We live in a corrupted system. The way to tackle corruption is to first acknowledge it exists. Only then is it possible to come up with ways of dealing with it, but don't make the mistake of believing the system can or will uncorrupt itself.

The Myth of Authority

17 February 2025

Lots of people, most in fact, still believe in the myth of Authority, the need for Governments and at least one of the political paradigms, be it from your basic Left vs Right or one of the more modern variations that include extra directions for added divisiveness and bonus arguments. Unfortunately that is all they add. There is no new clarity or open dialogue as the latest iteration spawned from “Political Science” seeks to place us all on an ever-increasingly convoluted “map”…

The issue with these graphs, spectrums, diagrams and so on is that it is not possible to represent the enormously complex breadth of, and infinite combinations of ideas and opinions in a way that can be simply wrapped up in an infographic or sound-bite for the media to hit the rest of us over the head with. What stating this rather obvious fact should immediately make abundantly clear is that Politics itself can never actually work for the people it alleges to represent, even if we pretended for a moment that that was even the real goal.

Let’s be clear. Politics was invented to prevent the heads of the ruling parasite class ending up on poles. As various forms of agriculture and industry increased the survival rate of your average peasant and opportunities arose beyond the desperate waiting for crumbs from the Royal Table, it began to dawn on those ruling class types that the mechanisms by which they were accumulating more wealth and land could also end up being their undoing. This is the kind of paradoxical tightrope the would-be Stewards of the Earth have been walking for a very long time.

Sure having lots of people as cheap labour doing all the hard work while you sit back taxing it all at every transaction and making all the rules to enshrine your position in unassailable and near-impenetrable legal doctrine is all very cool, but what if enough of the plebs become dissatisfied? History has repeated examples of the unsustainability of such an asymmetric social setup, and therefore it is vital that the masses are either:

  • Too impoverished
  • Too weak or disempowered
  • Too afraid

…or any combination of those things to ever be a threat. However, keeping people in that state but having them still useful as slaves or serfs is not as straightforward as it sounds. If people are too weak or feel too disenfranchised they will not be productive and useful to the parasites that feed off their labour, energy, adrenochrome etc. If people feel too empowered they don’t need you ruling them. This is a real problem for the psychopathic control-freaks that are running the show. Having the historical records of collapsing civilisations and revolutions as a reference, something needed to be devised to address this issue.

Politics, the Holy Grail

And so, the system of Politics was created to ameliorate the problem. The idea is relatively simple. The notion is that of a Representational Democracy where people have their vote which is then cast at arbitrary intervals for a local person who will represent the people of the area, ensuring their voice is heard and each and every voter gets a say in how the country is run. You can even work towards being a representative yourself. This is no closed system of dictatorship. This is it, no more tyranny of Kings and Queens, just the small matter of the State deciding who is eligible to vote and lo, the Voices of The People will be heard and heeded. This is the point at which you need to imagine the sound of an angelic choir singing as we approach the opening gates of the Promised Utopia. If you’re struggling to imagine the sound, click the play button below…

You’re welcome.

Obviously the list of who is eligible has expanded over the last hundred years or so, based solely on what was politically expedient at the time. If anyone is still under the illusion that the “fight for the right to vote” was really a thing, and the State reluctantly caved to the pressure of the Suffragettes or any other civil rights group I have some bad news for you.

Many highly quotable people over the years have pointed out the futility and/or illegitimacy of voting in various poetic and pithy ways. Here is a small selection of such for your amusement:

Voters decide nothing; people who count votes decide everything.

Joseph Stalin

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

Edward Abbey

In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, EVEN FOR THE TIME BEING. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self- defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man takes the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot — which is a mere substitute for a bullet — because, as his only chance of self- preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him….Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby meliorating their condition. But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or even consented to.

Lysander Spooner

There are many analogies that have been used over the years to describe various aspects of the world we live in and the “progress” the parasite class is making to construct the forever future they want to rule over. The “boiling frogs” analogy is a good one that most people are familiar with, even if they have not realised they are in increasingly hot water themselves, such is the effectiveness of the process.

Some people would like to believe that we have “Free and Democratic Elections” (well, until their team appears to lose) and as long as we can ensure that the process of electing a new figurehead is “fair” and “transparent” then all is well. There are a number of issues that viewpoint ignores and we’ll have a look at those now…

Choice

Lots of fans of voting claim that the fact we are given a choice of who we can vote for means it is as good as it can be. Point out any flaws and the response tends to be “It’s the best system we have, why don’t you move to Cuba/Russia/etc. and see how you like that” or words to that effect. Aside from the fact that response is based on many of the mechanisms by which the whole thing sustains itself (indoctrination, propaganda etc.) it ignores the important part of who the choices are and how the choices are engineered, and whether indeed they actually even matter.

An example I have given people in conversation about this matter of “choice” is that as long as you are able to control the availability of the actual choices, then it really doesn’t matter who chooses what. To better explain what I mean by that, think of it this way…

Position A is a set of policies, legislation, systems and so on. The goal of the ruling class is to get to Position Z which is the implementation of the final set of tyrannical policies, legislation etc. that enables the world to be run in the precise way they want it run. Consider Position A as where we are. Any attempt to instigate Position Z while we are at Position A is too much of a leap, the equivalent of going from 10C to 100C in our frogs analogy. This is all rather obvious and I am certainly not insulting the reader’s intelligence by explaining this because I think it would not be understood. I am simply outlining the starting position to better describe the issue with “choice” when it comes to voting.

If you can control the choices available, and you are starting at A and wish to get to Z, it is trivial to engineer the first set of choices as being between B and C where each letter represents slightly more tyranny that its predecessor, and after that between C and D, and so on. You might even be able to skip a few letters now and then, and eventually you’ll be able to offer Y and Z, and then after that, a choice between two cosmetically different versions of Z.

Even if one is sceptical about whether this is actually what is (and has been) happening, it should at least be understood that conceptually it is possible, and that the mechanism by which this could happen is exactly how the system of voting in elections works.

Another objection to the idea of this method of pre-determined choices that get increasingly bad that is sometimes raised is that people would never stand for a set of policies and legislation that is so bad, it would be “Political suicide” and so no Government would ever dare to enact or even propose anything particularly draconian. This brings us on to the next important tool of the State.

Engineering Consensus

Achieving a consensus on anything more important than what takeaway to order from or what film to watch when dealing with more than a handful of people is near impossible without someone making a concession, so the idea that “society” should, or even can be shepherded into unanimous, peaceful agreement with the kinds of invasive regulations Governments are obsessed with, affecting every single aspect of our lives is a fantasy entertained only by the extremely naïve and the unconscionably arrogant.

I am by no means making the case that we should be living in an unrestrained Mad Max-style terror-dome where chaos and violence are the defining characteristics, which is sometimes referred to as Might Makes Right. That is of course the stock response from devout Statists when you suggest to them that all the really evil things in the world are perpetrated by Governments of one kind or another, and if only humanity could cure itself of the apparent addiction it has to idolising and voting for the very worst people imaginable to take charge and rule over the rest of us, we might be considerably better off in almost every conceivable way.

Now we’re at a point where there are countless supranational organisations making decisions and policies that are even more invasive that are abstracted away from the façade of “democracy”, many of who’s existence the average person is totally unaware of, or they believe that some form of second-order democracy is in play, where their democratically elected leaders are electing themselves and their mates to these virtually untouchable positions. We can list just a few of these organisations here, some people will or may have heard of, others most people will likely have never heard of:

  • United Nations
  • Trilateral Commission
  • Atlantic Council
  • World Economic Forum
  • Council on Foreign Relations
  • Bilderberg Group
  • Group of Thirty

There are many many more of these kinds of organisations, with lots of overlap in membership. You can look any of these up, they are quasi-clandestine in nature i.e. they appear to be open and not secret, but much of their output is either hidden in plain sight so the vast majority of people never even look, and who knows how much else is discussed and agreed behind closed doors. Government representatives from almost every major country (that is, major in their opinion, not mine) regularly attend meetings or are members of these groups, all with a view to direct State policy in ways agreed by these megalomaniacs.

I remember someone once gave me some advice, and this is hardly planet-shattering stuff but nonetheless it was useful to hear it at the time… figure out what is possible, and what isn’t, what can be changed and what can’t, and then you’ll stop wasting your time chasing impossibilities and trying to change the unchangeable.

It is highly likely someone well-known has said something similar if not the same, Mark Twain perhaps, or Voltaire, who knows? But it is useful to bear in mind regardless, as once enough of humanity realises the intractable nature of trying to “govern” people in large numbers without becoming a tyrannical dictatorship, we might apply just a fraction of the time, effort and energy expended on this fool’s errand to something worthwhile. There will always be those people who think they deserve to be ruling over everyone else, but it is high-time everyone else put those lunatics in their rightful place instead of in charge.

It’s not like some (it is said) very smart people haven’t given this a lot of thought. We have had thousands of years of philosophy, schools of thought, think-tanks and academia doing lots of beard-stroking, ponderous frowning and vigorous debating. We have had entire civilisations come and go, all of which provide us with ample learning opportunities to see how setting up asymmetrical power systems where a tiny subset of the populous holds the power to rule over the rest only ever ends up badly. So badly in fact that lots of people end up dead. Every time.

Lots and lots of forms of Government have been tried, or more accurately they have given themselves different names, advertised themselves with the promise “this time we’ll get it right, not like all those other times”, but it always ends up the same, it just takes slightly less or slightly more time (depending on various factors) to end up collapsing under the weight of it’s own contradictions, lies and evil.

Each iteration finds new ways to maintain its Authority. In millennia gone by the new ways generally involved more powerful and invasive uses of force. Ruling by force can indeed be effective, these days Policy Enforcement is done by the Police but that costs money and more importantly cannot always be depended on to only investigate, harass and prosecute the right people. It takes considerable resources and layers of Authority to keep them on track and not start investigating Establishment paedophilia.

Engineering the consensus of the public, even if it is largely statistical trickery has been possible since Governments deployed psychology as a weapon against their own populations. We have looked at the UK Government’s obsession with “influencing people’s behaviour” in this article for example.

The sheer amount of time, energy and, of course, public money spent by Governments on finding ways to manipulate the public is astonishing. The reason is obvious. Money is no object to Governments and their Magic Money Trees, so while it may not end up costing less, the outcome is the risk to the ruling class is much lower. Instead of needing to arm a group of enforcers that could potentially turn on them, getting people to agree to the next step in the march to Position Z is relatively risk free.

This is why we are treated to an endless procession of false-flag events, fake stories, lies and trickery. A false reality is constructed for people to base their choices on, because making a decision out of fear over the Latest Scary Thing™ for example usually results in the choice being exactly in line with what the State wanted, but was otherwise a tough sell.

The devoted Statist will point out that all we need is the right people in power, with the right policies, and depending on their supposed position on the latest Political spectrum matrix, everyone from the other “side” out. Just vote harder, for the correct team and, well you can scroll up and play that angelic choir sound again if you want.

But it can NEVER work.

What might be useful is to explore why it can’t work, no matter which political school of thought one subscribes to, be that left-wing, right-wing, slightly-left of centre-right with a dash of upside-down or something else that has yet to be dreamt up.

So Why Can’t It Work Then?

The reality is that no matter how reasonable and rational your starting position is when it comes to Politics, it always ends up contradictory and insane, with lots of death.

Which ever flavour of Government you choose you end up with the same outcome. For the purposes of demonstrating this without going through every single variation of Government Applied Authority we’ll talk about some of the ideas that were popularised in the 20th Century after it became apparent that things were not going very smoothly.

The Frankfurt School was a school of thought and ideas founded in the Weimar Republic but its most developed critiques of modern society emerged after World War II and are what could be described as a Hegelian synthesis of Freud and Marx, a dialectic blend of psychology and Communism.

One might consider at a surface level the idea of the final goals of Communism, at least as advertised, i.e. the classless society with no predatory “Capitalists” looking to exploit others, coupled with a well-rounded psychological appraisal of the effects such a system would have on the people in it, as not a terrible idea. Of course one should never believe the ads, and such an idea is an impossible dream. Evidence that this is the case is so plentiful it is a wonder anyone still entertains it seriously, but such is the arrogance of some people, they would prefer to convince you to ignore the millions of dead, tortured and abused by their own Governments, and if only we did it their way, their ideologically superior version of social theory would be fabulous.

The Frankfurt School had no shortage of such arrogance. One of it’s most prominent ideologues Theodor Adorno wrote much that the point of social theory is to “demonstrate the disjointedness, the untruth of totality“. What is meant by the word “totality” is any general truth statement, and “totality is to be opposed by convicting it of non-identity with itself” or in other words, bringing out its contradictions.

Some of the ideas and the language those ideas are expressed in by the like of Adorno are, challenging to say the least. This will help to exemplify my point, so please bear with it, as tedious as it might be.

Adorno describes in his book Negative Dialectics, “the totality of identical definitions would correspond to the wish fulfilment picture of traditional philosophy to the a priori structure and to its archaistic late form ontology yet before any specific content this structure is spiritualized version“. In other words, definitions imply some view of reality and this view whatever it might be is taken to be secretly coercive. All traditional philosophy is a cover for social oppression, this is the point he is attempting to make.

What has any of this got to do with Politics and systems of Government? It will, I hope, become clear.

Adorno’s aesthetic theory basically states that art ends up presenting such visions of reality and so perpetuating oppression. The reason he makes this claim comes from his point that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” because poetry, positive art, transmits an idea of truth and victimizes anything that is considered to be outside that idea. Poetry leads ultimately to genocide, as does anything else that presents a vision of reality according to Adorno.

What this means is that anything that presents itself as being of any positive virtue, as a whole, as healthy, beautiful or true, is by default threatening. Adorno thinks it is oppressing whatever falls outside it. If this is beautiful, something else is ugly, if this is true, something else is a lie. To avoid oppressing anything things that seem beautiful must be engaged negatively, and have to be torn apart through its own supposed contradictions.

Adorno’s rejection of positive definitions, traditional philosophy accounts of reality and so on will end up forming a kind of mental habit where one is constantly lashing out against what he refers to as “spiritualized coercion”, and that is against any image or idea that seems harmonious, beautiful, coherent, wholesome etc. What this habit leads to is the “modern” attitude we see today that any beautiful art, any story with a moral is somehow “fascist“.

The modern critic hates power and beauty and strength and confidence unless it is repudiating societal “norms”. They have a compulsion to dismiss morality with scepticism or even total rejection. This kind of mental filter prevents them from seeing a beautiful thing as independent of a problem-filled mind, there is a suspicion that it must be hiding something, some evil crypto-oppression.

Modern Activism

Today’s activism (AKA the “woke” stuff) is exactly like this. It is determined to make beautiful things ugly, with accusations of being oppressive, embedding them in some make-believe terrible context of violence that they supposedly perpetuate, all the while painting them as guilty of lulling the masses into acceptance and participation with the current trendy social injustice, this -ism or that -phobia. An ever-increasing-in-volume torrent of virtue-signalling histrionics is what you end up with.

The political “Left” has long since abandoned the pretence of caring about the livelihood of workers and is now totally consumed with a fictional struggle for all sorts of supposedly oppressed collectives. This is hardly news to anyone paying even the slightest attention, but really it is nothing to do with the so-called “Left”.

Insane identity-politics radicalism promoted by mainstream discourse, media, international corporations and so on pretends it is championing the oppressed, but more than this it is hostile to traditional institutions, morality and standards of beauty. Ostensibly the motivation is a belief that older identities and institutions are inherently oppressive so that things can only be celebrated if they are a weapon against those older traditions and institutions. Yes to the girl boss, but as a weapon against the patriarchy, yes to alternative sexuality but as a weapon against the traditionalist/conservative. It is always a hostile or even destructive gesture.

Even if the ground-level “activists” really believe this is actually about fighting oppression, further up the food chain it is just another tool to destroy, to allow the rebuilding of the Brave New World, free of “oppression” is the claim, but the reality is the opposite.

The clearest justification for this hatred of the wholesome is found in the work of Frankfurt School intellectuals. It is not that their ideas were directly taken on board by modern so-called “woke” activists, but you can much better understand the psychology and motivations of what we see today once you have a handle on the original ideas that have been surreptitiously streamed into the public consciousness.

Adorno would not approve of modern “activists” because he was more serious about it than them. He rejected linear storytelling in cinema or even tonality in music. He was also not into sexual liberation in the way it came about in the 1960s, but the core of his philosophy defines a lot of the psychology that the political establishment promotes in the West today, because it’s useful to break down old structures and replace them with new systems of control, i.e. the political expediency we mentioned earlier.

Radical, apparently “Leftist” Freudian and Marxist critique has actually served the powerful so-called “elites”, not resisted their “Capitalism”. The most politically “Left” leaning corporations are also the biggest evil Capitalists according to Marxist theory but somehow they get a free pass. It should be obvious as to why.

Another Frankfurt School thinker that shared Adorno’s core philosophy but took it in a more mainstream direction is Herbert Marcuse. His influence is seen today in the sex-obsessed nature of a lot of modern culture. Taken to it’s “logical” conclusion, the ultimate rejection of distinct forms and traditional philosophy that Adorno promotes has to end up in the rejection of gender and sexual difference because that’s the most fundamental distinction into which tradition splits the human experience, man and woman.

Reject Everything

Marcuse wrote a book called ‘Eros and Civilization’ and in it he outlines his vision for erotic energy and political revolution. In brief his view is that sexuality has been repressed because economic systems, labour relations are oppressive. People have to be forced to work so that someone, the evil capitalist industrialist can extract surplus value from their labour, and therefore they cannot be allowed to play freely which would take the form of pursuing sex for pleasures sake. According to Marcuse this repression means that heterosexual reproductive marital relations have been the standard because industry and the capitalist demands it, but if Capitalism is abolished and Communism takes hold there will be no need for repressing sexuality and people can simply have sex all day with whoever they like.

It should be obvious that if your primary social thesis has as it’s end goal a permanent state of irresponsibility and instant gratification with no requirement to even provide for oneself, you’ve probably got something fairly fundamental wrong, but this seems to have escaped Marcuse.

Freud held the view that this repression is a necessary part of all civilization. Marcuse argues that you can have socially useful work that can maintain a civilization, a Communist civilization where such work is just play, erotic play, because he believes all play is ultimately erotic energy because he is fundamentally a Freudian even if he disagrees with Freud on some things. The end of repression though according to Marcuse comes through radical individualism, which is somewhat at odds with mainstream Marxism because for Marcuse the myth of Narcissus, the Greek myth of the man who falls in love with his own reflection in the water, kisses his reflection and ends up drowning, provides the culture hero for his type of future non repressive civilization. So does Orpheus but we’ll leave that aside.

Why would Marcuse claim that erotic narcissism AKA self-love can be politically liberating? Well in case it isn’t obvious because why would it be, he believes it’s because it begins from an individual who refuses to, as he puts it, perform for society by conforming to reproductive heterosexuality. This individual refuses Freud’s “Reality Principle” so-called, which is to say social norms, and from that refusal a whole new kind of culture can be created.

Again we can see the psychology that underpins much of what we are force-fed by corporate-driven pop-culture and Governments alike, this idea of abolishing “norms” along with everything else in order to create a Brave New World Order.

When Marcuse writes “reactivation of polymorphous and narcissistic sexuality ceases to be a threat and can itself lead to culture building” he’s actually talking about his alternative “Communist” culture. “If the organism exists not as an instrument of alienated labour” as it is in so-called Capitalism, “but as a subject of self-realization, in other words if socially useful work is at the same time the transparent satisfaction of an individual need”.

This is all very Freud. The idea is that the initial experience of life is narcissistic in that the world is not perceived as separate from the infant and is erotic “at this primary stage of the relation between the pre ego” the infant “and reality, the Narcissistic and the maternal Eros seem to be one and the primary experience of reality is that of a libidinous union“. Marcuse is wanting to recover that sense of unity between the infant and the mother, Narcissus and his own reflection in the world, he doesn’t see himself as different from the world, in adults. This weird infantilising idea is also something we see a lot of, with the State attempting to take on the role of Mummy and Daddy, and actual parents relegated to the status of interchangeable registered keepers for children, to be swapped out the moment they are deemed to be failing their highly prescribed and regulated duties.

Marcuse’s fantasy of a polymorphous narcissistic Eros, erotic orientation in a civilization where no repression is required by productive needs and labour relations, a Communist civilization will make the whole body of the individual erotic not just certain specific parts of the body that are considered sexual features and indeed the whole society will likewise become erotic. Don’t take my word for it, he argues for exactly that in ‘Eros and Civilization’.

Under repression there has been a “socially necessary desexualisation of the body the libido becomes concentrated in one part of the body leaving most of the rest free for use as the instrument of labour” claims Marcuse. This is apparently because “originally the sex instinct has no extraneous temporal and spatial limitations on its subject and object; sexuality is by nature ‘polymorphous perverse’. The societal organization of the sex instinct taboos as perversions practically all its manifestations which do not serve or prepare for the procreative function“.

Marcuse is defending perversion. He is arguing that perversions were only made into a taboo because of these kinds of oppressive social institutions that really wanted to focus everything in on procreation, because of the evil “Capitalist” forcing people to work.

Utopia, Of Course

Whereas Adorno dreamed of, and indeed lived himself an existence where everything is ugly and miserable, Marcuse fantasises of a utopia, as he describes “The erotic aim of sustaining the entire body as the subject/object of pleasure calls for the continual refinement of the or organism the intensification of its receptivity the growth of its sensuousness. The aim generates its own project of realization: the abolition of toil, the amelioration of the environment, the conquest of disease and decay, the creation of luxury…”

This is all “Pleasure Principle” stuff.

Marcuse continues “There is sublimation and, consequently, culture; but this sublimation proceeds in a system of expanding and enduring libidinal relations, which are in themselves work relations. The idea of an erotic tendency towards work is not foreign to psychoanalysis, Freud himself remarked at work provides an opportunity for a “very considerable discharge of libidinal component impulses, narcissistic, aggressive and even erotic“.

So this new utopian culture will run on “libidinal relations” which are in themselves “work relations” or in other words the workplace which is now a place of play but socially useful, is also erotic and he quotes from Freud’s ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ that says “Experience has shown that in cases of collaboration libidinal ties are regularly formed between the fellow-workers which prolong and solidify the relations between them to a point beyond what is merely profitable“.

So Marcuse’s future will make every social relation erotic, because play will replace work and play is fundamentally erotic because Freud said so, and reproductive heterosexual union will give way to narcissistic union also between employees at the workforce. If this sounds like the ravings of a porn-addicted brainlet dressed up in pseudo-intellectual logorrhoea, that’s because it is.

It should come as no surprise that this psychology that has permeated modern culture, especially academia, where in this non-repressive civilization humans will feel themselves at one with their environment just like the infant feels at one with its mother, and so Environmentalism, in particular the idea of melting into your environment and taking care of your environment, as Narcissus as in love with his reflection and therefore with the water in which he is reflected becomes key to the whole vision of Marcusian Communism and therefore helps us understand some of the strange obsessions and views of the “modern environmentalist”.

Marcuse explains this environmental activism in his book called ‘Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society’, and this is relevant now as we see that environmentalism, a more systemic environmentalism, not genuine environmentalism, has become the centrepiece of dominant discourse of the dominant ideology. No matter if we starve and freeze people to “save the planet” is what we see. For Marcuse environmentalism can be a “…political and psychological movement of liberation” but how can environmentalism possibly represent psychological liberation?

Well, because Marcuse frames his discussion of environmentalism in terms of Freud’s dichotomy between the death and life drives, Thanatos and Eros, and views environmentalism as the victory of Eros, in his words “The primary drive toward destructiveness resides in individuals themselves, as does the other drive Eros. The balance between these two drives also is found within individuals… the balance between their will and wish to live and their will and wish to destroy life. Both drives according to Freud are constantly fused within the individual. If one drive is increased this comes at the expense of the other drive. In other words any increase in destructive energy in the organism leads, mechanically and necessarily, to a weakening of Eros, to a weakening of the life instinct. This is an extremely important notion”.

We see this idea has taken hold and manifests itself in a number of way, not least in Hollywood films with characters like Thanos wanting to cull the population of the universe to save it. Of course there is always a large dose of Eugenics in these things, but that speaks more to the views of those who have mainstreamed these garbage ideas via films and pop culture. The current debate around “assisted dying” in the UK, that it is already up and running in countries like Canada where by 2023 made up almost 5% of all deaths, is a strong indicator that the deliberate causing of death, of promoting death as the answer is most certainly well established, but it didn’t come from nowhere.

Marcuse starts off with Freud’s category of the death drive, the desire to destroy life in order to return to the womb, a state before the confusion and pain of life, a state of total peace, but Marcuse believes we should pursue this same desire for peace for the end of pain, not as death, not as destruction, but through the life drive, Freud’s Eros as erotic energy.

I fully appreciate how detached from reality all this sounds. But it is useful to understand how these ideas have been weaponised and knowing about them helps to identify and explain some of the peculiar, self-destructive behaviour we see from the Current Year Activists.

Marcuse’s environmentalism is about the “pacification of external nature” which in turn will pacify “nature within men and women”. Environmentalism should shift the balance within individuals towards life towards the erotic over death. It could be reasonable to view this idea that peace, life without pain, can be pursued not by escaping life and the world but by maturing and pacifying life, as a positive idea. Maybe. But by taking Freud’s framing of the death instinct as a desire to escape pain as his own starting point, what you get with Marcuse’s fantasy future is the making of painlessness into the priority of politics. No longer should we care about the integrity of different entities, proper order, the individual flourishing and justice between things. Where this leads is to a place without strong individuals who do not want to hurt one another but weak individuals who cannot hurt one another.

Weak individuals, except because they don’t distinguish between self and world any longer, they are not distinct entities in that sense, they have melted into a perverted universal eroticism. That’s not me making that as a judgement, that is exactly what Marcuse argued for. The search for “erotic union” i.e. sex and pleasure moves one away from pain in physical terms, but it also implies an inappropriate merging of everything with everything else. We are seeing exactly this with the aggressive push of trans and gender ideology.

Marcuse expressed his dislike of distinct forms, as comes through in his opposition to traditional European representational art. A feature of modern supposedly “radical” politics is that every struggle gets joined to the push for non-traditional forms of sexuality, again we see this with the trans and gender ideology.

If we take Marcuse’s core tenets, the underlying theme which agrees with Adorno’s own core premise, is that when a thing is beautiful it implies that whatever is outside of it is ugly, if something is attractive something else is unattractive, if something is normal something else is abnormal etc, and any standard therefore implicitly justifies hierarchy and oppression, the beautiful over the ugly, and the oppression of conforming the ugly to the standards of the beautiful etc. It’s therefore moral to reject beauty.

This rejection is actually the Freudian death drive, an inherent desire to escape pain, to leave behind life including all of its injustices, hierarchies and oppressiveness, but also its harmony, order and beauty, and to return to the blissful sleep of the womb of unity with the mother. This is like the Gaia AKA “Mother Earth” fetish that is also very popular these days.

Marcuse believes though, the better and more politically powerful way to pursue this drive of escaping from the pain of life is through erotic energy melting the distinctions between things, erasing hierarchy and depression and all categories by merging everything together, and this is best achieved by the merging of the individual with their environment, so environmentalism becomes the centrepiece of erotic Communism that Marcuse envisages.

Recent environmental activism which appears to reflect the idea that there is something symbolic about vandalizing famous art pieces was demonstrated by the Just Stop Oil environmentalist group. Really though, what did the destruction of art, especially representational culturally significant art, European art have to do with saving the planet?

It turns out that this was very consistent with Marcuse-esque psychology. His opposition to “the representational art of Europe” was based on his view that this art represented the world as a world of things to be dominated and owned by men and thereby falsified it, falsified the world. Marcuse’s conflation of representational and traditional and specifically European art for some reason with oppression demonstrates that he shares Adorno’s premise that any positive statement, any coherent form implies repression.

Beautiful art, a linear story with a moral, even musical harmony for Adorno, whatever it is, it puts forward an ideal and therefore offends and oppresses whatever doesn’t fall in line with that ideal. Representational art, the distinct nature of things in themselves implies domination. Because Marcuse’s concept of liberation is a version of Freud’s death drive, we have to escape from life, but the search for erotic release in Marcuse’s case is the perverted desire to destroy distinction and merge together.

Revolutionary art in contrast, according to Marcuse “must be shaped in such a manner that it reveals the negative system in its totality and at the same time the absolute necessity of liberation” which is an overly complicated way of saying that art should be negative, critical, opposed to traditional standards of beauty, in a word ugly.

He continues “The work of art must, at its breaking point, expose the ultimate nakedness of man (and nature’s) existence, stripped of all the paraphernalia of monopolistic mass culture, completely and utterly alone, in the abyss of destruction, despair and freedom. The most revolutionary work of art will be, at the same time, the most esoteric the most anti-collectivist one, for the goal of the revolution is the free individual”.

The Road To Tyranny

So pure individualistic nihilism is how you get utopia, who knew? Erotic Communism comes by way of the narcissist who rejects traditional hetero-normative unions. Sounds totally sustainable right? There’s absolutely no way a society based on the total rejection of normal, healthy long-term relationships between men and women could face any challenges in simply being able to perpetuate itself.

Marcuse’s Marxism ends up in perfect individualism, an individualism so complete that the individual is alone, undefined by any inherited identity, not belonging to any group. The problem is, and it is quite incredible that all the Very Smart People™ like Adorno, Marcuse, Foucault et al never figured this out… an individual like that would be completely powerless, vulnerable to top-down control which is precisely why all of this leads us to tyranny.

Shock horror, these pseudo-intellectual attempts at “liberation” lead to increased Government control and more powerful and unaccountable corporate structures. While it was attacking harmless paintings, the Just Stop Oil group of activists was calling for Governments to invest more in so-called “renewable technologies”. Representational and traditional art is the problem, technology is the solution, technocracy replaces culture and identity which just so happens to align exactly with the plans of the rich and powerful parasite class. Imagine that.

Bestowing newly created individual rights to determine his/her own gender identity requires a strong medical establishment. It requires a powerful State to guarantee and pay for hormone treatments and surgery. It requires hate speech laws to grant you and protect your new identity. Yay, we have the total individual, but that requires complete dependence on external systems of enforcement like an all-powerful State where no-one has any individual power to resist anything because you might offend someone.

Aside from understanding that rights that can be “bestowed” or “granted” can also be removed and therefore are not rights at all, it should be clear that no matter how you slice it, the moment you start down the road to “liberation” via Government power, you have lost any chance of freedom.

What we have looked at with the Frankfurt School of Thought stuff sounds like ultra-Leftist stuff that would perhaps make Lenin raise an eyebrow, but really the outcome is what we are seeing and have been seeing under Conservative and Labour Governments in the UK and in most other places where the pretence of Left and Right is still a thing for quite a few years now. It should be obvious that the clearly intentionally polarising terminology and team colours is just a show.

Bear in mind that people who talk about “if we just had a small Government” and if we “have checks and balances” to prevent the cancerous expansion of the State seemingly forget that we apparently had just that many years ago. The UK Government for example did not start out like the USSR and yet here we are, where people are imprisoned for posting memes, arrested for peacefully protesting the deliberate killing of unborn babies, children are traumatised, exploited and mutilated for Political reasons and our so-called “Leaders” are busy debating whether to formally offer State suiciding as a service while funding multiple wars with our money.

Left or Right, if you entertain the idea of a Government, you end up with tyranny and death, lots and lots of death.

The worst atrocities in history without exception have been committed, not by random nut-jobs, but by Governments and supra-national organisations run by the very worst the human race has to offer. The biggest corporate exploiters of human labour are naively blamed on “unfettered late-stage Capitalism”, and yet Governments are regulating more now than ever, and these big corporate monsters have the majority of their income from Government contracts.

The evil “Capitalist” corporations provide the State a convenient bogey-man to “protect” the public from, yet the reality is that these corporations are only as dominant as they are because so much public money flows into their coffers from the Governments.

The myth of Authority is the main problem, everything else is a symptom. Like the alcoholic who wakes up feeling dreadful and believes a whiskey or five will make them feel better, refusing to entertain the fact that the addiction to alcohol is the problem and that they just need to stop, the belief that we need a Government to tell us what to do or bad things will happen is just as illogical.