Meursault, the existential hero of Albert Camus’ post WWII novel The Stranger is defined by his personal detachment almost to the point of emotional deadness, indifference to classic Judeo-Christian morality, a diminished sense of oneself as a social being, and a defiant coldness of personality. Yet, in the USA, these qualities are increasingly appearing along with other anti-social qualities. We see gender-affirming care being expanded in certain California hospitals and in Johns Hopkins on the East Coast. The physicians supporting it are smiling, bright young professionals who seem to intend the best for society after years of study spent developing unique abilities to acquire the skills to enable people to change or “transition” from female to male or male to female. They are completely on board with beginning this process at very early ages.
They are justifying the unjustifiable and advancing as a healing methodology a transitioning process that should be treated with great restraint and reserve. In the cause of “science,” they are denying their own humanity and that of their patients.
Those who are moving along blithely unaware of the philosophical implications of what they are thinking, saying, and doing are thus disrupting the order of the universe as created by God and upheld by humanity – all nationalities and ethnicities – for all times. This updating of creation is not of the same order as inventing the airplane or having running water in one’s home (relatively new developments in the march of historical time). Rather, it is a part of the continuing attack on Being as the essence of human reality and of course of Being as reflective of Supreme Being, since religion teaches we were created in the image of God. Being has been depreciated for a long time, and one of the chief depreciators was Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist atheist who advanced his deepest metaphysical reflections in his chief work Being and Nothingness. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy states, “insofar Sartre has rejected the notion of a grounding of all beings in Being, one may ask how something like a relation of being between consciousness and the world is possible.”
Prior to Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th century existentialist, announced in his book Thus Spake Zarathustra that “God is dead.” How was humankind to develop and interact in a world without values given and supported by a holy God, a Lord and Creator who loved his creation? For Nietzsche, the answer was simple. In the new world order, we would see and would profit from a “transvaluation of values” where that which had been bad is seen as good and that which under God was perceived as good will be treated as bad. The individuals who will accomplish this healthy transformation in the future are a new type of humanity. The assumption is that evolution is ongoing, and what we call the “human race” – the human beings who had presumably evolved from pre-Greek and Greek times in the West through the Christian centuries and up through the modern scientific era — is an expression of humankind merely at one level of its development. The next stage or next higher level will be that of the ubermenschen or “supermen.” They will not be wearing red capes or have a large S on the front of their shirts, but will depict reality in a way opposite from all that came before. Of course, all Bible believing, born again believers will recognize the ubermenschen as a type of Antichrist who puts forward evil and calls it good. And Nietzsche thus becomes a prophet of Antichrist because he foresees this stage, and, as a prophet of evil, not only sees it, but welcomes it.
We see this willingness to dispense with God and to reverse Judeo-Christian values and even classical Greek dependence on reason as applying not only in the gender reversal obsessions, but even in matters of social order. During this past summer, New York City agreed to pay $9,950 to each of the more than 1,300 protesters arrested by New York police officers during various George Floyd “protests” (read, “riots”) between May 28 and June 4, 2020. Thus, the mayhem of those riots now is deemed to be peaceful assembly as allowed by the First Amendment of our beloved Constitution. Thus, thinking oneself to be a man or woman when one is not a man or a woman becomes an easily fixed psychological disturbance that should be normalized. And the quelling of disorder becomes a serious action against the well-being of society. In both cases, the message is, you have a right to be anyone you want to be even if you are being violent or perverse. It is lawfully perceived as “cruel and unusual punishment” to crush rioting and looting.
The roots of this perversity can be traced to the Frankfurt School founded in Germany in 1921. The Frankfurt School was an institute organized by Felix Weil in Germany as a bastion for communist intellectuals to express their disdain for the capitalist model of economics and values. They had some disagreements with Marx and among themselves, but they were bound together by a fundamental and intense Marxist vision. Later, various notable psychologists and psychoanalysts joined their ranks which further modified their views by including views about the human unconscious that were not in Marx’s original overview of economic determinism as the basis of all civilizations. The Nazis however were opposed to this school of thought, and many of the professors left Germany in the 1930’s. They went to the USA and set up shop here in many of our universities, using their brilliance and academic bona fides to poison higher education in this country in favor of communism.
They became the voices of attacks on the hetero-normative sexuality of the West, the nuclear family, the work ethic, and advanced the view that capitalism was inherently oppressive. One brilliant Italian thinker, Antonio Gramsci, became a communist in 1921, and during his career which included lengthy imprisonment he broadened the communist conceptions in his writings to show that the media, schools, and the family were all institutions that spread and maintained the capitalist value system. Thus, he expanded the understanding of how to fight against the entrenched anti-communism inherent in capitalism. The communists were for him in a hegemonic struggle against the hegemony of capitalism – the pervasive grip of capitalism on the psyches of the citizenry. It is this pervasive grip that must be broken, not just dwelling on the wrongs of capitalism.
This writer believes that it is because of Gramsci’s expanded understanding of the breadth and depth of commitment of our citizenry to democratic/republican/capitalist principles – namely, to the hegemony of capitalist and individualistic ideals — that has produced the widespread attack and success of communism in rioting against what we would call “the American way.” Gramsci understood that force of arms alone against the powers that be was not the essence of the communist struggle with capitalism. Rather, deeper institutional commitments had to be attacked. DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance), drag queen story hours, rainbow flags, transviolence (although not accepted yet “understandable” for the left because “we feel your pain”), transwomen jiggling naked breast transplants on the White House lawn, deadbeats and “normal people” not paying fares at subway entrances, LGBTQA++ Pride Month, etc. etc. are all attempts to attack the “hegemony” of capitalist suppression of the people.
We must reject this onslaught in every possible way that is open to us.
Jeffrey Ludwig teaches philosophy and is the author of four books available here.
Jeffrey Ludwig
Photo: KALW
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