Anti-Religion and the Cult of Death

The Left-Hand Path in Sex and Socialism

“Cosmic Death,” Kiren In Digital

Every once in a while I take a kind of schizophrenic pleasure in the fruits of my book-reading habits. Let’s call them bibliosynchronicities, because … that’s what I call them. For months (or years) I might engage in wistful fantasies about a nonexistent book dealing with a particular subject in a particular way—and when that book appears in print I can’t help but thank the Mind of the Cosmos for doing me a solid (little do their authors know that my brain-thoughts are indirectly guiding their intellectual pursuits!). Sometimes I may start reading a book, love it, but inexplicably cast it aside only to pick it up again years later. Lo and behold, it has come at the perfect time; I wouldn’t have appreciated it if I had finished it back when I started. A slightly delusional form of intellectual overstimulation combined with an almost masochistic delay of gratification, perhaps. Or nothing significant at all. Whatever it is, it’s quite fun.

Here’s the latest. After interviewing Joshua Slocum on MindMatters again recently (check it out here, because it was great), I decided to pick up Cleckley’s Caricature of Love [CL], some 12 years after reading it for the first time. (I wrote a short post inspired by it here.) I was reading Igor Shafarevich’s book on socialism around the same time (which also inspired a post). (I started to read it a number of years ago, but by now you know the story—I must confess I stopped after only the first chapter, though eagerly awaiting the second.) Winston over at Escaping Mass Hypnosis had recommended it to me some months ago, so I dusted off my partially read printout and continued to read.

Part 1: “Wow, this is pretty interesting. These socialist thinkers were really off their rockers.”

Part 2: “Cool, he’s making connections to archaic societies similar to those I made after reading Turchin.”

Part 3: “Holy s**t. This is a masterpiece. A dark and beautiful masterpiece.”

Seriously, Part 3. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t that. And I surely wasn’t expecting such a conceptual resonance and overlap with Cleckley’s book on pathologic sexuality (which makes no reference at all to socialism). But I won’t spoil the reveal just yet. For that, keep reading.

But first, if you haven’t done so yet, check out the two excerpts I posted here over the past week or so (here and here). To recap, Shafarevich identifies the four core doctrines of socialism as 1) abolition of private property, 2) abolition of the family, 3) abolition of religion, and 4) communality/equality. In Chapter 7 he compares that picture with other representative conceptions of socialism, e.g., as revolutionary means of seizing power, as social justice, or as a religion.

Take compulsory labor. Sure, it seems that you can’t have real socialism in practice without what is essentially a form of universal slavery, but its mere presence does not account for any of the core doctrines, which remain otherwise inexplicable. In the case of socialism as a means for seizing power and creating a totalitarian state, features like the proposal for communality of wives and property were often hindrances to its revolutionary success (big shocker there), yet they remained part of the doctrine, even if their implementation had to be toned down. The socialist revolutionaries weren’t mere opportunists; they were ideologues.

Evidently, the concept of forerunners [like Plato, Muntzer, More] contained something essential to the ideology—some elements that had to be preserved at any cost, even at the risk of doctrinal inconsistencies. And this indicates that certain strata of socialist ideology cannot be understood in terms of any coldly calculated plan for the seizure of power. …

Furthermore, the view of socialism as the ideology of an absolute state makes incomprehensible one of the main properties of socialist doctrines—their infectiousness, their capacity to influence the masses. It would be absurd to suppose that people face torture and the gallows or go to the barricades for the sake of becoming a soulless cog in the all-powerful state machine. (Socialist Phenomenon [SP], pp. 214-215)

So he asks the question: what is it about these core doctrines? What is it that makes them so long-lasting and able to inspire such fervor in certain places and at certain critical moments in time? So far we’ve seen some hints. First or all, socialism is not merely an economic system (its concerns and appeal far surpass the economic). Neither is it a political system; the socialist “party” is more akin to a hive-like superorganism than a political party. It is not concerned with social justice, despite the propaganda; in fact, it is contemptuous of those suffering injustice, desires to increase suffering in the name of the revolution, and expresses explicit hatred for everything about the world as it is. And it requires a special sort of person to be a socialist; “the category of ordinary people” do not have what it takes.

The fanaticism and doctrinal nature of socialism have led some to consider it a religion (in which case its hostility to religion can be regarded as mere monolatry, a battle against what it perceives to be false religion). There’s a sense in which that seems true, as Shafarevich admits. But just because they share features, that doesn’t necessarily make them the same. Still others, like Dostoevsky, have conceived of socialism as the end result of atheism, of the spiritual crisis that severs mankind’s link with God. Remove all that is holy and socialism is what remains. Both viewpoints can’t be true, and yet …

Unlike socialism, religion is founded on concrete experience, an encounter with God or some higher level of reality, a revelatory experience that puts life in a new context and infuses it with new possibilities and transcendent meaning.

Socialism, on the other hand, proceeds in almost all its manifestations from the assumption that the basic principles guiding the life of an individual and of mankind in general do not go beyond the satisfaction of material needs or primitive instincts. What is more, this view becomes more explicit, the more clearly formulated the given socialist ideology. (SP, p. 226)

It goes so far as to embrace everything low about humanity (as with Fourier), to elevate the vices to virtues, and to denigrate the virtues as harmful inventions of the philosophers. Whereas ordinary people naturally admire personal excellence and gain some sort of inner strength from it, even vicariously, for Fourier there was no distinction between “good” and “bad” personalities. Not only are good and bad equal—which has the effect of making bad good—but the good is only a harmful fantasy, which has the effect of leaving only the bad, now redefined as good!¹ (Aleister Crowley has entered the chat.)

… Fourier refuses to recognize the existence of clearly instinctive attractions if they engender acts which do not fit an egoistic framework. For instance, he never speaks about love as such but only about the “delights of love” or about “amorousness.” He considers the feelings of parent for child and child for parent to be mere invention. …

It is possible to consider Fourier as an immediate predecessor of Freud: in his striving to understand man and human society in the light of the most primitive instincts, in a pathological underdevelopment of the emotional sphere which prevents any appreciation for the higher aspects of the human psyche, in the hypertrophied role he ascribes to relations between the sexes. … Freud compares morals with products of decay which are manufactured by a cell and then become the cause of its death. (SP, p. 227-228)

It was at this moment that several things started to fall into place for me: the socialists’ disdain for women, their support for “free love,” their reduction of family life to a useless nullity worthy only of destruction, their denial of love. For those of you who have yet to read Cleckley’s Caricature of Love, this should ring alarm bells. This is exactly what he was talking about. Anti-sexuality is baked right into the doctrine. But there’s more.

Marcuse managed to take the most unhinged products of Freud’s own perverse neurosis, mated them with socialism’s core delusions, and produced that deformed abortion (neo-Marxism) which became the basis for the “New Left.” If anyone was more frakked in the head than Freud, it was Marcuse. Take these pearls of wisdom (culled from Eros and Civilization):

“The regression involved in this spread of the libido would first manifest itself in a reactivation of all erotogenic zones and, consequently, in a resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality and in a decline of genital supremacy.”

Hmm, sounds like that might be kind of fun. I wonder what it would look like?

“This change in the value and scope of libidinal relations would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family.”

Ahh, I should have guessed! Kind of disappointing after such a setup to receive just a simple restatement of socialist dogma #2. (That’s Marcuse in a nutshell—a lot of fancy words and highfalutin verbosity, but underneath it he’s just a boring socialist.)

Marcuse speaks here of the end of culture in the old sense of the word … The essence of this upheaval Marcuse describes in poetic terms by juxtaposing Prometheus, the hero of repressive culture, with the heroes of his own New World—Orpheus and Narcissus. He ends as follows: “The classical tradition associates Orpheus with the introduction of homosexuality. Like Narcissus, he rejects the normal Eros, not for an ascetic ideal, but for a fuller Eros. Like Narcissus he protests against the repressive order of procreative sexuality. The Orphic and Narcissistic Eros is to the end the negation of this order—the Great Refusal. In the world symbolized by the culture hero Prometheus, it is the negation of all order; but in this negation Orpheus and Narcissus reveal a new reality, with an order of its own, governed by different principles.” (SP, pp. 232-233)

What might this “new reality” look like? Marcuse doesn’t say, just dropping hints that it will resemble the old socialist utopia, previously considered a pipe dream. Again, how original.

Even ostentatious slovenliness can be theoretically justified, for according to the theory, ego and superego suppress the instincts connected with the sense of smell and enforce the perception of strong smells as “disgusting.” … These views also serve as a theoretical basis for “left art,” which fosters the idea of “anti-cultural” (or “cultural”) revolution, of the destruction of “repressive” or “stifling” culture, up to and including a heightened interest (in both literature and art) in garbage and excrement as means of “exploding bourgeois culture.” (SP, p. 233)

We already know what this looks like. Here’s Cleckley quoting Straus on pathologic sexuality (anti-sexuality):

Whenever sex occurs it appears characteristically distorted, more often obscene and fetishistic than overtly sadistic. Sex is experienced as the impure and indecent, the lewd and unchaste. It is infected with disease and dirt. Dissociated from intimate personal relations, severed from the longing for unification, sex becomes obscene. Through the fetishistic isolation of the genitalia from the whole of the body, sexual functions are experienced as excretions and as decay. (CL, p. 257)

That’s Marcuse’s “fuller Eros”—less of a Rubens and more of an emaciated, heroin-addicted Schiele stained in s**t and various bodily fluids. There seem to be two basic reactions to sex: “One reaction is basically life-accepting. The other is a revulsion so primordial that it might accurately be thought of as antibiologic” (CL, p. 256). This latter response is exemplified in Huysmans’s character Des Esseintes, in whom “we feel pure revulsion against life itself” (CL, p. 252). Recall what Shafarevich said about the human response to social injustice: “we have here two quite different approaches toward life.”

And here is where the antibiologic and the mechanistic meet:

… we may regard Freud’s conceptions not as indisputable scientific truth but as evidence of a certain perception of the world (the scope of whose influence may be judged by the success Freudianism has enjoyed).

Finally, the same tendency may be seen in theories according to which man (or animal) is regarded as a machine. All the aspects of life in man (or in animals) can be reduced in this way to the action of several simple forces. Thus Descartes expressed the opinion that an animal is an automaton incapable of thinking. The same idea was developed by La Mettrie in his book L’homme machine. He asserts that “the human body is a self-starting machine” and then extends this principle to the human psyche. … Similar views became popular again in the second half of the twentieth century, in the wake of the invention of computers. Theories that hold that man (or animal) is a machine differ completely in their opinion as to what sort of machine is involved—mechanical, electric or electronic. And as all these explanations cannot be correct simultaneously, it is evident that the point of departure in each case is a similar a priori assumption, an impulse that derives from elsewhere, to prove that man is a machine. (SP, pp. 292-293)

Shafarevich concludes his section on socialism as religion with this:

… socialist ideology seeks to reduce human personality to its most primitive, lowest levels and, in each epoch, relies upon the most radical “criticism of man” available. For that reason, the concepts of man in socialism and in religion are diametrically opposed.

So that if socialism is a religion, it must be recognized as a quite special religion, different in principle from all others and antithetical to them in many basic questions. (How else are we to understand Bulgakov’s statement that socialism is “a religion based on atheism”?) Otherwise it would be necessary to expand the definition of religion to the point where it would have no meaning at all. (SP, pp. 233-234)

There it is: socialism is the anti-religion. It is the “religion” of pure materialism: anti-biology, anti-sexuality, anti-humanity, anti-life, anti-God.

The term “atheism” is inappropriate for the description of people in the grip of socialist doctrines. It would be more correct to speak here not of “atheists” but of “God-haters,” not of “atheism” but of “theophobia.” Such, certainly, is the passionately hostile attitude of socialism toward religion. Thus, while socialism is certainly connected with the loss of religious feeling, it can hardly be reduced to it. The place formerly occupied by religion does not remain vacant; a new lodger appeared.² This is the only true source of the active principle of socialism, and the aspect which determines the historical role of this phenomenon. (SP, p. 235)

Shafarevich thus rejects the view that socialism can be reduced to any social categories (economic, political, religious). This is how Lobaczewski put it in Political Ponerology: “Pathocracy is even less a socioeconomic system than it is a social structure or political system. It is a macrosocial disease process affecting mass social movements and reaching for power over entire nations” (PP, p. 237).

I will share my own speculations on what this all means in my next posts.³ But before I do that, I will close with one more quote from Shafarevich, the conclusion of his whole analysis, the principles that underlie the core doctrines. After summarizing and analyzing socialism’s views on individuality (spoiler: it looks forward to its complete destruction), he tackles the big problem: socialism’s implicit and ultimate goal, the attractor to which all socialist doctrine is inexorably pulled, regardless of the window dressing. His conclusion is somewhat shocking, but it follows directly from his analysis—from the words of the socialist thinkers themselves, and the real-world implications of their doctrine:

… a consistent implementation of the principles of socialism … would lead to the physical extinction of the group in which these principles are in force, and if they should triumph through the world—to the extinction of mankind. (SP, p. 272)

… the dying and, ultimately, the complete extinction of mankind is not a chance external consequence of the embodiment of the socialist ideal … this impulse is a fundamental and organic part of socialist ideology. To a greater or lesser degree it is consciously perceived as such by its partisans and even serves them as inspiration.

The death of mankind is not only a conceivable result of the triumph of socialism—it constitutes the goal of socialism. (SP, p. 285)

Cleckley’s Caricature of Love removes the veil of the dark reality behind the pathologic representations of sex and love in modern life, art, and psychiatry. Shafarevich’s Socialist Phenomenon rips asunder the veil that has masked socialism for millennia. Behind the mask lies only the pull of darkness, a collective death wish, contractile oblivion.

1. Shades of conscientiousness, punctuality, professionalism, and good spelling being in fact white supremacy.

2. Is he saying what I think he’s saying? (Demons. It’s demons.)

3. Yes, I altered my original plan for this post. Pray I don’t alter it any further.