To live or to rule? Autobiographical Review- Essay
E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control, South Bend, Indiana,
2005. St. Augustine’s Press, 662p.
In 1973 I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I once got a temporary job at "Greenhouse, Inc.,"
one of those counseling places that practiced group and encounter therapies of the sort developed by Carl Rogers. I thought
it would be an interesting place to gather raw material for the inveterate journal I kept of my life.
"We reject elitism and professionalism," Greenhouse, Inc., had printed on their flyer. The woman I was living
with at the time thought it was a dangerous place for that reason. She herself had experienced manic-depressive interludes
and had seen the inside of several mental health institutions. By this point she had stabilized her life after divorce as
an outpatient at McLean Hospital, therapy and lithium, one open lesbian lover, another crypto-lesbian lover, for a while -
me. She lived in a large house with her daughters and rented a couple of extra rooms to provide additional income. I had moved
up to Cambridge on one of my periodic exiles from the South, became one of her boarders, and found myself in the midst of
what is called the Sexual Revolution. I never stood on the barricade, but there was a time before my marriage when I hung
around the lesbian sideline to the extent being able to view the carnage.
At any rate, by 1973 in Cambridge the Sexual Revolution was in full swing. A few weeks after I had gotten
my job, there was a big demonstration in Harvard Square, as it turned out a (mock) pageant for Linda Lovelace, the star in
the pornographic movie "Deep Throat." Students were carrying signs – "Harvard-Radcliffe Students for Moral Decency,"
"Save Our Members," etc. A car with Linda on it came whizzing through the crowd. Linda sat up in the back of it, wearing a
white dress, carrying roses, and giving autographs. "There goes America’s sweetheart!" someone shouted.
The job at "Greenhouse, Inc." came after my job at the puzzle factory. I had worked for a couple of months
on the assembly line of a puzzle factory as part of my never-ending quest for something to write about in my journal. There
still were a few factories in America, back in those days. This one called itself American Publishing, and some of their puzzles
were legitimate – maps and things like that. But the big sellers were the pornographic ones, especially of fat Bridget
– "Bridget Goes to Market," "Bridget Cooks Dinner" – showing the scantily-clad grossly obese Bridget going about
her life of ravening consumption with her pink face and bulging buttocks. The connection between sex and stripping the planet
of its natural resources was not hard to perceive. So where the students at Harvard Square chose to take pornography seriously
by making fun of it, the workers at American Publishing made jokes about the pornography that comprised the livelihood they
had no choice but to take seriously.
In those days I hardly understood the portents of these events. I was protected by my formal education or
my innocence – or at least I was determined not to abandon the fortification my education gave to my soul. So I made
sorties, participated within limits, but mostly watched – and for this reason my adventures were often graceless, half-hearted
or incompetent. I lived as a renter on the alimony end of Anglo-Saxon corporate-derived wealth, in an atmosphere dedicated
to lesbianism and therapy. Pornography had been cheered at Harvard while it was providing the bread-and-butter for the working
classes, and the "Greenhouse, Inc." therapists were slamming doors and shouting at the top of their lungs as a way of perpetually
reminding themselves that they existed.
Carl Rogers believed that Encounter Sensitivity Training was "relatively unstructured, providing a climate
of maximum freedom for personal expression, exploration of feelings and interpersonal communication." It sounds so harmless
it makes you want to lock yourself in your basement with an adequate supply of food, water, and ammunition. "I don’t
know what it is about these people that reminds me of undertakers," I wrote in my journal of November 27, 1973. "Whenever
they walk in or see each other for the first time in the day, or when one is leaving, they hug and kiss each other. Today
there was a session going on in the next room. A man was shouting at the top of his lungs, What does it take to show my
anger, what does it take to show my anger! And he shouted it about ten times and pounded his fists on the floor. Later
Lynn [my boss] asked me if it bothered me. She told me they were in a ‘learning situation’ and that what was going
on was called ‘role playing.’ While the demonstration, or whatever it was, was going on, I could hear a woman’s
voice saying, ‘That’s right… let it all out … show your true feelings.’ I did hundreds of the
cards wrong, and Lynn shrieked, ‘Oh Caryl, you mean you have to do them all over!’ But she hadn’t been quite
clear in her explanations, though I do not absolve myself completely, since I should have looked at the sample card."
I think that Lynn was somehow related to, or was a friend of, Carl Rogers, or perhaps his wife or daughter.
This connection with the authentic beginnings of the encounter movement tinged Lynn’s speech habits with the aura of
portentousness, as though her words trailed pieces of the relic. Once when she was talking at great length with someone over
the phone about an ‘anger-producing situation,’ it turned out that the person she was talking to had infectious
gonorrhea. When she hung up the phone she announced, with a heavy sigh, that she was "losing clients." The Greenhouse therapists
called the people they counselled "clients’ and they called themselves "group facilitators." Again from my journal:
"Yesterday I had to type a card over a couple of times and Lynn looked up at me and said, ‘You can
say ‘fuck’ if you want to … or don’t you use words like that?’ Before I had a chance to reply
she rattled on to something else. She is always doing that. After a telephone conversation she hung up and said with a huge
melodramatic gesture that ‘It’s just terrible that women are not allowed to express their anger and men are taught
to repress their feelings.’ I told her that I had never felt in my life unable to express my anger. She said, ‘Can
you just pound your fist on the floor?’ She threw the ashes of my cigarette away immediately after I had smoked it,
saying ‘I have a fetish about ashes.’ I told her I trust people who had vices I could see. ‘Oh, that’s
the way you look at it,’ she said with a nervous titter. I only smoke there because I know it annoys people."
One journal entry describes how the Greenhouse, Inc. counsellors manipulated the feelings of the people who
came to their groups. Someone had written up a report, which I had to read in the course of typing it up. I wrote:
"…the session was on ‘Women Counsellors of Women,’… the gist is that women get together
as a group which numbers one or two Greenhouse women; and the purpose is to know how to handle counselling groups. What is
observed is: who takes the lead and who doesn’t, who initiates a situation which produces ‘tension’ or ‘anger.’
One incident mentioned was when one of the counsellors came into the meeting upset because one of her clients had run out.
‘Would the counsellor call the client? Or was the counsellor upset because the girl was afraid or upset?’…One
sentence shocked me in particular: ‘I noticed it’s hard for me to be still when someone is almost on the breaking
point.’"
On another day I wrote:
"Today… ‘Hob’ [a nickname] was manning the desk. There was a frenzied conversation between
him and Lynn – it sounds as though they were talking at the top of their voices in a kind of suppressed shouting, and
also at terrific speed. Hob was saying how he had gotten furious at some ‘high-powered women’ who were ‘trashing
Greenhouse’ though they had never been to a meeting. He said he had come home in a rage. Then the next morning he had
come down to breakfast, and said Good morning to his eight-year-old son, who at that moment was talking. The son said, ‘Don’t
interrupt me.’ At this Hob had blown up and sent his son out of the room. Lynn cried out about the son’s remark,
‘I hear you in that remark! I hear you in that remark!’ Lynn was talking at breakneck speed, suggesting that he
see one of the Greenhouse women about his anger… When he left he made some comment about how Caryl must be sick of all
the bullshit they had been talking. This seems to be characteristic. One of the few times he wasn’t talking bullshit
was when he was talking about his son. But today I got very sick of everyone’s language – ‘shit,’
‘fuck,’ – they use these words a lot."
Such was my far from stellar career at Greenhouse. I did try to talk to Lynn before I left. I said everybody
here seemed insecure – "because they know more," she said. But I came to have a sort of affection for the overly-jumpy,
restless and voluble Lynn. "She said twice that she was getting accustomed to having me and would be sorry to see me leave
– and that was kindness," I wrote in one of my last entries.
2.
Encounter groups, pornography, Linda Lovelace, mental manipulation and restless minds – it’s
all here and more in Michael Jones’s compendium of the Sexual Revolution. "Libido dominandi" – the passion
for dominion, is the dark side of the Enlightenment, the agenda of social control. The idea of the slavery of sin goes back
to the foundations of religious teaching, but learning how to exploit the idea for social control arose with the Enlightenment.
The era of the Enlightenment was known for its rationalism. It taught that reality was "matter in motion," and that the universe
and man were entirely determined and predictable. At the same time, there was a craze among the philosophes to remake
society along "scientific" principles. The Church and the monarchy presented the most obvious hindrances in the form of traditional
hierarchies and restraints. Lord Bacon, the author of the phrase that "knowledge is power," also thought that systems of theology
are purely "imaginary." Thus knowledge needs no justification. Power is its own justification.
Mechanistic philosophy thus gave birth to the naked will. But materialism cannot inspire, and the problem
of how to control man and direct society in the absence of traditional moral restraints remained. In any case, Adam Weishaupt,
the founder of Illuminism, could see through it, and the techniques for mind control arising from the systems of Illuminism
he developed were "effective precisely because they did not derive from the mechanistic philosophy of the Enlightenment."
Weishaupt took certain practices from the Jesuits, but ripped them from their religious context in order to develop a mechanism
where people could be controlled without being aware of it. By removing the practice of sacramental confession and the examination
of conscience from the religious framework that had restrained and guided it, Weishaupt was able to develop a system of spying
and informing. Thus Illuminism – "a system of controls in the absence of morality" by which one abdicates one’s
own mental sovereignty. Weishaupt set up a program for the methodical and systematic invasion of the psyche.
Techniques of "illuminized obedience" seeped into modern culture from numerous portals – through culture,
politics, intellectual life, and economics. Elements of the illuminist program found their way into psychoanalysis, psychological
testing, Kinseyian sex research, communism, the manipulation of sexual passion for advertising, encounter group therapies,
behaviorism and political and ideological correctness. Illuminist politics is essentially the dedication to "manipulate people
through their vices" -- although this agenda is of course never stated openly. Thus Illuminism found a helpful ally in what
Jones calls the "English ideology" – the refusal to put forth philosophical and metaphysical presuppositions out into
the open, and instead engineer covert forms of consensus. Modernity has thus coexisted with an anti-metaphysical bias. It
has ever avoided the unifying reason, and instead tended toward rationality on the one hand, sentimentalism on the other.
The disdain for metaphysics did not mean that people would no longer fight wars over ideas. It just meant
that such battles would be fought less openly and in intellectually dishonest ways. Libido dominandi is in large part
an exposure of the intellectual dishonesty of modernity, beginning with the idea that sexual liberation means freedom. On
the contrary, sexual liberation has meant and continues to mean an enormous increase in the power of government, rule by moneyed
elites, and ever-increasing escalation of subliminal control. "There are only two options," Jones writes, "either you control
yourself according to the moral law or your passions control you – or someone controls you through the manipulation
of your passions." There is either the rule of reason and self-control or there is the sexual revolution and tyranny. Just
as the classical state must foster virtue, the revolutionary state must foster vice. The twist of irony is that the "revolutionary
state" does not enable creative change; it actually breeds stagnation and the seemingly infinite extension of the status
quo.
Jones covers an enormous span of history in this book, which could be one of those founding texts for a counter-revolutionary
movement for reason. For – "Morality is reason in the practical order," writes Jones. This is a wise cautionary note
that recognizes the errors to which moral crusaders are often prone. Moral crusades rarely restore morality as such. It is
the labor of integrity in the act of thinking and of conscience that makes the difference and gives the strength and inspiration
of morality. The existence of morality is what makes it possible for us to disagree about reasons, but reasons cannot lead
us to suppose that morality does not exist – except as an intellectual game. The Enlightenment era of rationalism left
us a legacy of games of this sort because it was dedicated to the overthrow of the very communitarian forms of life that are
the physical and tangible representatives of the moral law. But Enlightenment intellectual games did not divorce us from the
moral law; they only divorced the act of thinking from the community of life. Hence we moderns have had to find out that thinking
without community does not mean freedom from the moral law. It only means that the moral law has made a transition from the
life of the community to the rule of the strong, the powerful, and the wealthy. Where morality is concerned, modern man has
been continually driven to reinvent the wheel – an ironic footnote to our great progress in technics and mechanics.
In any case, the story soon leads to Revolutionary-era France, and Jones paints an unforgettable portrait
of the English pre-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who was "forever attempting to infuse the images of the Enlightenment with
the moral patrimony of the West which they were intended to replace." Revolutionary theory didn’t always make the grade
when it encountered real life, as Mary Wollstonecraft was to learn to her cost. Then there was the Marquis de Sade, about
whom Jones devotes many pages of text. Read it and weep! An important later source for understanding the dynamics of Anarchy
and Terror was the Abbe Barruel’s Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, which was read by Mary’s
daughter, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. ("The calamities described in horror fictions are moral truths in repressed
form.") The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was entirely captivated by Illuminist ideas, and set Mary to reading the book in order
to learn the thoughts of the enemy. The Abbe Barruel’s reading of Weishaupt led him to believe that the Illuminist cells
were based upon the arousal and systematic management of the passions. The differences between the "illuminized and religious
obedience" was that the religious obedience recognized the primacy of the individual’s own voice of conscience and self-restraint
according to the Gospel. The illuminized obedience recognized and respected no such foro interno. It was also interesting
for me to read that the Abbe Barruel thought that the philosophy of Immanuel Kant had had a pernicious influence on morals,
and had written a book about it. Mysteriously and inexplicably, he burned the manuscript before it could be published.
An important benefit of reading Libido Dominandi is that it clarifies the relationships between Illuminism,
Freemasonry, and the Jesuits – a complex of subject heavily laden with conspiracy theory. Jones does not say that Illuminism
was a conspiracy, but he does say that the techniques for mind control developed by it "became the model of every secular
control system of both the left and right for the next 200 years." Is this "conspiracy theory"? Jones quotes "Wilson" (no
source given) who said that idea was "ridiculous." (Sources, citations and names in this book would benefit from a more careful
editing at times.)
The latter part of the 19th century deals with Freud and psychoanalysis, leading over to a discussion
of Freud’s nephew, Eddie Bernays, in America. Bernays was one of the founders of modern mass advertising, and saw how
sex could be used in advertising products. "Bernays and his famous uncle were both involved in exploiting sexual passion for
financial gain." Jungianism doesn’t fare much better in Jones’s view. Jones thinks that both Freud and Jung understood
how powerful and profitable the new movement of psychoanalysis was, and that their break had to do not over ideas but on the
issue of who was to control the movement. "Jung knew where the source of Freud’s power lay, and he wanted that source
in his own right and not as somebody’s gentile heir-apparent."
I once expressed some misgivings about the "philosophical" nature of psychiatry to a therapist – this
was another of my Cambridge-era experiences. I said I would feel presumptuous in giving advice. She laughed and said no one
knows what the truth is, but psychiatry "is a way of helping people find out what they want." Maybe so, but as Michael Jones
points out in several chapters dealing with psychiatry, it is finding out for a fee. "By fostering behavior that begets guilt,
the psychoanalyst binds his patient to himself in a vampire-like exploitative relationship that is the exact opposite of sacramental
confession but very similar to Illuminism."
The twentieth century brings us to America – John B. Watson and behaviorism, Greenwich Village and
socialist-beatniks, Margaret Sanger and the birth-control-eugenics movement. The left may have repudiated the eugenics embraced
by Hitler & Co., but it has never severed the link forged by Margaret Sanger, in which the agenda of the sexual revolution
converged with the interests of the propertied classes. Far from helping to work for better working conditions and wages for
working people, liberals and liberationists put their energy into the cause of contraception and later abortion. Jones thinks
this was a covert war against high-reproducing groups – particularly Catholics and blacks, which, Jones says, was "waged
in the ethnic interests of the WASP establishment … which had succumbed to hedonism and was in the process of putting
itself out of business politically by the widespread practice of contraception." Enormous grants from the Rockefeller Foundation
went into the sexual liberation agenda, Kinsey’s sex research institute, Planned Parenthood, and other eugenics crusades.
These chapters on Rockefeller money and Kinsey’s sinister influence on American sexual mores, and how these dovetail
into the agenda of the New World Order, comprise the most fascinating – and appalling – chapters of this book.
Jones writes: "…in controlling the agency responsible for the transmission of life, the controllers control human life
at its source and therefore, at its most crucial point…. Liberal politics becomes then first the incitation to sexual
vice, then the colonization of the procreative powers that are indissoluably associated with sexuality, and finally the political
mobilization of the guilt which flows from the misuse of the procreative power in an all-encompassing system that gives new
meaning to the term totalitarian." I will return later to this important subject.
Then, there are events unfolding in Russia. Several chapters describe the life and angst of Alexandra
Kollontai, the Russian feminist who "wanted both freedom and love but … on her own terms." Kollontai agitated fervently
for sexual freedom, a program which the Soviet State went along with in the ‘20’s until it became apparent that
the social chaos caused by it would bring down the regime. At that point the Soviet leadership made a radical about-face for
the sake of the survival of the Soviet state. Wilhelm Reich, the German apostle of sexual freedom and masturbation, was "stunned
by the reversal of the sexual revolution that was taking place in the Soviet Union" and spent some time trying to explain
this betrayal, as he saw it, of the goals of the Revolution. Germany was going through its own sexual tribulations during
the era of the Weimar Republic. Jones makes it quite clear that the struggles in the Weimar Republic were between two groups
of homosexuals: the "butch" faction under Hitler and the SA, and the "femmes" faction" under the leadership of Magnus Hirschfeld
and his Institute for Sex Science in Berlin.
Jones remarks that "Recent sexual politics has found it expedient to expunge the truth about the homosexual
proclivities of the Nazis from the historical record." The evidence certainly refutes Reich’s contention that to abolish
sexual repression is to abolish fascism. But the Reichian contention proved to be useful to people like Carl Rogers, Fritz
Perls, and others in their wake. Rogers introduced his T-group practice into a Catholic religious order in Los Angeles and
succeeded in utterly destroying it. Perhaps he didn’t "mean" to do it. Jones does not charge Rogers with overt anti-Catholicism.
But Wilhelm Reich earlier had perceived the link between sexuality and religion – a connection known to the mystical
tradition for centuries. Knowing how to work with the forces of instinct, drawing it into the conscious life in a manner which
would fructify and animate the life of the soul -–all of this was known and taught over the centuries in human spiritual
development. Reich quite consciously went about reversing it: "Intellect to the aid of instinct is… the classical notion
of the intellectual life turned upside down…" says Jones. Indeed, the total sexualization of culture would mean the
total extinction of religion. But such a sexualization would not mean that instinct would become "free" so much as it would
become infected with all kinds of rationalizations and self-deceptions – thus opening the door to new forms of brutality,
exploitation, and cruelty. The "let it all hang out" philosophy that I encountered in Cambridge in 1973 was an extension of
this Reichian-Rogerian philosophy, and Greenhouse, Inc. was only a local "hothouse" version of it. Really it was the repression
of moral instincts that was going on behind the pretence to "unrepress" the emotions -- such as repressing one's instinct
to go to the help of another in suffering, like that passage I quoted from the Greenhouse report.
After describing the course and collapse of sexual liberation in Russia, Jones returns to America to discuss
the progress of sexual liberation and how it affected especially the black community. Black writers like Claude McKay became
symbols, for white intellectual patrons, of the "wisdom of the primitive Negro." The refusal of white liberals and intellectuals
to endorse the 1965 Moynihan Report, which called for the protection of the black family and especially black fathers and
heads-of-household, was to have devastating consequences for the black community. The black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier,
who had been a major source for the Moynihan Report, thought that sexual promiscuity was more damaging to blacks than the
legacy of slavery. But such views did not accord with the bastions of liberalism, which was willing to perpetuate the pathologies
of the ghetto in order to preserve the sexual revolution.
The history of this period is still highly relevant today. The fixation of the American Left with the sexual
revolution is still true, and it goes a long way in explaining why we have no effective checks on megalomaniac government
and imperial aims. The left fumes about gay marriage while children in Iraq are incinerated and prisoners are sadistically
tortured – it itself a telling result of the sexual liberation movement. The narcissism of the Left has become utterly
repellent.
The long sections of American portions of Libido Dominandi devoted to the war against the Catholic
Church and the contraception issue are important and revealing, but they change the tenor of the book from one which is about
culture to one that is about Catholicism. If the book is to be about Catholicism, the lack of any mention of the priest sexual
molestation scandals that have plagued the Church in recent years is an omission of major proportions. I believe that these
scandals are based on facts, although in many cases probably exaggerated by the media and other groups for political purposes.
To all who wish the Catholic Church well, they cry out for a sympathetic, but impartial, treatment. Jones does indicate that
the penetration by Encounter group and other liberationist movements had a corrupting influence on religious orders. The larger
question, apart from the intellectual and moral dishonesty of the proponents of the sexual revolution, is whether priestly
celibacy can be viable in the Modern Age. One does not have to be an advocate of sexual freedom to recognize that modern man’s
relationship to sexuality is different from what it was in earlier periods – because his relation to the intellect is
different. The late Pope John Paul II addressed the need for a revised theology in his book and presentations on the Theology
of the Body. It doesn’t take genius to see that the Orthodox branches of Christianity have gotten along with the
permission of a married priesthood, and to ask why Catholicism somehow missed taking that step.
The other major issue for me concerns the population issue, which Jones highlights so well in his discussions
of contraception and procreation. I am not Catholic nor am I an advocate of sexual liberationist doctrines, and I neither
like or approve of our government’s pro-feminist, birth control policies. But I didn’t see the full implications
of these policies before reading this book. The issue of totalitarian control by controlling procreation seems to me indubitable,
frightening, and overwhelming. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the terms of the Malthusian problem – population outstripping
food supply – were forever altered by the advent of petroleum in the 20th century. The use of petroleum in
fertilizers and pesticides created the "Green Revolution," causing a huge increase in harvests. Cheap energy threw a curve
ball into the Malthusian equation. The irony is that petroleum probably had a lot more to do with mushrooming populations
than Catholic religious views. And further, it is not the poor of the world who are most guilty of environmental destruction
and pollution. But it is the poor who pay, morally, socially, and environmentally, for the habits and demands of the wealthy
elites of the wealthy nations. The officious interference of Western elites in the intimate matters of the family is but insult
to injury. In so many ways "cheap oil" is a partner to the sexual revolution. It fosters the same abandon, lack of self-restraint,
consumption, hedonism, and lack of concern for the future.
As Jones stresses in his last chapter about the Clinton sex scandals, without the moral law the rich can
do as they like. The moral law is the only thing that protects the poor. "A world liberated from morals is a world in which
the rich get to do whatever they want… In the absence of morals, the rich will get away with murder because their desires
are more powerful, and power in the context becomes the only measure of right and wrong. Either might makes right or we are
all bound by the terms of a moral order not of our making."
Libido Dominandi is an important book that takes one of the central threads of modernity and pulls it
through the skein of the last two hundred years of history. Michael Jones says things that Americans need to hear, and I wish
there were a chance that his book could be widely circulated. Unfortunately, there isn’t – not only because of
the atmosphere today, but also because the book would have to be substantially shortened and rigorously edited, and the focus
– whether Catholic or cultural – would have to be clarified.
Christian fundamentalists have attempted to step into the breach created by the sexual revolution, but unfortunately
fundamentalism is lacking in the tradition of moral reason that would enable it to win wider respect. If anything, Christian
fundamentalism has only increased the determination of the leftist elites to support gay marriage, abortion, and other issues
of "sexual freedom" – and this despite an unjust war, prison torture scandals, the abrogation of civil liberties, and
the emptying-out of the American economy in favor of heedless consumption and the manipulation of finance. Few things highlight
the terminal irrelevance and suicidal intent of the American so-called thinking class than their continued support for sexual
liberation in the face of a tsunami of woes headed our way. Protestant Christianity has apparently terminated in a divorce
from mores on the one hand and a divorce from reason on the other. Ironically, the churches that became "national" have nothing
to say any longer for the nations. It is possible that Catholicism, being international, will be the only real meaningful
support for Christianity in the future.
So perhaps there will be a "Catholic moment," in which case Michael Jones could revise his book to argue
the case for a counter-Protestant Reformation. Which, I think, is a case to be made. But the sexual liberationist doctrine
also needs to be seen in the context of cheap energy and abundant petroleum, which exacerbated many of the problems discussed
in this book. Lust brought us Empire – but Empire is discovering, to its chagrin, that oil is limited and there are
signs everywhere of environmental stress and energy constraints. It is not too much to say that this time in history presents
us with not only the opportunity but the necessity of affirming the moral law of self-restraint. But the book that unites
the reality of the moral law to the theme of stewardship has yet to be written. Gratitude for the act of procreation that
brought us here can be seen as a part of thanks and obligation to the Creation that made it possible.
April 9, 2005
