Libido Dominandi
From Neoredemptive
| Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control | |
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E. Michael Jones
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| Book Review Policy |
A review of the connection between revolutionary thinking in politics and sexuality from the late 18th century through the present day.
Contents |
Doc's Take
Okay, I feel like there's a lot that needs to be said about this book, but I'm having a hard time doing it justice. Consider this a work-in-progress.
Monsters From The Id presents many of the same ideas, but with only a subset of the history and in a much more readable form, so that may be a better place for many readers to start.
Editorial Problems
This book would have benefited tremendously from the application of a firm editorial hand.
- Chapter titles are "City, Year" tuples, which refer more-or-less to the epicenter of the chapter, although the chapters overlap heavily in locations, characters, and timelines. It would have been useful to understand exactly what the author was trying to accomplish by breaking the book up this way; as it is, it simply seems disorganized.
- Since the locus of each chapter seems most often to be a person and not a place or time, those names would seem to me more apt chapter titles (or even subtitle).
- Within each chapter, it's common to see one-paragraph or one-sentence excurses which take us over a decade outside of the current timeline (forward or backward) which end by just as abruptly snapping back into the original timeline. One is left with the impression that something is being pulled over on us by presenting the facts of the development of a person's thought out of order.
- A graphic representation of how all of these people and their timelines and travels intersect, annotated with page references, would make the constant time travel easier to follow.
- Much material is repeated within and between chapters, and a good amount of copy is simply superfluous repetition and restatement; I would estimate that a good 20% of the book could be removed completely without any loss of content, and another 10% could be cut by removing repeated accounts of the same event from the same person's perspectives and replacing them with footnotes or cross-references.
Bent
Jones could be written off as a conspiracy buff because the "Illuminati" play an important role in the book, but that would be an incorrect conclusion. He is using the Illuminati as they actually existed - as a Masonic secret society whose workings were made well-known by the publication of their documents - as the primordial expression of the use of sexual appetite to affect political control.
At the same time, it's not much of a stretch to say that Jones does a hard sell asserting that the liberator/libertine conspiracy was specifically targeted at the Catholic church's nuns and priests. Indeed, he becomes so heavy-handed in insisting upon the prominence of anti-Catholic psychological/pedagogical conspiracies in the 60s that he misses what I think is a golden opportunity to explore the broader applicability of his thesis to the unfolding of that same decade with respect to the rest of the culture: how it was dealing with the war, the shape of the court and jurisprudence, the political climate, the rise of the Jesus People and how they related to/reacted against/were conformed to the Flower People, etc.
Content
In the first quarter of the book, everything gets tied back to the Illuminati, a short-lived secret society founded by Adam Weishaupt whose founding documents articulated an intention to control its members by dispensing permission for sexual indulgence from one hand while holding the indulger captive to their indulgence with the other. This theme of capitalizing upon liberated perversion is then applied to the French Revolution, behaviorism, Freud's psychotherapy, the dawn of the public relations industry in America, the Bolshevik revolution, Sanger's contraception movement, (etc...)
I am struck by the unevenness of the form that "control" takes chapter by chapter. It is never made clear what kind of "control" Weishaupt exerted over his followers. The example of televangelists destroyed for the same sins which pornographers are applauded for is tenuous hyperbole; the former were hypocrites, which was the fault they hung themselves from. More interesting is the Freudian model (in which the patient's lusts are turned loose, and the patient then requires the ongoing service of the psychotherapist to offer absolution for the destructive effects of those indulgences). ...etc...
The notion of sexual addiction comes into play in the latter half of the 20th century. Forms of therapy (Reichian etc) are developed which stir up and excite sexual passions without equipping the patients to rationally manage those passions. Pornography and its apologia are mainstreamed.
...the place of the Land O'Lakes Statement (1967) in the development (devolution?) of the modern Catholic university (Notre Dame in particular)...
...degradation of public self-control produces anarchy, necessitating authoritarian response from government...
Political Reflections
It is difficult to see a way forward, and the book paints the prospects for the future as decidedly bleak. The issue cannot be a simple correction or adjustment of policy; man does not need techniques, but resolute character shaped by the moral law. At the same time, the implication of the book is unmistakable that it is the role of the state to cultivate virtue, or at the very least to repress agencies which drive the worst kinds of vice.
If we grant the supposition that pornography is highly addictive, then current US jurisprudence seems to suggest that it must therefore be regulated; see, e.g., how the law treats alcohol (age limits), tobacco (age limits plus compulsory anti-advertising), and narcotics (prohibition). But such a proposition puts the current power structure in a bind; pornography has been loosed on the masses, making masturbation a national sport and sucking the political will of any effort to shove the cat back into the bag, not to mention the implications of saying that the graphic depiction of sex isn't always socially acceptable for the culture of "sexual liberation" to which so much of our political culture must at least pay lip service.
Theological Reflections
Suspiciously absent from the book is a notion of repentance. Throughout the book, it is asserted as fait accompli that once sexual corruption has gotten its hooks into someone, that person is then and must perpetually remain a slave to the whims of whomever is able to manipulate those passions (by being seen as their guarantor, linking them with some other political end, capitalizing upon them through commerce, etc). But what would happen if, as a rule, we took to confessing our sexual sins instead of trying to hide them? Not through mere exhibitionism -- that would just be more of the same -- but earnest, public confession that we have sinned, that we have recognized it as sin, that we make no excuses for it, and that we do not wish for others to bear the weight of the same sins of which we are guilty? While this doesn't deal with the "addiction" side of the problem, the whole notion of people being unable to turn against their sexual masters because of fear of being "outed" (e.g. by Masters, who had taken sexual histories from many politicians and board members of the foundations which funded him) or for fear of being called "hypocrites" (e.g. the media establishment, most participants in which are enmeshed in fornication, adultery, and lust) disappears as soon as those same people are willing to confess and repent.
