The Frankfurt School and other forms of social criticism — whatever their anti-capitalist and socialist pretensions — were and remain important to the oligarchy. The social sciences provide a scientific rationale for the destruction of traditional remnants which hinder capitalism from proceeding to its next phase: globalisation and what one of their intellectuals, Francis Fukuyama, calls ‘the end of history’.
While much of the world turns to ‘populism’ and puts up barriers to globalisation in reaction to globalist demands for ‘open borders’, on the other hand, new identities have been created by detached individuals re-clustering into interest groups that in the name of ‘human rights’ demand to be fully integrated into the global market economy. Genders, races, families, states, nations, neighbourhoods, as supposedly fluid ‘social constructs’, can be deconstructed and reshaped at will, and such a fluidity accords with the demands of ever-fluid — expanding — production and consumption. The ‘freedom’ for which Fromm hoped has become the servitude which he feared, and about which Jung warned. What these new identities demand — identity politics, as it is called — is not self-determination or self-help, like the Black nationalism of the Marcus Garvey or Louis Farrakhan type, but ‘rights’ that necessitate dependence. Hence, the new ‘revolutionary’ identities envisaged by Herbert Marcuse et al. merely end up as clients of the System.
In states targeted for deconstruction, which persist with some vestiges of tradition, such as Putin’s Russia and Shi’ite Islam, identity politics, especially feminism, its concomitant abortion in the name of ‘reproductive health’, and ‘gender fluidity’, are promoted by the Open Society global network, USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, Rockefeller, Ford, United Nations agencies, social media corporations and thousands of others, collectively called ‘civil society’, and ‘the international community’.
Are we to suppose that the oligarchs have expended fortunes to fund this process for a century for any other reason than that of control? Are we to suppose that they are too naïve to understand what they are subsidising decade after decade?
This detachment from organic identities and a sense of place and permanence has created what Richard LaPiere foresaw sixty years ago as the emergence of a ‘new bourgeoisie’. This new class of what might be aptly termed, to borrow Stalin’s phrase, ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ has become a repository for the functionaries and CEOs of globalisation, lauded by Pascal Zachary as the next stage in evolution.
The sensible predicate for social change is organic growth as distinct from artificial ‘social engineering’, as scientists such as Carl Jung and Konrad Lorenz1298 warned. Jung, from the perspective of analytical psychology, and Lorenz, the founding father of ethology, called the problems afflicting modern civilisation pathological, and the malfunctioning of instincts.1299
Contrary to what ‘progressives’ state in regard to the need for man to be ‘liberated’ from his organic ‘primary ties’, and to break free of the traditions and customs by which they are maintained, Lorenz states that ‘extreme conservativism’ in retaining what has long been tried and tested, ‘is a vital property of the apparatus performing, in cultural evolution, a task analogous to that of the genes in species variation’. It is selection that decides what is to be transmitted as ‘traditional, “sacred” customs and habits’. What is disparaged by the progressives as ‘superstition’ mostly originated with genuine insights and inventions, which have been maintained over generations by taking on sacred and mythic aspects. ‘Retention’ is even more important than ‘additional acquisition’. What can be discarded as obsolete and useless from a survival perspective and what necessitates preserving as indispensable in the cultural heritage, is not something that should be casually decided.1300
Mircea Eliade pointed out for the same reasons the importance of enduring myths, sacred places and religious rites and ceremonies, in maintaining a sense of a community’s place and purpose in the cosmos.1301 Scorned by the progressives as irrational and useless superstition and ‘magic’, as Julian Huxley put it, or as a plot by the ruling class to keep the people oppressed in the name of ‘God’, as Marx put it, there is a religious element to man’s psyche that is hardwired and should not be causally rejected in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘science’. Julian Huxley, like the Jacobins with their Cult of Reason, proposed a new cult of science with its own rites and ceremonies that would replace all traditional faiths.
One should look askance at the Critical Theorists and other ‘progressives’ when they dogmatically state that an institution or custom is ‘old fashioned’, ‘reactionary,’ ‘regressive’, and as the cliché goes on so many issues, should not be retained ‘in this day and age’. Removing one element from a multiplicity of traditional, cultural interactions might have devastating consequences, as Lorenz pointed out.1302 ‘Being enlightened is no reason for confronting transmitted tradition with hostile arrogance…’1303
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