus existence is characterised also by 'exigency' (Marcel). For many existentialists, authentic existence involves a certain tension be recognised and lived through, but not resolved: this tension might be between the animal and the rational (important in Nietzsche) or between facticity and transcendence (Sartre and de Beauvoir). In the 19th and 20th centuries, the human sciences (such as psychology, sociology or economics) were coming to be recognised as powerful and legitimate sciences. To some extend at least their assumptions and methods seemed to be borrowed from the natural sciences. While philosophers such as Dilthey and later Gadamer were concerned to show that the human sciences had to have a distinctive method, the existentialists were inclined to go further. The free, situated human being is not an object of knowledge in the sense the human always exists as the possibility of transcending any knowledge of it. There is a clear relation between such an idea and the notion of the 'transcendence of the other' found in the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas. f. Irrationality/Absurdity Among the most famous ideas associated with existentialism is that of 'absurdity'. Human existence might be described as 'absurd' in one of the following senses. First, many existentialists argued that nature as a whole has no design, no reason for existing. Although the natural world can apparently be understood by physical science or metaphysics, this might be better thought of as 'description' than either understanding or explanation. Thus, the achievements of the natural sciences also empty nature of value and meaning. Unlike a created cosmos, for example, we cannot expect the scientifically described cosmos to answer our questions concerning value or meaning. Moreover, such description comes at the cost of a profound falsification of nature: namely, the positing of ideal entities such as 'laws of nature', or the conflation of all reality under a single model of being. Human beings can and should become profoundly aware of this lack of reason and the impossibility of an immanent understanding of it. Camus, for example, argues that the basic scene of human existence is its confrontation with this mute irrationality. A second meaning of the absurd is this: my freedom will not only be undetermined by knowledge or reason, but from the point of view of the latter my freedom will even appear absurd. Absurdity is thus closely related to the theme of 'being on its own', which we discussed above under the heading of anxiety. Even if I choose to follow a law that I have given myself, my choice of law will appear absurd, and likewise will my continuously reaffirmed choice to follow it. Third, human existence as action is doomed to always destroy itself. A free action, once done, is no longer free; it has become an aspect of the world, a thing. The absurdity of human existence then seems to lie in the fact that in becoming myself (a free existence) I must be what I am not (a thing). If I do not face up to this absurdity, and choose to be or pretend to be thing-like, I exist inauthentically (the terms in this formulation are Sartre's). g. The Crowd Existentialism generally also carries a social or political dimension. Insofar as he or she is authentic, the freedom of the human being will show a certain 'resolution' or 'commitment', and this will involve also the being – and particularly the authentic being – of others. For example, Nietzsche thus speaks of his (or Zarathustra's) work in aiding the transformation of the human, and there is also in Nietzsche a striking analysis of the concept of friendship; for Heidegger, there must be an authentic mode of being-with others, although he does not develop this idea at length; the social and political aspect of authentic commitment is much more clear in Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus. That is the positive side of the social or political dimension. However, leading up to this positive side, there is a description of the typical forms that inauthentic social or political existence takes. Many existentialists employ terms such as 'crowd', 'horde' (Scheler) or the 'masses' (José Ortega y Gasset). Nietzsche's deliberately provocative expression, 'the herd', portrays the bulk of humanity not only as animal, but as docile and domesticated animals. Notice that these are all collective terms: inauthenticity manifests itself as de-individuated or faceless. Instead of being formed authentically in freedom and anxiety, values are just accepted from others because ‘that is what everybody does’. These terms often carry a definite historical resonance, embodying a critique of specifically modern modes of human existence. All of the following might be seen as either causes or symptoms of a world that is 'fallen' or 'broken' (Marcel): the technology of mass communication (Nietzsche is particularly scathing about newspapers and journalists; in Two Ages, Kierkegaard says something very similar), empty religious observances, the specialisation of labour and social roles, urbanisation and industrialisation. The theme of the crowd poses a question also to the positive social or political dimension of existentialism: how could a collective form of existence ever be anything other than inauthentic? The 19th and 20th century presented a number of mass political ideologies which might be seen as posing a particularly challenging environment for authentic and free existence. For example, nationalism came in for criticism particularly by Nietzsche. Socialism and communism: after WWII, Sartre was certainly a communist, but even then unafraid to criticise both the French communist party and the Soviet Union for rigid or inadequately revolutionary thinking. Democracy: Aristotle in book 5 of his Politics distinguishes between democracy and ochlocracy, which latter essentially means rule by those incapable of ruling even themselves. Many existentialists would identify the latter with the American and especially French concept of 'democracy'. Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset both espoused a broadly aristocratic criterion for social and political leadership. 3. The Influence of Existentialism a. The Arts and Psychology In the field of visual arts existentialism exercised an enormous influence, most obviously on the movement of Expressionism. Expressionism began in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. With its emphasis on subjective experience, Angst and intense emotionality, German expressionism sought to go beyond the naiveté of realist representation and to deal with the anguish of the modern man (exemplified in the terrible experiences of WWI). Many of the artists of Expressionism read Nietzsche intensively and following Nietzsche’s suggestion for a transvaluation of values experimented with alternative lifestyles. Erich Heckel’s woodcut “Friedrich Nietzsche” from 1905 is a powerful reminder of the movement’s connection to Existentialist thought. Abstract expressionism (which included artists such as de Kooning and Pollock, and theorists such as Rosenberg) continued with some of the same themes in the United States from the 1940s and tended to embrace existentialism as one of its intellectual guides, especially after Sartre's US lecture tour in 1946 and a production of No Exit in New York. German Expressionism was particularly important during the birth of the new art of cinema. Perhaps the closest cinematic work to Existentialist concerns remains F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924) in which the constantly moving camera (which prefigures the ‘rule’ of the hand-held camera of the Danish Dogma 95) attempts to arrest the spiritual anguish of a man who suddenly finds himself in a meaningless world. Expressionism became a world-wide style within cinema, especially as film directors like Lang fled Germany and ended up in Hollywood. Jean Genet's Un chant d'amour (1950) is a moving poetic exploration of desire. In the sordid, claustrophobic cells of a prison the inmates’ craving for intimacy takes place against the background of an unavoidable despair for existence itself. European directors such as Bergman and Godard are often associated with existentialist themes. Godard's Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, 1962) is explicit in its exploration of the nature of freedom under conditions of extreme social and personal pressure. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries existentialist ideas became common in mainstream cinema, pervading the work of writers and directors such as Woody Allen, Richard Linklater, Charlie Kaufman and Christopher Nolan. Given that Sartre and Camus were both prominent novelists and playwrights, the influence of existentialism on literature is not surprising. However, the influence was also the other way. Novelists such as Dostoevsky or Kafka, and the dramatist Ibsen, were often cited by mid-century existentialists as important precedents, right along with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Dostoevsky creates a character Ivan Karamazov (in The Brothers Karamazov, 1880) who holds the view that if God is dead, then everything is permitted; both Nietzsche and Sartre discuss Dostoevsky with enthusiasm. Within drama, the theatre of the absurd and most obviously Beckett were influenced by existentialist ideas; later playwrights such as Albee, Pinter and Stoppard continue this tradition. One of the key figures of 20th century psychology, Sigmund Freud, was indebted to Nietzsche especially for his analysis of the role of psychology within culture and history, and for his view of cultural artefacts such as drama or music as 'unconscious' documentations of psychological tensions. But a more explicit taking up of existentialist themes is found in the broad 'existentialist psychotherapy' movement. A common theme within this otherwise very diverse group is that previous psychology misunderstood the fundamental nature of the human and especially its relation to others and to acts of meaning-giving; thus also, previous psychology had misunderstood what a 'healthy' attitude to self, others and meaning might be. Key figures here include Swiss psychologists Ludwig Binswanger and later Menard Boss, both of who were enthusiastic readers of Heidegger; the Austrian Frankl, who invented the method of logotherapy; in England, Laing and Cooper, who were explicitly influenced by Sartre; and in the United States, Rollo May, who stresses the ineradicable importance of anxiety. b. Philosophy As a whole, existentialism has had relatively little direct influence within philosophy. In Germany, existentialism (and especially Heidegger) was criticised for being obscure, abstract or even mystical in nature. This criticism was made especially by Adorno in The Jargon of Authenticity, and in Dog Years, novelist Gunter Grass gives a Voltaire-like, savage satire of Heidegger. The criticism was echoed by many in the analytic tradition. Heidegger and the existentialist were also taken to task for paying insufficient attention to social and political structures or values, with dangerous results. In France, philosophers like Sartre were criticised by those newly under the influence of structuralism for paying insufficient attention to the nature of language and to impersonal structures of meaning. In short, philosophy moved on, and in different directions. Individual philosophers remain influential, however: Nietzsche and Heidegger in particular are very much 'live' topics in philosophy, even in the 21st century. However, there are some less direct influences that remain important. Let us raise three examples. Both the issue of freedom in relation to situation, and that of the philosophical significance of what otherwise might appear to be extraneous contextual factors, remain key, albeit in dramatically altered formulation, within the work of Michel Foucault or Alain Badiou, two figures central to late 20th century European thought. Likewise, the philosophical importance that the existentialists placed upon emotion has been influential, legitimising a whole domain of philosophical research even by philosophers who have no interest in existentialism. Similarly, existentialism was a philosophy that insisted philosophy could and should deal very directly with 'real world' topics such as sex, death or crime, topics that had most frequently been approached abstractly within the philosophical tradition. Mary Warnock wrote on existentialism and especially Sartre, for example, while also having an incredibly important and public role within recent applied ethics.The Agenda: How An International Elite Are Destroying Sovereign Nationsby Ian R ThorpePart 1 When UK foreign secretary William Hague, recently threatened to storm the Ecuadorian embassy in London and arrest Julian Assange, it was an example of the contempt for national sovereignty that Western nations have repeatedly shown since the fall of the Soviet Union. There are many examples of this contempt, from invading countries to bring about regime change, to the unelected officials of the European Union, United Nations and the IMF bullying Greece into sacrificing itself on the altar of the single European currency to protect the interests of the elite which has invested heavily in expanding the EU and creating a pan European federal superstate. In every case, the core United Nations principles of national self-determination and of democratic sovereignty, once championed by Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill and Lenin alike, are pudhed aside in the stampede towards creation of a global government. In his book The Significance of Borders controversial Dutch columnist Thierry Baudet’s offers a rare counter to such views. Baudet, a lawyer and historian at the University of Leiden, argues that representative government and the rule of law is impossible without the nation state. But if we look at what is happening around the world, the sovereign nation is under attack from two directions. First it is under attack from supranationalism, that is, from institutions like the European Court of Hum an Rights, the UN Security Council, and, most dramatically, the European Union to those world leaders and heads of international bureaucracies who have used G20 meetings climate conferences and even the London Olympic games, occasions on which the attention of the media is focused, to talk about the need for global government, global taxes and a global ecoomy . While nations retain sovereignty over their currency, foreign policy and domestic laws at a formal level, increasing degrees of ‘material sovereignty’ have been acquired by supranational organisations. Baudet argues, for instance, that the official aim of the EU ‘is the negation of the concept of statehood’, because the nation state is held responsible, most notably by German theorists, for the great wars of the twentieth century. The EU’s immanent federalist logic leads to the necessary extension of its bureaucratic power and plans for taking more and more countries into its orbit from the basket cases of eastern Europe to the tribalistic failed states of north and east Africa. Take as an illustration of the attack on the democratic basis of national sovereignty the contempt in which the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) holds Britain for denying convicted prisoners the right to vote: this despite the fact that the UK's elected parliament voted 234 votes to 22 against the proposal. It seems the bureaucrats of the ECHR are happy to demand Britain change laws upheld by its own democracy. Second, national autonomy is also under attack from behind. Multiculturalism and its official support, legal pluralism ( the application of the law with cultural ‘sensitivity’ rather than justly with all being equal before the law). Secondly, from cultural diversity, which rejects the idea of a British or a Dutch identity in favour of overlapping multiple, labels associated with social demographics, lightly held, identities. Not British Culture or German culture buy Gay culture, Black culture or metropolitian culture. Baudet provides as an example of how this globalist thinking is embedded in the elite the Dutch crown princess, Máxima, who declared in 2007 that ‘the Dutch identity does not exist’, that the world has ‘open borders’ and that ‘it is not either-or. But and-and.’ When royalty – once the very symbol of national sovereignty – refuses to discriminate between citizens and outsiders, then even the most ardent internationalist or socialist might begin to smell a rat. What is going on is nothing to do with equality and everything to do with inequality and those who style themselves “progressive liberals” and voluntarily promote this agenda are nothing more than useful idiots, gullible dupes prepared to give away their own freedom to think for themselves and act independently in what they believe to be their own interests in exchange for peer group approval and an occasional pat on the head from members of the elite. As Baudet puts it,,without a community of interest, a ‘we’, there is nothing. If we are not British, American, Dutch etc. what are we, who are we? Will we all, like those pathetic emotional retards of the left, be reduced to jumping on the bandwagon of every politically correct cause in a vain attempt to find an identity for outselves?
It is worth noting that the ECHR outlaws ‘discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status’. Everyone must be the same, not in the sense of being treated equally but in that we are not allowed to identify ourselves as English, Catholic, Socialist, Conservative, Baudet is correct to point out that such a widely drawn attack on discrimination ‘must necessarily implicate the citizens’ indifference towards those criteria’. Any form of particularity, for example nationality, will be abolished in the name of a universal cobformity. Though the international eliteists claim the effect will be to widen ‘minds and sympathies’ anyone who has read history will know a far more likely, almost inevitable in fact, outcome will be a return to tribalism as has happened in the Balkans after the breakup of Yugoslavia, in various former Soviet republics, most notably those in the Caucasus and in the synthetic political nations created by former colonial powers in Africa and the middle east. This in turn makes the governing authority so remote from the individual and so removes us from the collective identity that shapes our communities there is a breakdown of law and order. Once the law becomes ‘no longer “ours” or “from within”, but from “theirs” from “out there”, the property of a faceless and anonymous “them” our responsibility to our fellow creatures is so eroded and our capacity to decide for ourselves (however we constitute that ‘we’) is gone, both at the level of the local community, historically the basis for constituting a self-governing ‘we’, and at the level of the individual citizen. It is difficult to overstate the degree to which the dismantling of the sovereign nation is actually a project of unelected international elites The case of Hungary is a good example of how these two trends – the supranational and the multicultural – come together to defeat democracy and sovereignty. By backing the corrupt socialist government of Ferenc Gyurcsany against the right-wing Fidesz and Jobbik parties in 2010, the EU robbed the elected assembly of legitimacy and actually promoted the kind nationalism its act of tyranny claimed to be halting. The intervention of the supranational elite and their tame bureaucrats didn’t only fan the flames of civil unrest, but also added fuel to the fire by branding Hungary a savage throwback to darker times. Most disturbingly, EU criticisms of Hungary ignore the fact that Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government (whether you like their politics or not) was freely elected with a massive majority. The EU has since done similar things in Greece and Italy, on the pretext of acting to save the single currency (which is doomed anyway) the elitists by threatening financial sanctions forced elected governments to step down and replaced the outgoing leaders with unelected bureaucrats. The nation is not being attacked from without so much as from within, wherever we are in the free world, our National politicians have long sought refuge from their own responsibility to make and implement policy in the UN and it's economic development agencies, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO and regional organisations like the EU. For British politicians, blaming Europe has always been a useful way of passing the buck for unpopular decisions. Yet in hiding behind the EU or the ECHR, national politicians reveal the very same contempt for sovereign democracy of which they accuse Brussels, the UN and the IMF. RELATED POSTS:
Democracy Murdered In France Who Runs America, The White House Or The Shadow Government? Trump catches attention of CFR, Bilderberg, Trilateral Donald Trump is portrayed as a clown by mainstream media and his combover is the silliest I have ever seen. Still, he's a billionaie so I don't suppose he gives a flying fuck what The Daily Stirrer thinks of him. Not that we think he is all bad, anyone who attacks Obama's global naziism trade deals, TTIP and TPP mush have some good points. How Mainstream Media And The Major Political Parties Are Making Sure Voters Do not Hear The Voices Of Politics' Most Powerful Critics US Presidents Of The Past warned Against Secret, Shadow Government. By now it should be obvious that peacemake, joybringer and putative aquatic pedestrian Barack Hussein Obama was never really in charge of the US Government. Whatever Obama said would happen, all the American government's policies ensured the opposit would happen. The embedded article thows some light on how the US government really works The American Political System Is "Not A Democracy Or Constitutional Republic" - Thiel Multi-Cultural England: Are You Feeling The Progressive Diversity. Even The BIS Is Shocked At How Broken Markets Have Become. What Would George Orwell Think Of The Screeching Left's Horror At Plans To Shrink The State. In part one of his classic social commentary, The Road To Wigan Pier, George Orwell wrote of the grinding poverty and appalling living conditions endured by people in industrial areas. The second part, which is more revevant to the 21st Century is a rant against the superiority of the upper class 'Fabian' socialists who have hijacked the Labour movement and whose Paternal Liberalism is in almost all ways more repugnant that the uncaring attitude of the old elite.
France’s President Hollande Says 'Non' To Obama’s Demand for Corporate Global Oligarchy Living With The Conspiracy Latest Posts Elsewhere: [Boggart Blog]...[Little Nicky Machiavelli]...[Scribd]...[Wikinut] The Purpose Of Common PurposeCommon Purpose (CP) is an elitist, globalist, pro-EU political organisation which aims to replace democracy in UK, across Europe and eventually worldwide. CP intends to do this by choosing and training “Future Leaders” of society. [https://www.cpexposed.com/a...] Common Purpose (CP) is a Charity, based in Great Britain, which creates ‘Future Leaders’ of society. CP selects individuals and ‘trains’ them to learn how society works, who 'pulls the levers of power' and how CP ‘graduates’ can use this knowledge to lead 'Outside Authority’. Children, teenagers and adults have their prejudices removed. Graduates are ‘empowered’ to become ‘Leaders’ and work in ‘partnership’ with other CP graduates. CP claims to have trained some 30,000 adult graduates in UK and changed the lives of some 80,000 people, including schoolchildren and young people. But evidence shows that Common Purpose is rather more than a Charity ‘empowering' people and communities’. In fact, CP is an elitest pro-EU political organisation helping to replace democracy in UK, and worldwide, with CP chosen ‘elite’ leaders. In truth, their hidden networks and political objectives are undermining and destroying our democratic society and are threatening ‘free will’ in adults, teenagers and children. Their work is funded by public money and big business, including international banks. It is important for researchers on this site to realise that the majority of Common Purpose 'graduates' are victims, who have little if any understanding of the wider role of Common Purpose within UK society, nor of its connections to higher government and the European Union. Drawn into CP training by a flattering invitation, or selected by their company or organisation, this recruitment is normally carried out by a previously trained CP person - now recruiting for the cause. Candidates are screened and selected (or rejected) by CP Advisory Board members in their area. Both candidates and 'trained graduates' will have no real understanding of Common Purpose's wider role to help achieve a political and social paradigm shift in the UK. The real objective, would appear to be to replace our traditional UK democracy with the new regime of the EU superstate. By blurring the boundaries between people, professions, public and private sectors, responsibility and accountability, CP encourages graduates to believe that as new selected leaders, CP graduates can work together, outside of the established political and social structures, to achieve this paradigm shift or CHANGE. The so called "Leading Outside Authority". In doing so, the allegiance of the individual becomes 're-framed' on CP colleagues and their NETWORK. Using behavioural and experiential learning techniques, the views of graduates can be remoulded to conform to the new Common Purpose. Most will not be aware this has happened, but we are given immediate clues in descriptions by graduates that Common Purpose training is 'life changing', 'disturbing, or 'unsettling'. Trained and operating under the Chatham House rules of secrecy (details of discussion, those present and location are not disclosed), CP graduates come to operate in 'their world' of Common Purpose. Please go to Document Library .......Category.........Mind Control Background on this site for historical information regarding manipulation of people's free will and behaviour. The term 'GRADUATE' is used deliberately so as to prevent disclosure of involvement with Common Purpose. As 'MEMBERS' of CP, which is more appropriate, individuals in the public sector would have to declare their interests. So strong is the Common Purpose bond, that some individuals will lie to hide information and documents considered 'dangerous' to the CP cause. People challenging CP colleagues have been victimised and forced out of their positions. Common Purpose is linked to a host of other suspect trusts, foundations, think-tanks, quangos and so called charities. DEMOS is a key example. These organisations funnel political and social CHANGE policy through CP, to re-frame graduates. Examples range from promotion of Diversity in every company and organisation, to Curfews for young people. Common Purpose promotes the 'empowerment of individuals', except where individuals challenge the activities of CP, and public spending on CP. These people are branded vexatious, extremist, right wing or mentally unsound. Mrs Julia Middleton, the Chief Executive of Common Purpose, praises the work of German bankers. Deutsche Bank is, of course, a major power behind Common Purpose. Mrs Middleton, earning circa £80,000 p.a. from her charity, is also very happy to promote the term 'USEFUL IDIOTS' in her book 'Beyond Authority'. Are we the General Public the USEFUL IDIOTS, or are the Elitest Common Purpose Graduates? You must decide. I recommend that you begin your research by clicking on the DOCUMENT LIBRARY button above and then selecting " Advice on Using the Archives". When you have read the brief introduction select the "CP Penetration UK" category. Here you can see diagrams of of the CP Network and a Map of Geographical Penetration of UK. The DOCUMENT LIBRARY, also contains documents, letters and emails as evidence of Common Purpose at work. The library will be regularly updated. Please also click on GRADUATES on the top bar. You will be able to search for Common Purpose graduates in cities across the UK. Did you realise these people, possibly your colleagues and friends, were now 're-framed' "elite leaders". But overwhelmingly, you the taxpayer, have paid for their CP training. Interested? Annoyed? Happy searching. The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint ... but is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.--C. S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters). And we should remember that...Evil flourishes where good men do nothing. These “Future Leaders” will manage CP’s hidden networks and achieve its political objectives by undermining and destroying democratic society and removing free will in adults, students and children. Uncontrolled Third World immigration into the West is their foremost way of destroying Western democracy. What should really alarm people about CP is their funding. Their work is funded by public money and big business, including international banks. By far the biggest part of CP’s funding comes from international financial institutions. Who holds the power in international financial institutions? Who are the ones in these institutions who make the decisions about which political groups get funding? Check Delingpole’s article for the answer. And when you get the answer you are faced with an anomaly. By far the biggest threat to J’s in the UK and Europe is Islam. But then take the fact that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour is practically Islam whilst bearing in mind that it's also a close twin of Common Purpose. Labour and CP are two sides of the same coin. This brings us back to the anomaly of the people funding CP. Implosion of Germany's Green Party Threatens To Destabilse EU KEYWORDS: news, opinion, dailystirrer,
Fair Use: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers (usually as an embedded page which means you see their complete page with all content including attibutions, links and advertising within a window in our page). We feel this comes under the provisions of “fair use†in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic, cultural, scientific, spiritual and social issues. The material on this page is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use†you must request permission from the copyright owner. Information on this can be found within the embed frame. Contact us: |
find keywords on this domain This free script provided by NAVIGATION
More From Around The Labyrinth
Our Latest Posts Recommended Reading
MORE FROM THE GREENTEETH STABLE MenuFollow Greenteeth on TWITTER...Boggart Abroad ... Daily Stirrer home ... Greenteeth Bites ... Boggart Blog ... Greenteeth Labyrinth ... Author ... Wikinut - Ian R Thorpe ... Gather ... Bubblews ... Authorsden ... Scribd ... Ian Thorpe at Facebook ... Delicious Greenteeth ... Boggart Network News ... Boggart Network News |
