Eric Fromm, a leading figure of the Frankfurt Institute for Critical Theory, a guru of Generation ’68 and hence a father of the ideology of the modern era, proclaimed the emergance of the individual ‘liberated’ from what he called the ‘primary ties’. However, this ‘freedom’ presented a problem that he and others of the Freudo-Marxian clique sought to resolve: The individual, cut off from the security and sense of place that was provided by traditional societies, which Fromm called ‘pre-individualistic’, so far from creating the freedom for what humanistic psychologists call ‘self-actualisation’, resulted in loss of meaning. Fromm, in preparing the ground for deconstruction, wrote of modern man and the new society that he and others were preparing ideologically:
This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man.1
Fromm and his colleagues were refugees from Hitlerism. Fascism was analysed through a combination of Marx and Freud, as these intellectuals objected that Fascism sought to return man to his pre-modernist state of organic community, where the individual finds meaning in service to the greater whole. Such bonds were regarded by Fromm et al. as ‘tyranny’. The central question was
that man, the more he gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an ‘individual’, has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world as destroy his freedom and the integrity of his individual self.2
The Critical Theorists, having arisen from the chaotic milieu of the Weimar Republic, presaged the New Left and what is today called ‘identity politics’. They replaced classic Marxian class struggle with a Freudian Oedipal conflict as the basis of a new historical dialectic, in which alienated individuals and minorities would become a revolutionary vanguard where the proletariat had failed to respond. Organic bonds would be deconstructed as historically passé and the alienated individuals and minorities would be reconstructed with new identities while simultaneously allowing the individual to pursue self-actualisation through ‘spontaneity’ and ‘love for humanity’; ‘democracy’ would be built under the guardianship of a technocratic and intellectual elite, and democratic debate would not be confused by the intrusion of contrary opinions.
The neo-Marxist Freudians of the Frankfurt School become masters of Orwellian double-speak. Their dialectics, promoted by the very Establishment they claimed to be resisting, became the ideological, moral and social foundation of the modern world; they were so successful, and the confusion that they caused so great, that even those who are considered ‘conservatives’ adopt positions that were seeded by the Critical Theorists and think that left is right, and right is left.
Even those such as Jordan Peterson now regard ‘primary ties’ as intrusive on the sovereignty of the individual, and condemn ‘Identitarianism’ as being related to ‘Left-wing’ ‘Identity politics’ because Identitarians eschew the supremacy of the detached individual in favour of a collective identity. Of this Peterson stated, like a true Whig:
I have irrefutable evidence that I’ve pulled thousands of young men away from the attractions of the ‘alt-right’. Part of the core information that I’ve been purveying is that identity politics is a sick game. You don’t play racial, ethnic and gender identity games. The left plays them on behalf of the oppressed, let’s say, and the right tends to play them on behalf of nationalism and ethnic pride. I think they’re equally dangerous. The correct game, as far as I’m concerned, is one where you focus on your individual life and try to take responsibility for your actions.3
In the abhorrence of all collective identities as supposedly inherently ‘Leftist’, the neo-Whigs do not see the difference between the organic bonds that the actual traditional-Right aims to restore on the one hand, and the Leftist aim of creating new identities by the destruction of those organic bonds, in the dialectical pursuit of creating a nebulous ‘humanity’ and one-world system, on the other.
In Generation Identity, aptly subtitled ‘a declaration of war against the ‘68ers’, Marcus Willinger lists a new generation’s grievances with the ‘modern world’ that has pushed them to a genuine revolt:
You’ve thrown us into this world, uprooted and disoriented, without telling us where to go, or where our path lies. You’ve destroyed every means for us to orient ourselves. You’ve reduced the Church to rubble…. You’ve devalued the state… You’ve split the family… You’ve subjected love to a reductionist deconstruction… You’ve ruined the economy, so we inherit mountains of debt. You’ve questioned and criticised everything, so now we believe in nothing and no one. You’ve left us no values…4
There is no identity between Identitarianism and Identity politics. The first is an actualisation of the perennial, the latter a by-product of the age of decay. In this essay the aim is to examine the key elements of Critical Theory, their contradictions and superficiality. Juxtaposed are the views particularly of Carl Jung as the leading heretic from the Freudian school, who provides a comprehensive critique of the Freudian-Marxian synthesis, and who could be far more utilised in Rightist analyses.
Organic ‘Freedom’ vs. Rootless ‘Freedom’
To be ‘free’ in the traditional sense means to dwell in peace (Friede = peace), at a place, free from harm and danger, suitable for dwelling.5 Dwelling’ is ‘the basic character of Being’,6 which is an uncovering of what one is. Martin Heidegger predicated freedom on place and Being. While the Critical Theorists and humanistic psychologists sought ‘self-actualisation’ in the destruction of ‘primary ties’, for Heidegger ‘freedom now reveals itself as letting beings be’7, whereby freedom is not a capricious inclination to one direction or another,8 but requires a memory of what the essence of things are. Heidegger contrasted this with the modernist impulsion to conceal the nature of Being by forgetfulness, where ‘historical-man is left to his own resources’, taking his own standards while ‘forgetting being as a whole’, continually supplying himself with ‘new standards, yet without considering either the ground for taking up standards or the essence of what gives the standard’.9 This forgetfulness is a ‘constant erring’.10 Modernism demands forgetfulness as the path to ‘self-actualisation’, and the destruction of all that binds; firstly of the family, which implies continuity and stability.
The problems of alienation and lack of meaning in industrial society that Fromm sought to address, the danger of modern man wanting to ‘escape from freedom’ and from his ‘awareness and conception of himself as an independent and separate being’,11 have been addressed by Heidegger. He considered modern man to be ‘enframed’, to have been engulfed by an outlook that prevents the revealing of who he is. This ‘enframing’ existed prior to industrial society, but technology and industry block the path to Being.
Fromm adapted the dialectical approach to history from Marx: The historical process had been one of widening individualism from the time of the Reformation. Many sought ‘escape from freedom’, and the insecurity it entails, by embracing the paternal authority of Fascism, which had once been provided by the Church and the feudal order. Here Fromm writes of ‘modern history’ (sic). Like Marx and other social theorists typical of the 19th century and after, he sees humanity in a ‘progressive’, lineal ascent from ‘primitive to modern’. From the time of the Reformation, which did represent the birth of the ‘modern’ epoch within the context of Western Civilisation, Fromm sees the start of the process whereby the individual becomes aware of himself and detached from communal ties, as a child matures to become detached from biological dependence on the mother.12 Hence, the mission of the ‘modern’ epoch is to continue the process of cutting the individual from the organic identity that existed prior to the Reformation, where the individual found meaning in guild, village, family, and Church. It is here that could be found the actual ‘freedom’ referred to by Heidegger in its primordial meaning.
This organic sense of purpose is a primitive trait that needs replacing by the ‘modern’: that is the meaning of modernist ‘freedom’. This is the ego-driven ‘freedom’ that became the battle cry of Generation ’68: the ‘freedom’ that fractured society from the time of the Reformation, heralding the individualism of the bourgeois and the rise of an oligarchy. But for Fromm, as for Marx, this was a necessary part of history:
To the degree to which the individual, figuratively speaking, has not yet completely severed the umbilical cord which fastens him to the outside world, he lacks freedom; but these ties give him security and a feeling of belonging and of being rooted somewhere. I wish to call these ties that exist before the process of individuation has resulted in the complete emergence of an individual, ‘primary ties’.13
Here Fromm introduces his concept of ‘primary ties’. This is the most important concept, because it is here that Fromm and the Critical Theorists sought to destroy Western Civilisation. Fromm explicitly calls these ‘primary ties’ ‘organic’, and that is an essential factor in Rightist analyses: the foundations of traditional society, and the traditional view of history are ‘organic’; it is the ‘organic’ that the Right upholds, defends, and restores, while the ‘progressive’ aims to obliterate the organic.
Fromm saw in the child a temporary phase from which to be liberated and in which self-actualisation would progress beyond organic bonds. The mind is a blank slate on which anything can be written, and the individual once conscious of his Self can write anything he desires so as to self-actualise. He – like Adam and Eve biting the apple, an analogy that Fromm uses in The Fear of Freedom – is not bound to anything; not constrained by anything once he comes to self-consciousness. He does not come from anywhere. He proceeds to wherever he so chooses.
Fromm states of these ‘primary ties’ that they are the barrier to the next stage in human ‘evolution’.
They are organic in the sense that they are a part of normal human development; they imply a lack of individuality, but they also give security and orientation to the individual. They are the ties that connect the child with its mother, the member of a primitive community with his clan and nature, or the medieval man with the Church and his social caste. Once the stage of complete individuation is reached and the individual is free from these primary ties, he is confronted with a new task: to orient and root himself in the world and to find security in other ways than those which were characteristic of his preindividualistic existence. Freedom then has a different meaning.i
Individuation
While Fromm refers to ‘individuation’, the concept was explained in a contrary manner by Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology. Jungian Individuation proceeds from what is inborn, rather than being cut off from it. Individuation is ‘inherited possibilities’, as Jung wrote (see below). Where for the Critical Theorists self-actualisation requires revolt, both individually against one’s family and collectively against ‘society’, Jung countered that Individuation is a process that unfolds organically; the organic bonds provide the sustenance for individual growth, not its suppression: ‘Insofar as this process [of Individuation], as a rule, runs its course unconsciously as it has from time immemorial, it means no more than that the acorn becomes an oak, the calf a cow, and the child an adult’.14 It is a conception that accords with Heidegger’s unfolding of ‘Being’, ‘to let be’.
A certain few consciously strive after Individuation in the sense of Nietzsche’s self-overcoming and the sublimation of instincts, or psychisation as Jung called it, but for most it is an organic unfolding of life; one does not need to be in existential crisis against one’s parents or homeland. ‘Individuation is just ordinary life and what you are made conscious of’, said Jung.15 Jung wrote of this innate creativity:
It is in my view a great mistake to suppose that the psyche of a new-born child is a tabula rasa in the sense that there is absolutely nothing in it. In so far as the child is born with a differentiated brain that is predetermined by heredity and therefore individualized, it meets sensory stimuli coming from outside not with any aptitudes, but with specific ones, and this necessarily results in a particular, individual choice and pattern of apperception. These aptitudes can be shown to be inherited instincts and preformed patterns, the latter being the a priori and formal conditions of apperception that are based on instinct. Their presence gives the world of the child and the dreamer its anthropomorphic stamp. They are the archetypes, which direct all fantasy activity into its appointed paths and in this way produce, in the fantasy-images of children’s dreams as well as in the delusions of schizophrenia, astonishing mythological parallels such as can also be found, though in lesser degree, in the dreams of normal persons and neurotics. It is not, therefore, a question of inherited ideas but of inherited possibilities of ideas.16
Where Fromm saw the ‘primary ties’ as the continuation of an infantile dependency of the individual, Jung saw in the infant the presence of all the instincts and experiences of his ancestors over millennia, from where potentialities arise. This is not something from which to be dissociated, but to be integrated into the total personality; the process of Individuation in the Jungian sense. Here is the difference between Jung’s concept of Individuation, and that of the Critical Theorists. The first means integration, the second means fracture. The whole meaning of Critical Theory is to facture: the individual and society. Of the beginnings of this individuating process from childhood, Jung stated:
Childhood is important not only because various warpings of instinct have their origin there, but because this is the time when, terrifying or encouraging, those far-seeing dreams and images appear before the soul of the child, shaping his whole destiny, as well as those retrospective intuitions which reach back far beyond the range of childhood experience into the life of our ancestors.17
This is what the modernist zealots for the autonomous individual seek to break in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘self-actualisation’ according to their preconceptions of such abstractions, ‘blinded’ by what Jung called ‘the garish conceits of enlightenment’.18 Jung warned that in breaking the bonds and instincts conveyed through untold generations, ‘Disalliance with the unconscious is synonymous with loss of instinct and rootlessness’.19
The Individual and ‘Collective Norms’
The progressive states that ‘individuation’ or ‘self-actualisation’ can only be gained by breaking ‘free’ from ties that restrict the ego. Jung to the contrary, said that Individuation must flower from one’s primordial rootedness: ‘Individuation is only possible with people, through people. You must realise that you are a link in a chain, that you are not an electron suspended somewhere in space or aimlessly drifting through the cosmos’.20 The path to Individuation, to authentic self-actualisation, to the uncovering of one’s Being, is through a consciousness of the self as part of something greater. In Jung’s analysis, where Fromm and the ‘progressives’ can see only restriction: ‘Individuation is not that you become an ego – you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist’.21 Individuation is not ‘individualisation’, ‘but a conscious realisation of everything the existence of an individual implies: his needs, his tasks, his duties, his responsibilities, etc.’22 ‘Individuation does not isolate, it connects’.23
While Fromm talked of the detached individual somehow recombining with the entirety of humanity through a new social consciousness, Jung did not proceed from the notion that the individual must be first detached from bonds, but rather that he grew out of such bonds: ‘You see as the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense relationships and not to isolation’.24 Jung refers to the necessity of identification with ‘collective norms’ as a prerequisite for Individuation: ‘Before [Individuation] can be taken as a goal, the educational aim of adaptation to the necessary minimum of collective norms must first be attained. If a plant is to unfold its specific nature to the full, it must first be able to grow in the soil in which it is planted’.25
The Danger of ‘Freedom’
The Critical Theorists saw resistance to what they regard as an historical, progressive, dialectic, as ‘Fascism’; in his day Marx condemned it as ‘reactionism’.26 The process of destruction and disintegration must proceed before the world can be reconstituted according to Marx’s or Fromm’s utopianism. But Fromm warns that it is a dangerous course because ‘freedom’ can only be gained by cutting loose from all that is familiar and by leaping into an abyss where self-destruction rather than utopia might await. Yet if one reaches the other side what awaits in a world of unbounded universal freedom to live ‘spontaneously’.
There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual. However, if the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.27
Fromm is warning that ‘freedom’ can only be had if society is revolutionised by destroying the ‘primary ties’. A falling into the abyss can result in madness. Fromm and his colleagues stated that if the aspirant fails and madness ensues it is the fault of society. The masses are therefore prone to flee from freedom, and return to what is ordered and secure, which for Critical Theorists is the meaning of ‘Fascism’.
Mother, Child, Fascism
Fromm alludes to the child increasingly seeking independence from the mother as part of the education process, until the mother is considered ‘a hostile and dangerous person’. This ‘antagonism’ sharpens the distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘thou’.
This process entails a number of frustrations and prohibitions, which change the role of the mother into that of a person with different aims which conflict with the child’s wishes, and often into that of a hostile and dangerous person. This antagonism, which is one part of the educational process though by no means the whole, is an important factor in sharpening the distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘thou’.28
The antagonism towards the mother, the father, and the traditional family, becomes a matter of political ideology, in which the family as the incubator of ‘Fascism’ has to be eliminated. Through a series of surveys of Americans, published as The Authoritarian Personality, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and their team of Critical Theorists sought to empirically ‘prove’ that the more one maintained a love of parents the more one possessed an authoritarian personality and scored high on an ‘F scale’.29
The Authoritarian Personality states of the family, comparing it to other hierarchical and authoritarian elements of society: ‘The conception of the ideal family situation for the child is similar: uncritical obedience to the father and elders, pressures directed unilaterally from above to below, prohibition of spontaneity and emphasis on conformity to externally imposed values’.30 Even in 1950 Max Horkheimer, editor of The Authoritarian Personality, referring to the psychiatry of Freud, stated that there had been a social revolution in the relations between parents and children:
The permeation of the social consciousness at large with the scientifically acquired experience that the events of early childhood are of prime importance for the happiness and work-potential of the adult has brought about a revolution in the relation between parents and children which would have been deemed impossible a hundred years ago.31
It is notable that Horkheimer, director of the Institute of Social Research, could refer – even in 1950 – to the ‘permeation of the social consciousness’ with psychiatric theories which had already brought about a ‘revolution’, and that this had a primary impact on ‘work-potential’. These themes are those that had been expressed by Fromm in his 1942 book Fear of Freedom, and had percolated among this Freudo-Marxian cabal in Weimar Germany amidst the wholesale social and moral breakdown following World War I. It is this offensive against family, homeland, and people that resulted in the relocation of the Frankfurt Institute to the USA, where they took over American social sciences. It is here that we see the groundwork for what became the ‘youth revolt’, and its development into ‘identity politics’.
The primary factor in the surveys of The Authoritarian Personality was the relationship of the respondent to the family:
Family Figures: Personal Aspects. After the inquiry into the sociological aspects of the family background, the personal conception of the family figures by the subject was recorded. The subject’s conception of the parent figures could reveal, among other things, whether the picture was dominated by the authoritarian aspects of the parent-child relationship or by a more democratic type of relationship. In this connection the attention of the interviewer was further focused on the ability of the subject to appraise his parents objectively – whether on the more critical or on the more loving side – as contrasted with an inclination to put the parents on a very high plane, exaggerating their strength and virtuousness.32
The power-relationship between the parents, the domination of the subject’s family by the father or by the mother, and their relative dominance in specific areas of life also seemed of importance for our problem. The sources within the family of satisfactions and tensions in general were also explored.33
It is notable that the primary factor in the New Left ‘rebellion’ was that of a revolt against parents, and the State as a substitute parental authority figure. Like Fromm, the Critical Theorists working on The Authoritarian Personality are unequivocal in stating that ‘rebellion’ against any remnants of traditional society is healthy, and that continuing adherence to such traditions ranks one high on the ‘F scale’ of latent ‘Fascism’ and potentially genocidal tendencies.
On the other hand, Jewish psychohistorians Stanley Rothman and S. R. Lichter, in their surveys found that the New Left was activated by Jewish nerds attempting to prove their ‘manhood’ by rebelling against the well-known stereotype of the overbearing Jewish mother,34 while non-Jewish New Leftists were rebelling against both parents.35
Another interpretation of the antics of the New Left and its present heirs is that of ‘Immature Personality Disorder’, where the demand is for instant gratification, which surely describes the widespread mentality of the modern world. Where instant gratification is not had it is regarded as suppression among ostensible adults, while as children they had cried ‘it’s not fair’, ‘I want…’ In Critical Theory it is ‘spontaneous creativity’, and in ‘identity politics’ denial of instant gratification becomes part of a narrative of ‘underprivilege’. The Critical Theorists provided an ideological rationalisation for the infantile disorder of the New Left and subsequent generations of ‘rebel youth’, in claiming that ‘rebellion’ against one’s parents is a healthy response to childhood suppression by the family.
Of the relationship with the father, Adorno et al. stated:
The inquiry regarding early memories, wishes, fears, dreams, and so forth had the purpose of getting material which stood out for the subject in connection with his childhood and seemed relevant as a basis for inference. Among the underlying questions, the structure of the emotional attachment to the parents seemed of paramount importance. Here we were specifically interested in the parents as objects of cathexis as well as of identification. In the case of a man, it was important to learn whether there was at any time an explicit rebellion against the father, and against what sort of father, or whether there was only passive submission. The assumption behind this question, later proved correct, was that the pattern developed in the relationship to the father tends to be transferred to other authorities and thus becomes crucial in forming social and political beliefs in men. In this connection it is of importance to know not only about rebellion against the father but also how far such rebellion is conscious and accepted as such. Rebellion against, or submission to, the father is only one part of the picture. Another part deals with the question of identification, or the lack of identification, with the father, and thus with the masculine role in general.36
Interestingly there is a difference in relationship with the father between those on the Far Left, and those who are ethnic-nationalist separatists. Leftists have a dysfunctional relationship with the father, while ethnic separatists see their rebellion as being in honour of the father; that is of the forefathers. Unlike those of the extreme Left, the ethnic separatist nationalists were found to be well-adjusted within their communities and with family support.37
On the relationship with the mother the Critical Theorists wrote:
The establishment of masculinity in the boy is, of course, also closely connected with the boy’s attitude toward the mother. To what degree was there love for the mother and to what degree identification with the mother? Was such an identification, in its turn, sublimated and accepted by the ego, or was it rejected on the conscious level because the mother symbolized not only something ‘admirable’ but at the same time something weak and therefore contemptible? How did the boy defend himself against the rejected and feared passivity? A compensatory display of ‘toughness’ and ruthless- ness is, according to findings from the F scale, correlated with antidemocratic social and political beliefs.38
Yet such motives were precisely those found among the New Left two decades later. The relationship especially of the Jewish radical to his mother was a significant factor in his ‘rebellion’. The nerdy Jewish kid was trying to prove his masculinity to a mother who had, he felt, emasculated him. With Abbie Hoffman, among the most notable of the New Left extremists, his call to ‘kill parents’ was a struggle against his ‘overbearing father’.39 To questions about his own wealthy family background, Bill Ayres, co-leader of the Weather Underground, the most violent of the New Left organisations, responded, ‘Bring the war home, kill your parents’, although the family wealth was useful in his legal predicaments.40 Another of the Weather Underground leaders, Mark Rudd, reminisced on his fear of fights and contact sports as a child, and how Leftist terrorism allowed those such as himself to ‘take back their manhood through violence’. 41 When feminism appeared on the New Left scene, female assertiveness brought back feelings of inadequacy among those such as Rudd.42 It seems that Rudd and perhaps most other male activists in the New Left would have scored high on the ‘F scale’ had they taken the survey, and it might explain why the Left, such as the pseudo-macho posturing of Antifa, adopt an exaggerated show of violence, like apes pounding their chests, towards those of conflicting views, onto whom they project their own authoritarian personality. Adorno, et al. continued:
Since the way in which the parents transmit social values to the child, and the punishment and rewards with which they reinforce them, are decisive for the establishment of the superego, we are led from highly personal problems back to problems of social conscience. The effects are mirrored in interpersonal relationships, on a smaller scale in one’s private life and on a larger scale in one’s public function as a citizen. A person with a mature, integrated, and internalized conscience will certainly take a different stand on moral and social issues than a person with an underdeveloped, defective or over punitive superego, or a person who still, as in childhood, clings to a set of rules and values only as they are reinforced by an external authority, be it public opinion or be it a leader.43
Fromm had previously written that ‘Fascist’ tendencies would persist so long as the incipient ‘Fascism’ of the parents in the traditional family remained. It sounds very ‘modern’ as the attack on the family has accelerated. Fromm wrote of the ‘suppressive’ character of the family: ‘It is the thwarting of expansiveness, the breaking of the attempt to assert himself, the hostility radiating from parents – in short, the atmosphere of suppression – which create in the child the feeling of powerlessness and the hostility springing from it’.44
References
1Eric Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (1942), Foreword, IX. Also named Escape from Freedom (1941).
2Fromm (1942), ibid., p. 18.
3‘Jordan Peterson Talks Gun Control, Angry Men & Why so Few Women Lead Companies’, Time, 7 March 2018.
4Markus Willinger, Generation Identity, (London: Arktos Media Ltd., 2013), pp. 16-18.
5Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (SanFrancisco: Harper, 1993).
6Ibid.
7Martin Heidegger, ‘The Essence of Truth’: ‘(4) The Essence of Freedom’, ibid.
8Ibid.
9Ibid., ‘(6) Untruth as Concealing’.
11Fromm (1942) , op. cit. p. 19.
12Ibid., p. 20.
13Ibid.
14Carl Jung, ‘Answer to Job’, Collected Works (Princeton University Press, 2010), Vol. 11, para. 755.
15Carl Jung, Letters (Princeton University Press, 1973), Vol. 1, p. 442.
16Carl Jung, CW 9, para. 136.
17Ibid., 8, para. 98.
18Ibid., 8, para. 528.
19Ibid., 7, para. 195.
20Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar (New York: Routledge, 1989), Vol. II, Part I, p. 103.
21Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar 1932 (Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 39.
22Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. 1, pp. 503-505.
23Carl Jung, Letters, ibid.
24Carl Jung; CW Vol. 6; p. 448; para. 758.
25Carl Jung; ‘Definitions’, CW Vol. 6, para. 761.
26 Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto ([1848] Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 57.
27Erich Fromm, op. cit., pp. 30-31.
28Fromm, ibid., p. 21.
29M. Horkheimer (ed.), T. W. Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality (American Jewish Committee, 1950), passim. How ironic, but not unique, that an organisation dedicated to the preservation of Jewish ethnic identity sponsored such a study. Only White Christian Americans seem to have been the subjects of the surveys. This follows a theme from the beginning of psychoanalysis. The B’nai B’rith Lodge in Vienna delighted in hearing Freud lecture on the neuroses of Western Civilisation, according to Jewish historian Howard Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (Vintage Books 1991), pp. 400-401. The synthesis of Marx with Freud is the perfect formulae for the deconstruction of Western Civilisation.
30Horkheimer, Adorno et al, ibid., p. 150.
31Max Horkheimer, ibid. Preface, X. (Emphasis added).
32Ibid., p. 313. Emphasis added.
33Ibid., p. 314.
34Stanley Rothman, ‘Group Fantasies and Jewish Radicalism: A Psychodynamic Interpretation’, The Journal of Psychohistory, Fall 1978, pp. 211-240.
35Stanley Rothman and S. R. Lichter, Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians and the New Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 227
36Horkheimer, Adorno et al, op. cit., p. 315. Emphasis added.
37J. M. Post, ‘Notes on a Psychodynamic Theory of Terrorist Behavior’, in Terrorism: An International Journal, Vol. 7, no. 3, 1984, p. 243.
38Horkheimer, Adorno et al, op. cit., pp. 315-316.
39See: K. R. Bolton, The Psychotic Left (London: Black House Publishing, 2013), p. 168.
40Ibid., p. 181.
41Ibid., p. 183.
42Ibid., p. 185.
43Horkheimer, Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality, op. cit., p. 317.
44Fromm (1942), op. cit., p. 21.
I’ve never been able to square Marxist economic thought, which makes eminent solid sense in its way, with this latter day crackpot ‘social science.’ Just how daft it is can be easily seen when you look at how an avowedly ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ state like the USSR quickly jettisoned Frankfurt School kookery once the decision was made to build a state that would actually function. Stalin had no time for airy fairy nonsense about free love or trans-positivity. A man running around insisting on his ‘right’ to ‘self actualize’ by using the ladies’ privy had a one way ticket to labor camp to put that self actualization to the test.
People had a few years of this idiocy in Germany and they went all in for Hitler. Maybe people just haven’t had enough. A little economic downturn tends to remind people of the practical utility of family and ethnos.
So I have hope. The real question is as Lenin said, “What is to be done?”
Islamic socities have no use for gender fluidity. Internet provocateur J. Yaniv would get relieved of its head johnny quick in Arabia. African traditional societies value their ethnos despite outsiders hammering away at it. New problems call for new alliances. Even just of convenience.
Another tour de force from Bolton.
Nearly all Muslim activists in the UK are in an unholy alliance with the Left who use us for their neo-Marxist agendas. There is much we can learn from authentic Rightist thinkers about the intellectual roots of modernity.
We share a common enemy.
It is beyond doubt that the scholarly proponents of Critical Theory had the subversion of Western society in mind as an underlying feature of their work. However, lumping all of the Critical Theorists into the psychoanalytic Freudian camp is too narrow of an approach. The methods pursued by these scholars in psychoanalysis are very different from those they have employed in social sciences. Whereas psychoanalysis departed largely on false assumptions, and could have done so because there is hardly any proof, the assumptions in social sciences were tenable. The solutions, of course, were not.
Fromm, in particular was a fierce opponent of some of Freud’s central themes. He was also an excellent social critic with a succinct ability to delineate the deviant tendencies forming in our culture at that time. It is the solutions he proposed to it that are objectionable, not the depiction of their existence. I am not trying to polish his image. I just would like to see a more differentiated debate since there are nuances.
It was Fromm who depicted the mass man and all his pathologies in a way that allows us today to work with the concepts. His observation of mass man’s slow transition from biophilia to necrophilia due to modern society’s obsession with the mechanized and the dead stands unparalleled. The same goes for Marcuse’s ‘one-dimensional man’ as well as Adorno’s and Horkheimers depiction of mass culture. Have they described what their own kin has created and set in motion? Certainly. It is, in the end, a brilliant dialectic. It still does not negate the fact that the men of the Right can make use of the knowledge those anti-mavericks have given us.
We tend to view the past with rosy glasses sometimes. The authoritarianism in families, in society and the insitutions at large was at times not what we would like to see again today, given our acclimatization in post-liberal societies. The people of the West responded to the antithesis Critical Theory offered because there was fertile ground to reject the oftentimes irrational and unfounded violence percolating in post-war Western society, especially against young people (records of how easily youngsters could have been institutionalized with either the state of the church for menial offenses, is just one example). That, of course, does not mean that the dissolution of the family was ever the right redeeming step. As I said, it is a brilliant dialectic. They have depicted in large parts the truth (thesis) and dipped it in rat poisen (anti-thesis), and we as a society have bought it.
Another topic, which is a study on its own, is the undeniable dysfunction that permeates Western families. We should be very careful to not brush it away as a direct result of modern culture. Not all of it was caused by the women’s liberation or other liberal tendencies. Some of these dysfunctions have existed for generations, undetected. It is only now that they have come to light and are exposed. If we don’t don’t view things in a differentiated manner, we run the risk of being naive about our culture’s own shortcomings (and I mean the inherent, not the engineered ones).
Valid points. Hopefully, my position on this will become clearer in part II. Still, the Right should be looking at forgotten thinkers such as Kornad Lorenz, Alexis Carrel, and I have aimed to show that Jung has much to offer the Right.
Let me just go ahead here and agree that much of the Frankfurt school is inspired by Freud.
I would like to add that Freud is basically a secularised cabalistic Judaism, as shown by David Bakan in “Sigmund Freud and the jewish mystical tradition”.
I want to stress this whole broods (including Fromm) relationship to another contemporary who is too often overlooked in this context – Gershom Sholem. He basically self-identified as a Jewish supremacist cabalist. In his “Major trends in jewish mysticism” he delineates the development of cabalist thought in the last 500 years. This book is an eye opener because the thought structure neatly fits the ideas later proposed by the Frankfurt school.
Also, the political spectrum (as opposed to the personal work), is clearly messianic.
Definitely interesting that Jewish supremacism evolved parallel to the stew of other contemporary supremacisms. Pan-Slavism. Pan-Germanism. Manifest Destiny. “White Man’s Burden”. “Hakko Ichieu”. Once the world got small enough you could send a telegram around it in a day or two, it was inevitable that the course of empires would drive every tribe into thinking it was The Chosen. And the Jews had been nursing that fantasy since Flavius Josephus wormed his way into the retinue of Titus. And we’re still paying the price for this family’s social engineering project.