Dhamma

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

What’s at stake

 

The reductionistic, allopathic model of medicine is deeply flawed and based on outdated assumptions. And it has turned modern health care into an establishment that all too often endangers the very patients it’s supposed to help.

Medicine should be devoted to caring for people. It should be about a human-to-human connection in the process of healing. While some noble practitioners embody these ideals, the overall system has become a “medical-industrial complex”: an intricate web of financial interests involving pharmaceutical companies, doctors, nurses, medical device/equipment suppliers, diagnostics companies, hospitals, medical schools, insurance companies, media companies, politicians, technology companies, scientific journals, and others.1

Those who pull the strings of this web have managed to control society’s belief systems about health and disease; and about germs, infections, contagion, and vaccines. Modern medicine’s core beliefs are often blindly accepted—and even defended—when there is great reason to challenge them. And yet they persist.

The medical-industrial complex not only steers society’s belief systems but also the practice of medicine itself. Making money  often takes precedence over healing, while a deeper spiritual orientation is lacking.

From a financial perspective, healing a person means losing a customer. Having people stay on long-term pharmaceutical medications is a much better outcome than identifying and solving the underlying problem that’s causing symptoms. Thus, for the pharmaceutical industry, it makes sense to fund research on drugs and vaccines rather than uncovering how to empower people to stay healthy on their own. Certainly, the medical system has saved people from life-threatening conditions, but at the same time, it hasn’t focused as much on how it could have prevented those people from becoming deathly ill in the first place. Overall, a chronically sick society is a better economic outcome for the medical-industrial complex than a healthy society is. This dangerous mentality can persist if participants within “the system” act from a physicalist perspective that has lost sight of the greater “cosmic system” that connects us all. As such, a consciousness shift is essential.

In the absence of this shift, hospitals have become factory-like; and doctors and nurses, often unknowingly, have transformed into cogs in a wheel. Perhaps they enter the system with good intentions and genuinely want to help people. But indoctrination takes hold quickly, and the prospect of going against the grain is harrowing and outright intimidating. Speaking out carries great risk, so it’s easier to just play it safe, not make a fuss, and unquestioningly follow the protocols. Patients who have experienced this dynamic can attest without hesitation: compassion in the mainstream medical system is sometimes conspicuously absent. In part, this might be due to a flawed philosophical outlook, but it’s also a symptom of an unhealthy society. Given how many sick people are flooding the system, it’s often a practical challenge for health-care providers to treat each patient with appropriate care and attention.

With these dynamics at play, many health-care providers do not focus on providing holistic solutions. Stale and simplistic narratives about why people get sick have transformed into invincible dogmas such that the only solution to illness is a magical pharmaceutical  bullet. In other words, an external source must be the savior, and the patient is a mere victim.

Uncovering the true determinants of health and disease has become secondary, whereas it should be the primary objective in a system truly focused on well-being. That’s where health-care providers, in theory, should be directing their attention. In essence, allopathy often focuses on what’s under the microscope, rather than what’s within the “macroscope.”2

New Zealand surgeon-turned-naturopath Ulrich Williams saw this clearly back in 1937. He suggested basic principles that can redirect our current paradigm—and the thinking that underlies it—into something much better:

The orthodox healing system has failed for reasons that easily can be defined….We have failed because from our too narrow and materialistic outlook we have conceived of disease as something attacking us from without, due to germs; whereas disease whether of body, mind, soul, or estate, is mostly a gradual degenerative process going on within, due to failure to comply with the requirements of well-being. We fail because in the zones of physical limit we look outside ourselves for cause and cure of troubles arising within. We have failed because the whole complicated system of orthodox modern diagnosis and treatment is based upon a misconception that mistakes the symptom for the disease; and tinkering with effects while the cause is ignored and allowed to continue always has been and will be followed by deplorable consequences.3Furthermore, moving toward a better system of medicine might require looking back at ancient methods from a variety of cultures all over the world. Dr. Shamini Jain mentions Indian Ayurvedic, classical Chinese, and Tibetan teachings in particular, summarizing their approach and the implications thereof:

The body has an innate ability to heal itself, and this process can be encouraged by fostering proper flow of  life force energy, which serves as a conduit between consciousness and physicality.

These Eastern teachings provide an underlying model to help us better understand and explore communications between the spirit, the body, and our environment. Disease is considered disharmony that might exist within one’s self or between one’s self and his or her surrounding environment. Thus, healing is not about curing yourself from something that is “not you” but understanding the patterns that might be causing you disharmony and therefore illness. The vital life force is a bridge that allows the healer—ultimately you—to better understand the nature of that disharmony and bring harmony back to your system.4

While we may not yet know exactly what a new paradigm of medicine will look like, at least we know what it won’t look like.5 Armed with a general compass for rethinking heath care, we have an opportunity to create a brighter future—both on an individual and collective level.

From the perspective of an individual, if we want to be healthy, it’s simply not wise to rely exclusively on the mainstream allopathic system and its health-care providers (perhaps outside of emergency situations). Finding real health solutions requires reconsidering the basic nature of disease.

In their book What Really Makes You Ill?, Dawn Lester and David Parker lay out what they consider to be the four determinants of illness:61. Nutrition

2. Toxic exposures

3. Electromagnetic radiation

4. Stress

 Notice that they don’t focus on germs. Thus, from this perspective, “symptoms” reflect the body’s attempt to heal or detoxify from an underlying ailment in one of those categories. Modern labels of discrete diseases are in many ways arbitrary distinctions for varying symptoms. Those labels often tell us nothing about the real causes of those symptoms.

An even broader way to think about it, in my view, is that ill health comes from:

1. Physical injury and/or

2. Psychospiritual injury

The first category can be a physical ailment (from, say, sports), but it also can relate to other aspects of physicality such as poor diet, environmental toxicity, electromagnetic toxicity, and so on. The second category relates to one’s mental state, unresolved trauma, belief systems, emotions, “spiritual” connection, a sense of purpose in life, and even multidimensional matters that we don’t fully understand.

What, then, should we do to stay healthy? Holistic practitioners might vary in their specific recommendations—such as detoxification protocols, dietary recommendations, herb and/or supplement recommendations, electromagnetic-protection solutions, body-alignment and somatic modalities, spiritual-practice suggestions, and so forth. But there seem to be some basic lifestyle recommendations, that they suggest across the board, which anyone can implement, such as eating nutritious and clean food; drinking clean water; avoiding toxins; sleeping well; exercising; getting sunlight and fresh air; avoiding excessive electromagnetic radiation; minimizing toxic forms of light (such as blue light from electronic screens); spending time in nature; having positive relationships; working on processing and clearing trauma; practicing forgiveness; feeling emotions rather than suppressing them; setting appropriate boundaries in relationships; laughing; following passions and joy; experiencing gratitude; being authentic; engaging in centering practices like meditation or breathing exercises; feeling a strong spiritual connection; discovering and following one’s “soul  purpose”; giving, receiving, and embodying love; and so on.7 Maintaining good health might be much simpler than we’ve been led to believe by a pharmaceutical-dominated paradigm. These basic practices, which are empowering and largely inexpensive, enable independence from the overarching societal power structure. Personal sovereignty isn’t possible without taking the reins over one’s own health.

On a collective level, this is an essential point. We saw during the COVID-19 era that a “crisis” can be used as a pretext for taking citizens’ rights away. What better way to control the global population than to bring about massive amounts of health-related fear—even for imaginary causes—wherein the only solution is the remedy provided by the authorities. The weaponization of fear around climate change has been taking on a similar quality.8

In fact, both are central pieces of the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset”—which was formally announced in June 2020 by Klaus Schwab and then–Prince Charles, and was described, in detail, in Schwab and Thierry Malleret’s July 2020 book COVID-19: The Great Reset. As discussed in my book An End to the Upside Down Reset (2023), COVID-19 presented an opportunity to reset all aspects of society in a manner that a small number of people consider to be ideal. Perhaps the most significant point about the Great Reset is that it’s not an agenda that emphasizes liberty or human flourishing; rather, it’s much more focused on limiting freedom under the guise of “compassion.” Thus, we are currently living through an attempted reshaping of society, and medicine is one of the key levers that’s being used to usher it in.

As I’ve often contended, these matters extend beyond physical concerns; they are part of what appears to be a “spiritual war.” One might wonder if the corrupt dynamics of the medical-industrial complex trace their roots to nonphysical forces of evil—the ultimate “string-pullers,” invisible to our ordinary perceptual abilities. Such forces are drawn to power, and they seem to thrive off of the suffering of others; perhaps they even feed off of negative energy. Thus, the notions of eugenics and depopulation—in other words, culling the population like cattle—doesn’t seem like a stretch. A  medical system that’s ostensibly supposed to save people, but in fact ends up harming them, is the perfect instrument for such an objective. And furthermore, a weakened and unhealthy populace is much easier to control than a strong and healthy one.

Even transhumanism—merging humans with artificial intelligence and altering our natural form—is often being promoted. The spiritual impact of such activities on the bodily vessel might be more hazardous than scientists currently acknowledge.

On a related note, in 1917 the mystic Rudolf Steiner foresaw the following:

The time will come—and it may not be far off—when…people will say: It is pathological for people to even think in terms of spirit and soul. “Sound” people will speak of nothing but the body. It will be considered a sign of illness for anyone to arrive at the idea of any such thing as a spirit or a soul….The soul will be made nonexistent with the aid of a drug. Taking a “sound point of view,” people will invent a vaccine to influence the organism as early as possible, preferably as soon as it is born, so that this human body never even gets the idea that there is a soul and a spirit….

I have told you that the spirits of darkness are going to inspire their human hosts, in whom they will be dwelling, to find a vaccine that will drive all inclination towards spirituality out of people’s souls when they are very young.9 [emphasis added]

The dystopian books Brave New World and 1984 no longer seem like fictional possibilities for our future—and from a metaphysical perspective, such enslavement could have even greater consequences than we know.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has openly discussed a “next pandemic.”10 Future global health scares seem inevitable, and COVID-19 showed us that the world can be shut down in an instant if the authority figures choose to do so. People’s livelihoods can be determined on  the basis of whether they take an experimental injection or not. A “positive” result on an unreliable test can lead to a mandatory quarantine sentence. Quarantine camps were even built as a result of COVID-19.11

Therefore, with such high stakes, discernment is essential; our ability to identify “wolves in sheep’s clothing” needs to be sharp. A big piece of that is seeing through the dangers and falsities of the allopathic system, upon which many control mechanisms in society are based. That entails breaking out of the hypnotic spell of conditioned belief systems and engaging in independent, critical thinking rather than parroting the opinions of “experts.” From a higher perspective, this process could be viewed as “evolutionary”: in order for us to transcend the darkness of our world, we must be able to accurately perceive deception and navigate accordingly. We must learn to see through “false light.” Therefore, the evil forces within the spiritual war either stimulate our growth and make us stronger (if we are able to catch on); or, if we don’t, they’ll consume us.

During his near-death experiences decades ago, Dannion Brinkley, the author of Saved by the Light (1994), was shown hints about our society’s future. As he summarizes the message in a 2023 interview: “I’ve been saying this for forty-eight years: the battle of humanity will be fought in health care.”12 [emphasis added]

The question then arises: How should we approach this battle? Thomas Friese provides sound guidance in his 2013 preface to Ernst Jünger’s The Forest Passage (1951). May these words echo in our consciousness as we navigate the treacherous waters ahead:

The forces seeking to exploit man today are but the latest incarnations of forces that have threatened individual freedom throughout history….

While [an individual’s journey to freedom] may bring collateral benefits for society, in particular for other individuals, it does not aim primarily at world-improvement: the collective, as a whole, is essentially beyond redemption, a priori a lost cause. It is only individuals,…rebels  within society, that can hope, as exceptions, to escape the coercion, to “save their own souls.” The…rebel[s] [battle] the Leviathan not in the hopes of defeating it—for it eventually collapses under its own enormous weight—though [they] may promote this inevitable demise by inflicting strategic damage on it, and [they] can already help define and introduce the seeds of new freedoms for a post-Leviathan world. Rather, the… rebel[s] [have] two other immediate motivations in the here and now: first, to save [themselves]…and second, and not unrelated, to obey [their] conscience…which feels natural concern for its fellow human beings.13

An End to UpsideDown Medicine

Contagion, Viruses, and Vaccines—and Why Consciousness Is Needed for a New Paradigm of Health

Mark Gober

Psychological Hurdles


In addition to headwinds posed by the medical establishment, the general public’s psychology serves as a barrier to a new medical paradigm. More specifically, the way people think often anchors them toward the prevailing and engrained belief systems.

So, before embarking on a journey to poke holes in the allopathic model, it’s first important to appropriately orient one’s mindset. This exercise aims to reduce the cognitive dissonance—emotional discomfort—that might accompany forthcoming discussions in this book.

1. Anomalies matter. An anomaly is something that doesn’t fit a worldview. It is an exception to the rule.36 Encountering even a single anomaly is problematic because it implies that the “rule” is incorrect, and a new one is needed. For instance, in 1900, one of the leading authorities in science, Lord Kelvin, declared that physics had largely figured things out, but there were two pesky “clouds”—unsolved mysteries—that remained. Upon further study, those clouds emerged into what are now known as relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Two anomalies resulted in drastic changes in scientific thinking.372. Correlation does not imply causation. If someone observes firefighters at the scene of a fire, there are multiple possible explanations. Without having any background knowledge, one might assume that the firefighters caused the fire. Alternatively, one might believe that the fire has a mystical ability to manifest humans out of thin air, so the firefighters are a by-product of the fire itself.38 Of course, these explanations miss the correct reason, which is that firefighters appeared on the scene in response to the fire. The point here is that when two things are related to one another, or if they appear at the same place and at the same time, the relationship between those things needs to be explored carefully. That is, the correlation of  those things doesn’t automatically imply that one caused the other. All possibilities need to be considered in order to accurately explain the relationship.

This point is critical in the exercise of uncovering the causes of illness. For instance, if people get sick in the same place around the same time, one can’t automatically conclude that a contagious virus or bacteria caused it. Maybe the sick people were exposed to a common environmental toxin; or consumed food or water that contained toxins; or were exposed to a similar form of radiation or a dangerous electromagnetic field; or were affected by a change in seasons, humidity, temperature, or barometric pressure; or they were under similar emotional distress; or they were exposed to some other factor, or factors, that could collectively contribute to illness. Critical thinking and open-mindedness are thus essential in the process of exploring causation.

3. Presuppositions often go unacknowledged. A presupposition is an assumption that underlies a belief system. If presuppositions aren’t examined, people end up believing things without knowing why they believe those things—other than “someone told me this was true.” Consider the six-feet-social-distancing requirement that dominated policy around the world during the COVID-19 era. In 2021, former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb revealed to CBS that the rule was “arbitrary.”39 Yet, how many people religiously followed the rule, trusting that it would save lives because people on television said so? The belief that “it must be true because an expert said it” is a logical fallacy known as “appeal to authority.” Cultlike superstitions are the result.

4. Science is an approach, not a religion. These days, the term science has come to refer to “anything that a mainstream scientist or doctor says.” Anthony Fauci, MD, a leading public medical figure in the United States, even declared in 2021 that attacks on him are “attacks on  science.”40 In reality, the scientific method is supposed to be an approach that welcomes endless challenges, whereas religious dogma is not allowed to be questioned. The institution of “science,” ironically, has become its own religion.

5. Consensus does not always mean “truth.” There is often a belief that if the majority of authority figures believe something, then it must be true—as if it’s not possible that so many prominent people could be wrong. Author Michael Crichton explained why this is such a problematic approach:

I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had….Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.41What’s to Come in This Book

With this contextual backdrop, I will move into an examination of flawed allopathic assumptions. Although I will discuss potential alternatives, they are presented in a hypothetical manner, and they need to be studied further.

 Said another way, the ideas I discuss in this book should not be taken as definitive proof of anything. But, taken together, the pieces of evidence suggest that the allopathic approach is misguided—not just a little bit misguided, but severely misguided. That means we need to be looking for new models if we want to achieve better health. Therefore, it’s necessary to consider ideas that are far outside of conventional thinking. And given how unhealthy modern society is, such a radical exercise is warranted.

Thus, the examination of the medical system in this book aspires to “start from scratch”—as if we know nothing about medicine and are exploring health and disease for the very first time. That entails asking the question: “How is it that we know the things we think we know? And how certain are we of those things?”

Keeping that approach in mind, in part I of this book I explore why allopathic assumptions need to be challenged. The first exploration, in chapter 1, takes a fresh look at HIV/AIDS. This serves as a template for later discussions about other diseases. Viruses—and how they are identified and “isolated”—are explored in chapter 2. The discussion walks through potential flaws built into the field of virology itself. Chapter 3 then sets the stage for a reevaluation of all allegedly infectious diseases by examining the logic needed to establish a cause of disease. That framework provides a backdrop with which to examine a variety of conditions commonly believed to be infectious, including polio, SARS, Spanish flu, avian flu, smallpox, chicken pox, hepatitis, rabies, and the Black Death (chapter 4). In the process of reviewing these illnesses, many questions about vaccines arise, which leads to a deeper analysis of their safety in chapter 5.

An End to UpsideDown Medicine

Contagion, Viruses, and Vaccines—and Why Consciousness Is Needed for a New Paradigm of Health

Mark Gober

In part II, I explore consciousness and why it’s a necessary component of a comprehensive medical model. In chapter 6, I dive into the nature of reality—and the human body’s place in it—which presents a fundamental challenge to allopathic beliefs. The resulting framework makes way for a discussion about consciousness, health, and disease in chapter 7. The topics covered are so far outside of traditional thinking that they make modern medicine seem highly primitive.

I conclude this book with a discussion of what’s at stake for all of us, in terms of our individual and collective freedom. The implications are immense.

Dr. Sheldrake and Wikipedia "credibility"

 Why are so many articles on these phenomena (such as Wikipedia articles) so negative?

A number of organizations are openly hostile to claims of the paranormal. One has to wonder if their sentiments have played a role on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

One such organization is the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). CSI’s Lee Nisbet, who holds a PhD in philosophy, said of paranormal phenomena: “We feel it is the duty of the scientific community to show that these beliefs are utterly screwball.” One of CSI’s former co-chairs of its “Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal” resigned because he felt that “they sought to debunk rather than scientifically examine.”18

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has been a target of criticism from skeptics and speculates that a group called “Guerilla Skepticism” is contributing to negativity around the paranormal on Wikipedia. As Dr. Sheldrake states in his blog post Wikipedia Under Threat:

Wikipedia is a wonderful invention. But precisely because it’s so trusted and convenient, people with their own agendas keep  trying to take it over. Editing wars are common.…Everyone knows that there are opposing views on politics and religion, and many people recognise a biased account when they see it. But in the realm of science, things are different. Most people have no scientific expertise and believe that science is objective. Their trust is now being abused systematically by a highly motivated group of activists called Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia.

Skepticism is a normal, healthy attitude of doubt. Unfortunately it can also be used as a weapon to attack opponents. In scientific and medical contexts, organized skepticism is a crusade to propagate scientific materialism.…Most materialists believe that the mind is nothing more than the physical activity of the brain, psychic phenomena are illusory, and complementary and alternative medical systems are fraudulent, or at best produce placebo effects. . . . Several advocacy organizations promote this materialist ideology in the media and in educational institutions. The largest and best-funded is the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), which publishes The Skeptical Inquirer magazine. The Guerrilla Skeptics have carried the crusading zeal of organized skepticism into the realm of Wikipedia, and use it as a soapbox to propagate their beliefs.

This summer…a commando squad of skeptics captured the Wikipedia page about me. They have occupied and controlled it ever since, rewriting my biography with as much negative bias as possible, to the point of defamation.…The Guerrilla Skeptics are well trained, highly motivated, have an ideological agenda, and operate in teams, contrary to Wikipedia rules. The mastermind behind this organization is Susan Gerbik. She explains how her teams work in a training video. She now has over 90 guerrillas operating in 17 different languages. The teams are coordinated through secret Facebook pages. They check the credentials of new recruits to avoid infiltration. Their aim is to control information, and Ms. Gerbik glories in the power that she and her warriors wield. They have already seized control of many Wikipedia pages, deleted entries on subjects they disapprove of, and boosted the biographies of atheists.

 As the Guerrilla Skeptics have demonstrated, Wikipedia can easily be subverted by determined groups of activists, despite its well-intentioned policies and mediation procedures. Perhaps one solution would be for experienced editors to visit the talk pages of sites where editing wars are taking place, rather like UN Peacekeeping Forces, and try to re-establish a neutral point of view. But this would not help in cases where there are no editors to oppose the Guerrilla Skeptics, or where they have been silenced.

If nothing is done, Wikipedia will lose its credibility, and its financial backers will withdraw their support. I hope the noble aims of Wikipedia will prevail.19

If what Dr. Sheldrake describes is truly happening, then we might (in part) understand why the reality of the “paranormal” has struggled to gain momentum. The casual researcher doesn’t have time to dig into the details. If you Google a topic and the first thing that comes up is a Wikipedia article saying it’s fraudulent, you might stop your search then and there.


An End to Upside Down Thinking

Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life

Mark Gober

Daniel Amneus: The man’s primary contribution to marriage is his paycheck, the woman’s is her sexual loyalty.

 

Father Gregory Boyle, former director of Dolores Mission in the Los Angeles barrio, laments that “The week before Christmas, I had to bury the 40th young person killed by what is still a plague in my Eastside community. I’ve grown weary of saying that gangbanging is the urban poor’s version of teen-age suicide….Poor, unemployed youth are hard-pressed to conjure up images of themselves as productive and purposeful adults sometime in their future.”1

Father Boyle also describes the girls’ problem—which is not gangbanging but sexual promiscuity:

The 15-year-old girl, bounding ecstatically into my office with the news of her pregnancy, explains, “I just want to have a kid before I die.” She says this not because she’s been diagnosed as having a terminal illness, but because she lives in my community—a place of early death and where the young lack the imagination to see something better.

Father Boyle is a little lacking in imagination himself, for he supposes that the familiar litany about poverty, racism and discrimination points to the real problem. He fails to see the causal connection between the boy who gets himself killed and the girl who pretends to be “ecstatic” over becoming pregnant “before I die.” The behavior of each is routine in a matriarchy where neither males nor females can hope for stable families—because females insist on controlling their own sexuality rather than sharing it with husbands, and because the resulting male amotivation makes males poor marriage material. The community he describes is one where social arrangements do not chain women so that men can depend on having families with them. The girl supposes that turning to sexual promiscuity is an affirmation of life, in contrast to the boys’ choice of death. But her words “before I die” show that her ecstasy is a pretense and that her offspring will recycle the same matriarchal pattern of female promiscuity resulting in male violence. Without stable families there is reduced hope for both boys and girls. The girl brings a fatherless child into the world because she inhabits a matriarchy where females control their own sexuality and can deny males families. “One does not move freely and joyously ahead,” says Ms. Friedan, “if one is always torn by conflicts and guilts, nor if one feels like a freak in a man’s world, if one is always walking a tightrope between being a good wife and mother and fulfilling one’s commitment to society….”2  Fact is, society’s primary demand of women is that they accept the responsibility of being good wives and mothers, that they perform their maternal functions—the most important functions of society—with competence. Ms. Friedan wants to minimize the importance of these functions while maximizing the far less important goal of becoming an elitist career woman, which she supposes means “fulfilling one’s commitment to society”—and in probable consequence becoming a poorer wife and mother, certainly more divorce-prone.

“Men,” says Dr. Popenoe, “need cultural pressure to stay engaged with their children, and that cultural pressure has long been called marriage….Currently marriage is an institution that is quietly fading away….[A] man’s chances of staying with the mother are considerably lower when he is not formally married. We should increase social, cultural, and economic supports to help couples stay married.”3 He should have added “legal support.” A man’s assurance that he will have custody of his children will make the mother’s chances of staying with the father higher—and will make his chances of staying with the mother higher, for he will not wish to place himself in the situation of today’s single mothers.

“I would warn you,” says Ms. Friedan,

that those societies where women are most removed from the full action of the mainstream are those where sex is considered dirty and where violence breeds.

By “women” Ms. Friedan means middle-class, educated white women, by “full action of the mainstream” she means elitist careers where women are economically independent and, not incidentally, free to follow a liberated matriarchal lifestyle and engage in adulterous adventures—to “do bad and feel good.” For lower-class inner city black women who are two generations in advance of their white sisters down the slippery slope into matriarchy, this lifestyle has developed into a virtually complete rejection of the patriarchal family, to an illegitimacy rate verging towards 80 percent and a male demoralization and amotivation which traps one-third of young black males in the criminal justice system. It does not serve the purposes of Ms. Friedan’s propaganda to say what she knows as well as the rest of us, that it is here in the matriarchy that real violence breeds. “Where stable family life has been the norm for men and boys,” says David Courtwright, “violence and disorder have diminished. That was one important reason why, during the mid-twentieth century marriage boom [=the era of the feminine mystique, when women were “most removed from the full action of the mainstream”], violent death rates showed a sustained decline.”4

Ms. Friedan continues:

If we confront the real conditions that oppress men now as well as women and translate our rage into action, then and only then will sex really be liberated to be an active joy and a receiving joy for women and for men, when we are both really free to be all we can be.5

Everyone who reads the newspapers knows that the high crime areas are those where females are sexually de-regulated, “liberated,” “unchained,” and where men are denied a family role. “The rage women have so long taken out on themselves, on their own bodies, and covertly on their husbands and children, is exploding now,” says Ms. Friedan.6 Men prefer this rage to be bottled up rather than “exploding now.” Automatic mother custody provides a major motive for the explosions of divorce and adultery, by which feminists de-regulate themselves. The “rage” they affect to justify this de-regulation is mostly spurious—which is why, as I explain on page 215 “extreme cruelty” (the legal fiction which embarrassed even judges and lawyers) had to be replaced by No Fault. Nothing would do more to prevent the explosion than automatic father custody. Nothing would do more to make divorce court judges behave themselves than letting them know they are not paid salaries to facilitate the explosion of women’s rage in divorce actions which displace fathers.

Women, like men, must accept regulation if children are to have fathers and grow up in two-parent homes. Father custody is the most humane way of imposing this regulation, far more humane than gynaecia, harems, chadors, clitoridectomies, foot-binding, suttee. Father custody would make wives see the benefits they receive, those required by Briffault’s Law—a family, children, a home, the father’s paycheck, the higher status conferred by patriarchy. Mother custody with equal division of the property—the “assets of the marriage after there is no marriage”—is the big temptation which the legal system dangles before the wife—since “children belong with their mother.” It is this sanctity of motherhood which transforms “marriage in contemplation of divorce” into solid cash.

The real sanctity of motherhood, and of wifehood, and of family, was understood by Queen Victoria’s prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli:

“The nation is represented by a family, the royal family; and if that family is educated with a sense of responsibility and a sense of public duty, it is difficult to exaggerate the salutary effect they may exercise over the nation.”

The feminist revolution emphasizes two things: (1) male reproductive marginality; (2) women’s reluctance to de-marginalize the male by allowing him to share in reproduction. It fails to emphasize the need for the legal system to enforce the marriage contract.

This betrayal of marriage and the family by the legal system is what has permitted the feminist revolution and the consequences noted on pages 12ff.

The solution is obvious: father custody. “It is [Princess Diana’s] greatest concern,” wrote her biographer Andrew Morton, “that her children will be taken away from her.7 If Diana had really known this would happen all would have been well. She would have known that it was Charles who gave her children, her royal status, her wealth, her admired situation in British society as one of the most glamorous women in the world. He did not make her “irrational, unreasonable and hysterical…her behavior …endangering the future of her marriage, the country and the monarchy itself.”8

With automatic mother custody, the “enormous potential, and natural, counterforce” against regulation came into play. Chaucer’s Wyf of Bath told us that what women want most is mastery over their husbands. Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs tell us “The clitorally aware woman is sexually voracious to the point of being a threat to the social order.”9 This is partly because much of [her] private dissatisfaction centered on marital sex, which fell short of being a glowing payoff for a life of submersion in domestic detail. At the same time, new opportunities were opening up for women. As jobs for women proliferated, young single women crowded into the major cities, and began to enlarge the gap between girlhood and marriage, filling it with careers, romances, and—what was distinctly new—casual sexual adventures.

Female promiscuity before marriage, female adultery within marriage10 and the appalling divorce rate, mostly female initiated, all work to destroy families and undermine men’s desire for them and for legitimate children. The “distinctly new…casual sexual adventures” made possible by female economic emancipation are what make father custody especially needed today. The only means of restoring what marriage has to offer males is for society to guarantee men custody of their children regardless of female sexual irresponsibility. “The more decisively sex can be uncoupled from reproduction, through abortion and contraception,” say Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs, “the more chance women have to approach it lightly and as equal claimants of pleasure….[S]ex has been overly burdened with oppressive ‘meanings,’ and especially for women.”11

Uncoupling sex from reproduction is an aim incompatible with civilized society, which must make reproduction its most serious business, and must support the two-parent family by supporting the father’s role. Women who wish to uncouple sex from reproduction—to be promiscuous—must be prevented from claiming custody of children procreated within marriage.

A woman’s claimed right to control her own sexuality has two corollaries: the man’s right to control his own paycheck and his obligation not to let it be used for alimony and child support payments to subsidize the placing of his children in the female kinship system. The primary purpose of marriage and of patriarchal society is to allow children to have fathers. They can have mothers—and the mess described on pages 12ff.–without patriarchy. The primary purpose of the feminist revolution is to deprive children of fathers (though not of their paychecks), thus releasing women from sexual regulation.

The main means for bringing about this result, simplicity itself, is indicated by Ms. Heyn. “The original immutable marriage contract,” she says, “a commitment to permanence, has shifted to a commitment to the quality of the relationship—a mutable phenomenon if there ever was one—so if one partner or other decides the quality has diminished sufficiently, all the court has to do is simply agree and the marriage is over.”12 And Mom walks away with the kids. So the marriage contract is no contract at all.

A University of Chicago study concludes that “marriage in the U.S. is a “weakened and declining institution” because “women are getting less and less out of it.”13 The opposite is true of divorce, because women are getting more and more out of it—or expecting to, an expectation encouraged by judges and politicians (“We will find you. We will make you pay.”) The way to make marriage deliver more is to have divorce deliver less.

Feminist Marilyn French repeats the feminist party line when she says “[W]omen choosing to raise their children alone is not a social problem unless it is accompanied by severe poverty,”14 but the facts disprove her. Divorce and single motherhood are unhealthful for children. “Marriage,” says Nicholas Eberstadt of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, “is a far more powerful predictor of infant mortality than money: If the mother is unmarried, the risk of death to her infant more than doubled….Despite the well-established link between education and infant health, a baby born to a college educated unwed mother is far more likely to die than a baby born to married high school dropouts.15 Similarly with the other problems mentioned on pages 12ff.

Lesbian feminist Laura Benkov says of her fellow lesbian feminist Adrienne Rich that she “saw the institution of motherhood as inextricably bound to the institution of heterosexuality and the oppression of women”:

She pointedly questioned the nature of motherhood in our society. What ideas about mothering do women bring to the experience of raising children? How do these ideas affect family relationships? Where do these ideas come from? And most important of all, What other possible ways of constructing motherhood are available? Describing time spent alone with her three young sons, she wrote:

[W]e fell into what I felt to be a delicious and sinful rhythm. It was a spell of unusually hot, clear weather, and we ate nearly all our meals outdoors, hand to mouth; we lived half naked, stayed up to watch bats and stars and fireflies, read and told stories, slept late. I watched their slender, little-boys’ bodies grow brown, we washed in water warm from the garden hose lying in the sun, we lived like castaways on some island of mothers and children. At night they fell asleep without a murmur and I stayed up reading and writing as when a student, till the early morning hours. I remember thinking: This is what living with children could be—without school hours, fixed routines, naps, the conflict of being both mother and wife with no room for being simply myself….We were conspirators, outlaws from the institution of motherhood; I felt enormously in charge of my life.16

The passage shows how many women feel about the patriarchal system. She got rid of her husband; she has economic independence; she is de-regulated. And she likes it that way. So do many women. Feminist Kate Chopin describes the sadness and exhilaration of a woman who hears that her husband has died in a railroad wreck: “She will miss him, but loves her freedom more.”17 This is the matriarchal pattern, that of Ms. Boulding’s Indian squaw, that of the ghetto matriarch. Ms. Rich had divorced her husband, deprived him of his children and the poor man, driven to despair, killed himself. She was liberated; he was dead, a small price, we are to suppose, for Ms. Rich’s freedom to be “enormously in charge of my life” and having custody of her three sons, who, however, will not wish to live the kind of life their father led, as Marcia Clark’s sons and tens of millions of other sons living in female headed households will not wish to live the kid of life their fathers led—just as Ms. Coontz’s and Ms. Breines’s and Ms. Debold’s and Ms. Wilson’s and Ms. Malave’s girls did not wish to lead the kind of life their mothers led. Females, clearly, are chafed by patriarchal marriage; males have hitherto had to depend on it if they want to have families, but they are coming to realize, as Adrienne Rich’s husband and Marcia Clark’s husband came to realize, that they can no longer depend on it:

if their wives choose to drag them into the divorce court the judge will deprive them of their children and the role on which they hoped to build their lives.

Ms. Benkov’s comment on Rich’s thinking is this:

As an “outlaw from the institution of motherhood,” Rich discovered the pleasure of being in charge of her own life and the joy of being able to be herself along with her children, who also were able to be themselves. Noting these feelings as extraordinary, she thought about how her usual experience of mothering made her feel less in control of her life. She recognized that this loss of control was not a necessary corollary of motherhood but rather a direct consequence of particular societal expectations of mothers—expectations quintessentially linked to women’s oppression…. When a mother extricates herself from the experience of oppression and begins to value her capacity to act from a strong sense of herself, both she and her children can thrive.18

This is code language for getting rid of the father and returning to the female kinship system, where Mom runs things and Dad is a boyfriend or an exile—or in this case a cadaver. Ms. Rich extricates herself from “the experience of oppression” and “both she and her children can thrive.” Much of the thriving of the single mother is done in the “feminization of poverty”19 and “her children” are eight times more likely to become delinquents. The one-third of fatherless ghetto males who do their thriving in prison, jail, on probation or parole are being joined by increasing numbers of fatherless whites, “the growing white underclass.”

How the fatherless male children of the matriarchal ghettos will thrive when they grow up is indicated by the following from the Los Angeles Times for 5 October, 1995:

Nearly one in three African American men in their 20s is in jail, prison, on probation or parole—a sharp increase over the approximately 25% of five years ago, a study concluded Wednesday….African American women in their 20s showed the greatest jump of all demographic groups under criminal justice supervision—up 78% from 1989 to 1994….What has changed in recent years is the age composition of those males engaged in violent crime, particularly with a substantial and disturbing increase in the murder rate of young black men since the mid-1980s.

This is the way things drift when Mom is “enormously in charge of her life” and “extricated from oppression,” sexually de-regulated, or “unchained.” The crucial lack is male motivation. Formerly this motivation was created by women’s acceptance of sexual law-and-order— including the “feminine mystique,” the most important feature of the feminine mystique being the female chastity which made families possible. Women’s rejection of sexual regulation is destroying it. Women’s former acceptance of patriarchy gave men a role, gave them families, and society thrived. Ms. Benkov would like us to suppose that women and children thrive in the female kinship system, but the ghettos, the areas of feminized poverty, are the least thriving parts of society.

It was the great discovery of Ms. Friedan that women hated this thriving patriarchal society. Also girls, as signified by Ms. Breines’s title, Young, White and Miserable, where young females talk like this:

[I]t was clear to me…I did not want my life to be anything like my mother’s life!…None of us wanted to do any of the things our mothers did—nor anything the way they did it—during the postwar years.20

They didn’t want to live as their mothers did during the era of the Feminine Mystique. They wanted to live like the black girls whose lifestyle elicits the admiration of Debold, Wilson and Malave:

[W]ithin segments of the African-American community, mothers are granted respect and authority that, by and large, non-African-American mothers are not.21

This confuses authority and power . A wife may have unlimited power over her husband and be able to get him to do anything she wishes, yet have no authority—and if she tries to exercise authority she loses her power. Black men are denied authority in order that black women may be promiscuous. This is why the ghettos are “hostile and dangerous”—the danger coming from other blacks. Debold, Wilson and Malave would like to reduce white society to the same matriarchal pattern so that white women can enjoy the same liberation as these admired black women. This is the “revolution” of their title.

White mothers have the power to spend three-quarters of their husbands’ paychecks, in part because they acknowledge male authority. The black mothers have both authority and power—but they spend a smaller paycheck. The white mothers give up authority to gain power and they spend three-quarters of a larger paycheck.

To say that “women compete against each other” is to say men have bargaining power, something to offer women, this being their income and status, things which lift a society out of matriarchy and civilize it. Such men are worth competing for, just as attractive and chaste women are worth competing for. When such men and women find each other they create stable families and well-behaved, high-achieving children. It ought to be the object of social policy to get such people together to create such children. Debold, Wilson and Malave don’t want women to compete with each other, but a society in which women think men aren’t worth competing for would be a society in which men are low achievers or anti-social, like many men in the ghettos, whose women Debold, Wilson and Malave wish white girls to imitate. It would be a society in which most women would be worth competing for only on the shallowest basis, for their desirability as partners in short-term, unmeaningful relationships.

The patriarchal culture they wish to undermine is condemned as “sexist.” It is sex-centered in the sense that it puts sex to work for the most worthwhile and long-term goals, those related to the family, the future and the overall good of society. Also the past, for in such societies ancestors are revered. Where there is no such regard for the past there will be little regard for the future or concern for those united by family ties.

Feminist sociologist Stephanie Coontz was quoted on page 172 as complaining that the double standard increases the number of prostitutes. The double standard is part of the patriarchal idea, a means of motivating males to support families, of elevating the status of chaste women deemed to be suitable wives, and lowering the status of unchaste women, those for whom Ms. Coontz is concerned. Feminists would like to obliterate the distinction between good and bad women. Women who have premarital sex have an eighty percent higher divorce rate. Formerly they would have been condemned as bad women and unsuitable marriage material. Now the feminist revolution considers such condemnation to be “sexist.” Thus a correspondent to Ann Landers:

DEAR ANN: I read those 12 guidelines to help sons choose a mate, and I think some of them are clearly sexist. No. 3, for example, says to leave her alone if “she has sex with you on the first date.” Well, if she had sex, so did he.

The same goes for the one that says to leave her alone if “she can get her pantyhose off in less than five seconds. It means she has had lots of practice.” If the man has had enough experience to set a time limit, he, too, has had “too much experience.”…

I have no beef with the man’s warning signals, but why didn’t you point out that some of these red flags also reflected poorly on men? It is considered perfectly OK for men to have one-night stands, get drunk and want sex on the first date, but women who do this are called tramps. It’s time men were held to the same standard.

Ann Landers’ reply is naive—“Thanks for nailing those male chauvinist attitudes.” The man’s primary contribution to marriage is his paycheck, the woman’s is her sexual loyalty.

If what she offers is accompanied by the threat of an eighty percent greater divorce rate, and if the legal system automatically gives her custody of his children he is a ruddy fool not to consider the woman poor marriage material. And telling women their unchastity makes them no less attractive as potential wives is no favor to women (or men). The good new life as seen by Ann Landers is that previously described by Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs, where young single women crowd into the cities in search of sexual adventures.

FATHERS AND BOYFRIENDS

Patriarchy separates the “good” women, who delay sex, from the bad ones, the madonnas from the whores, the women who are willing to give men families from the women who are willing to give them one-night stands. Men and women who think that our divorce rate and illegitimacy rate are unconscionably high ought to see that these rates are the result of the sexual revolution which tries to obliterate the distinction between good and bad women, between legitimate and illegitimate children, between fathers and boyfriends—and the result of the legal system’s perverse promotion of the female kinship system, of which bad women are the principal “beneficiaries.”

Ms. Friedan speaks of women’s “inalienable” right to control their own bodies—regardless of a marriage contract. The meaningfulness and enforceability of that contract are essential to the patriarchal system and since the law has now come around to the feminist view and refuses to enforce it, fathers must remove discretion from the legal system and take custody of their own children. The legal system will not support the family and accordingly it is necessary to remove all discretion from it and make father custody automatic and mandatory. The present situation is too threatening to men—and children and good women. Men once trusted women’s commitment to the contract and the legal system’s commitment to enforce it. Neither commitment is now taken seriously. Ms. Friedan speaks for millions of women when she says woman’s right to disregard it is “inalienable.” Judge Noland speaks for most judges when he says human reproduction ought to be modeled on that of cattle. It is no wonder so many men are afraid of marriage, afraid of judges willing to do the bidding of disloyal wives—judges whose weakness encourages wives to be disloyal.”

The maintenance of the distinction between good and bad women (and men) is essential to the patriarchal system, to maintaining family stability and the procreation of legitimate children. The breakdown of this distinction is essential to the feminist program. Feminists wish to trivialize this breakdown. Ms. Coontz says: “Much of the modern sexual revolution consists merely of a decline in the double standard, with girls adopting sexual behaviors that were pioneered much earlier by boys.”22 “Pioneered” suggests progress—that the girls are catching up to a good thing already enjoyed by the boys. Ms. Coontz, however, realizes the magnitude of the sexual revolution:

Much of the new family topography is permanent. It is the result of a major realignment of subterranean forces, much like plate tectonics and continental drift. Women will never again spend the bulk of their lives at home. Sex and reproduction are no longer part of the same land mass, and no amount of pushing and shoving can force them into a single continent again.23 Sex and reproduction are no longer part of the same land mass for liberated women, for squaws on Indian reservations, for ghetto matriarchs like Rosa Lee, for women who don’t need men—for women living in the female kinship system. But suppose men woke up to the realization that for them, since they need the male kinship system which exploits male aggression and creates male motivation—for them sex and reproduction must be part of the same land mass because sex and reproduction and work and creativity and responsibility and family life are all interconnected and the loss of their children is the loss of everything. Men must, if they are not to lose everything, be assured of the custody of their children and must refuse to share their paychecks with women who discard the double standard which enables men to participate as equals in reproduction.

“New family patterns,” says Ms. Coontz, “are the result of pluralism, increased tolerance, and the growth of informed choice.”24 These bad things are thus explained by Ann Landers: “Many more women are in the workplace. They have more visibility, more mobility, more temptations and greater economic independence….Is the trend toward infidelity going to change? I don’t see how. Cheating on spouses is now an equal-opportunity sport.”25

Equal opportunity but unequal damage, since the woman’s sexual loyalty to the man is of greater importance to him than is his sexual loyalty to her. Her sexual loyalty is her primary contribution to marriage, comparable only to her husband’s economic loyalty. This breaking down of patriarchy seems natural to women because it is natural, because patriarchy itself is artificial, dependent on the stability of fatherhood. Men and children must have the patriarchal family—and men must not be jollied into subsidizing its deadly enemy, the female-headed matriline, with AFDC and child support money.

“Black girls,” says feminist Marie Richmond-Abbott,

who are less eager to marry, show higher self-esteem, more independence, and much less fear of success than do white girls….The woman may be reluctant to be tied to a man she feels is not worth the restrictions. He may be reluctant to take on the role of provider, particularly if he feels that he will not be able to fulfill it well. 26

They have high unemployment because they lack the motivation provided by families. The “strong family connections” of black girls described by Debold, Wilson and Malave are not family ties at all, but matriarchal ties. Few of these girls have fathers. The “fewer resources” and the loss of “economic security” are the price they pay for living in the matriarchy and being able to avoid collision with “the wall” of patriarchy—being able to escape patriarchal socialization.

Debold, Wilson and Malave quote Beverly Jean Smith, an African-American educator: “When I read the psychological research about mother-daughter relationships, mostly what strikes me is daughters’ pain, anger, hate, rejection, fear and struggle to find self….This way of speaking about the mother-daughter relationship runs counter to my experience.”

In fact, Smith tells us, what research there is suggests stronger connections between African-American mothers and daughters: “A decisive 94.5 percent expressed respect for their mothers in terms of strength, honesty, ability to overcome difficulties and ability to survive.”27

This female solidarity explains why so many of them live in ghettos:

At the edge of adolescence every girl collides with the wall of the culture. But this wall is not simply made of the power relations between women and men. There are other bricks in the wall: racism, classism, homophobia, and bias against persons with disabilities.

“Earning all the stuff” enables men to have families. Girls don’t need to earn all the stuff, as boys must if they are to find wives. It is earned, not a gift. Patriarchy, let it be said again, is the system which creates a civilized male role, enabling males to claim their status in families by their achievement. Hence Arthur’s Education Fund, which enables Arthur to support a wife and children. This is why men earn more than women: they must and they know it. They know that ghettos result from men’s not earning more than women—and women not needing men.28 Briffault’s Law. Women earning as much as men would wreck the patriarchal system by making males superfluous and roleless.

According to William Murchison, Between 1983 and 1993 births to unwed mothers soared by more than 70%. This means that 6.3 million children under 18 lived last year with a never-married parent. The truly astounding thing, perhaps, is to look back three decades to 1960. How many children lived that year with a never-married parent? Just 243,000. Since that time, we have undergone social revolution.29

According to the Los Angeles Times, “Nearly 500,000 teen-agers have babies annually—the highest adolescent birthrate in the developed world.” About 90 percent of the federal welfare payouts go to fatherless families ”most often started with unwed teenage childbearing.”30

Many will turn to drugs to forget their problems. According to the Times, “African Americans and Latinos were found to constitute nearly 90% of offenders sentenced to state prison for drug possession.”

Children have to put up with father-deprivation in order that their Moms may be free to “thrive.” Boys must accept matriarchy and a high probability of rolelessness. Girls may like their freedom from sexual regulation but they too are trapped in the role of impoverished single motherhood, where they wonder where the men are.

Judith Wallerstein’s study has been cited, showing that only half of the male students she followed completed college, and that forty percent of the young men were drifting—on a downward educational course, out of school, unemployed. When so many of them have seen their fathers expelled from the homes they bought for their families, when they themselves face a sixty percent chance of divorce and the loss of their children and their role, they wonder why they should work as hard as their fathers and grandfathers did in the years after the war. Feminists now say “the ultra-domesticity of the 1950s was a historical aberration,”31 ultra-domesticity meaning that women accepted sexual regulation and the housewife role. It was the judge’s conviction that she (and not her husband) was fitted by nature for this role which gave her custody of the children. But many women—those for whom Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique—knew this domesticity to be an assigned role, unnatural, a “mask,” and hated it.

Of course feminists were right that the domesticity of the fifties was artificial. They have proved this by proving what is natural—the matriarchal lifestyle of the ghettos, the barrios, the Indian reservations, the Stone Age, the barnyard, the rain forest. This matriarchy is the natural pattern of human—and all animal—society when there are no artificial props for patriarchy. Automatic mother custody has enabled women to destroy the prosperity of millions of males by destroying the motivation which produced it. This motivation can be restored by automatic father custody and this motivation will restore the economy of which William Baumol said in those better days, “In our economy, by and large, the future can be left to take care of itself.”32

If you ask a man why he works at his job, he will bring out his wallet and show you pictures of his family. Males have lost confidence that a society with a sixty percent divorce rate wants them to be heads of families rather than providers for ex-families. This is what they hear when President Clinton tells ex-husbands “We will find you. We will make you pay.” It is what men hear when California ex-Governor Wilson says, “If you abandon your responsibility to your child…you forfeit the freedoms and opportunities that come with being a responsible citizen….We cannot and will not tolerate parents who walk away from their children.”33 He means men who have been deprived of their children. This is like stabbing a man in the back and accusing him of carrying a concealed weapon.

The troubles of fatherless boys have led to government programs to provide them with role models or mentors to replace their missing fathers. Governor Wilson dedicated $15 million for this purpose and hoped to expand the number of mentors from 70,000 to at least a million.

“Mentoring programs,” says the Los Angeles Times,

are based on the premise that many youth turn to the camaraderie of gangs or to destructive peers because they lack a role model to inspire their confidence and encourage responsible behavior….The biggest problem facing mentoring programs is finding adults willing to volunteer their time.34

There are millions of fathers willing to volunteer their time—which is why they got married. The Governor himself undertook to mentor a fatherless Sacramento boy “for at least an hour a week.” “I am convinced,” he says, “that unless a whole lot of us step forward…a lot of very decent kids are going to wind up making very tragic mistakes that hurt themselves and the people who love them and hurt society in a variety of ways. I think that an awful lot of kids are hungry for the kind of affection and the kind of attention that they don’t get and frequently can’t get.”

They find it difficult to get it from fathers thrown out of their homes. Governor Wilson imagined that an hour of his mentoring time once a week could replace a real father in a boy’s life. Why not instead guarantee the father’s role within the family by an assurance that if he undertakes to be a provider for his family he cannot be expelled from it?

Once again: men can end this foolishness by raising their consciousness. If men realized that they were primarily responsible to be fathers to their children, not sugar daddies to Mom, not willing handmaidens and servitors to the stupid judges who are wrecking over half of society’s families. The judges assume that fathers will accept the injustice they are handed more readily than mothers would, which is why they give mothers custody and victimize the fathers. (I’m repeating, but this needs repeating.) Suppose the fathers saw through this fakery and didn’t feel themselves obligated to “go ahead and pay anyway— they’re my kids and I love them.” Frederic Hayward has the right slant on this:

[It] sounds like a kidnapper’s demand: “I want money. It’s not ransom, because I don’t intend to return your child. But still, I’m running low on cash, so start sending me one-third of every pay check from now on.” My hunch is that most parents would reply: “You have some nerve asking me to subsidize your torture of me. If you can’t afford my child, return it.” A father who refuses this extortion, however, is just another Deadbeat Dad….

Imagine your child is kidnapped and you receive a ransom demand. You call the police, but they put you in jail for failing to pay the ransom. Their only concern, they tell you, is that the kidnapper not go on welfare. And insisting that what the child needs most from you is not your love, attention or a relationship but simply money, they cynically tell you that they’re looking out for your child’s “best interests.” How do you feel?35

Blaming the victim. There is virtual unanimity of support for the folly of wrecking families by expelling fathers and then holding them responsible for their own victimization.

“Reno Stepping Up Pursuit of Child-Support Delinquents,” says a Los Angeles Times headline:

Even her severest critics agree on this: More than any other U.S. attorney general in history, Janet Reno has gone to bat for children.36

Ms. Reno’s program for helping children is more mindlessness— making it easier to deprive them of fathers, making divorce more attractive to mothers, making marriage less attractive to men, encouraging judges to continue discriminating against males as they have been doing for over a century:

Under a recent Reno directive, the Justice Department is stepping up the pursuit and punishment of deadbeat parents who fail to make court-ordered child-support payments after moving across state lines. The move is intended to put sharp teeth into a 1992 law that made the practice a federal crime for the first time.

Prior to the Civil War this was known as a Fugitive Slave Law, punishing slaves who tried to escape from their obligation to perform forced labor for the benefit of another person. Ms. Reno’s attempt to enforce slavery is thought to be justified by the following untruth, previously noted:

Reno, the first woman to serve as attorney general, hopes the accelerated enforcement will have a genuine impact on a national problem of staggering proportions. More than half of all court-ordered child support currently goes unpaid, and the accumulated IOUs total an estimated $34 billion.

Susan Faludi complains that ex-husbands are so selfish they don’t even want to support their ex-wives. Her argument is the same as Reno’s:

The real source of divorced women’s woes can be found not in the fine print of divorce legislation but in the behavior of ex-husbands and judges. Between 1978 and 1985, the average amount of child support that divorced men paid fell nearly 25 percent. Divorced men are more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations—even though, for two-thirds of them, the amount owed their children is less than their auto loan bill.

As of 1985, only half of the 8.8 million single mothers who were supposed to be receiving child support payments from their ex-husbands actually received any money at all, and only half of that half were actually getting the full amount. In 1988, the federal Officer of Child Support Enforcement was collecting only $5 billion of the $25 billion a year fathers owed in child support.37

Ms. Faludi’s figures are faked, but apart from the fakery why should an ex-husband pay anything to an ex-wife? What services does she perform for him that entitle her to share his income? The support money he is alleged to owe her serves the bad purpose of financing the destruction of his family.

Donna Shalala makes her contribution to the promotion of matriarchy by doubling Ms. Faludi’s spurious figure of $25 billion to $50 billion, ten times the true amount. (Lying is OK for a good cause.) According to Stuart Miller, cited on page 150 above, senior legislative analyst for the American Fathers Coalition in Washington, “there was about 10.9 billion in court-ordered child support owed by all Americans, and of that, a little more than $6 billion was paid. That leaves $4.9 billion in unpaid child support for 1992—far short of the $50 billion Ms. Shalala hopes to raise.”38 A better estimate is that half of court-ordered child support is paid in full and another quarter is paid in part. The wildly different estimates are significant; they show how muddled the existing system is, how little anybody knows about what’s going on or how little concern there is for the truth, how much concern for saying whatever will promote the feminist program.

Suppose President Clinton could make good on his threat to Deadbeat Dads: “We will find you. We will make you pay.” Can it be doubted that child support awards would skyrocket, that divorce would become yet more attractive to women, marriage yet less attractive to men? “Divorce almost always guarantees a woman severe financial hardship,” says the National NOW Times of Feb/Mar 1989. It is well that it does; it would be better if it guaranteed more hardship. To say that divorce hurts women is to say that marriage benefits women. It is the purpose of marriage to benefit women (and children). Hence the folly of the present system of virtually automatic mother custody and the need for replacing it with automatic father custody. The feminist/political “solution” to the poverty of single mothers is to still further penalize fathers for having undertaken the responsibilities of marriage—more discrimination against men, not only because the ex-wives want the money but also because most of them are resentful of their continued dependence, and their resentment makes many of them vindictively rejoice at the law’s punishment of their ex-husbands.

Irv Garfinkel, author of Assuring Child Support, and Sara McLanahan and President Clinton and virtually every judge are assisting this erosion of marriage. It is astonishing that the manifest connection between matriarchy, family destruction and violence is invisible to these people. The same obtuseness is shown in the following from Garfinkel and McLanahan’s book:

Stronger child support enforcement for cases involving out-of-wedlock births is likely to eventually result, in our view, in a decrease in such births by the following reasoning. Increasing the probability that men will have to contribute to the support of children they father out of wedlock will increase their incentives to father fewer children.39

Increasing the probability that men will have to contribute to the support of children they father out of wedlock will increase mothers’ incentives to bear more children out of wedlock and to make the children they do have fatherless, since many mothers hate patriarchy and many want “the right to have children without having a man around,” since, as Betty Friedan says, “our so-called sexual liberation isn’t real and isn’t possible as long as…women are still trapped in mutual torments and rage by their obsolete sex roles,”40 and since, as feminist Barbara Seaman says, they believe “the sexual morality of an individual is and should be a private matter, for it has no bearing on the general welfare if she conducts herself responsibly.”41 “If there is going to be a breakthrough in human sexuality,” says Ms. Seaman–

and I think such a breakthrough might be in the wind—it is going to be because women will start taking charge of their own sex lives. It is going to occur because women will stop believing that sex is for men and that men (their fathers, their doctors, their lovers and husbands, their popes and kings and scientists) should call the shots.42

It is going to occur because women will stop believing that sex is for men and children—and believing that children need fathers. It is going to occur if men are foolish enough to suppose that if they stop calling the shots women will continue to submit to sexual law-and-order and allow men to have families and children to have fathers. It is going to occur because men imagine they ought to continue subsidizing the destruction of their families. Patriarchy, fatherhood and the stabilizing of the two-parent family are only possible when men do call the shots.

“There are women you screw and women you marry.” A promiscuous woman places herself in the former category and for doing this Garfinkel and McLanahan propose to reward her with support money. Even on the absurd assumption that they could frighten 90 percent of males into being chaste, the remaining 10 percent would sire as many bastards as the 90 percent, if women are unchaste. The obvious, tried and successful way for making men sexually responsible is by allowing them to be heads of families.

“Parents are obligated by law to support their children,” say Garfinkel and McLanahan:

When a parent lives with a child, this obligation is normally met through the course of everyday sharing. When a parent does not live with the child, the obligation is supposed to be discharged through child support— a transfer of income from the noncustodial to the custodial parent….Most noncustodial fathers do not pay even a reasonable amount of child support.43

With the exception of a minuscule number of token cases, where enforcement almost never enters the picture, “parents” is interpreted to exclude non-custodial mothers. No judge would dream of compelling an ex-wife to go to the home of an ex-husband who has won custody of her children and mop his floors and do his laundry. The ex-husband’s obligations to the ex-wife ought to be identical with the ex-wife’s obligations to the ex-husband, which are non-existent. They are identical to his obligations to Frederic Hayward’s kidnapper who steals his children and then hires a lawyer to drag him into court to collect support money on the ground that he is obligated to support them.

Feminist Sylvia Ann Hewlett makes the same mistake as Garfinkel and McLanahan:

By rewarding “good” behavior and penalizing “bad” behavior, our divorce laws send a clear signal to citizens about what kind of behavior is valued and what is not, as well as nudging people in the “right” direction by creating an appropriate set of carrots and sticks.

If a divorce court awards a significant amount of spousal and child support to a thirty-year-old homemaker with two preschool children, it is in effect rewarding the woman’s devotion to her children and giving her permission to continue to stay home with them. It is also reinforcing heavy ongoing responsibilities on the part of an ex-husband and creating a deterrent effect (severe financial burdens may cause other husbands to think twice before divorcing). But if a divorce court denies the housewife spousal support, awards minimal child support, and tells her she must get a job to support herself and her children, then the legal system is sending out a very different signal. It is opting for day care for the children of divorce and releasing the ex-husband from most of the responsibility for the continued support of his family, thus making divorce a less onerous alternative for many husbands and fathers.44

Talk about a double standard! Let’s put the shoe on the other foot. If a divorce court awards a significant amount of spousal support to Dad it is in effect rewarding the man’s devotion to his children and giving him permission to stay home with them and continue to earn the salary needed to support them and himself. It is also reinforcing heavy ongoing responsibilities on the part of an ex-wife and creating a deterrent effect (severe financial burdens may cause other wives to think twice before divorcing). But if a divorce court denies the father spousal support, awards minimal child support, and tells him he must get a job to support himself and his children, then the legal system is sending out a very different signal. It is opting for day care for the children of divorce and releasing the ex-wife from most of the responsibility for the continued support of her family, thus making divorce a less onerous alternative for many wives and mothers.

Ms. Hewlett affects not to know that most divorce actions are initiated by wives. If a divorce court awards a significant amount of spousal and child support to a homemaker it is rewarding the woman’s defection from her husband by giving her permission to continue to stay home with “her” children. Increasing the rewards of such women will result in more divorces. Husbands are already deterred from divorce— which is one reason why most divorces are initiated by wives.

Ms. Hewlett’s proposal will also deter—has already deterred—men from marriage. Recall Ms. Coontz: “At age 29 nearly 40 percent of American men have not yet settled into a stable long-term job.”45 The anti-male bias of the divorce court has frightened them away from marriage. Ms. Coontz has been cited on women’s proneness to divorce: “Women, despite initial pain and income loss, tend almost immediately to feel that they benefit from divorce.” Ms. Hewlett would increase this benefit, thus exacerbating the already high divorce rate, which will in turn exacerbate the sufferings of the children concerning whom she writes her book— whose subtitle is “The Cost of Neglecting Our Children.” Father custody will deter both wives and husbands from divorce.

The Janus survey found that “women were more likely than men to disapprove of the mother’s taking career time off for child care”:

They have heard tales of the reentry—poorer pay, lower ranked position, less or different responsibility, and less interesting work all await women who take a few years’ leave of absence to devote to raising their children.46

Ms. Hewlett’s proposals—and indeed the whole feminist program— de-motivate men from what society ought to induce them to do for their own sake, for the sake of women, children and society—becoming providers for families.

The male must be able to offer a woman a sufficient benefit to induce her to accept the sexual regulation required for family stability— he must “settle into a stable long-term job” and become a family provider. But he must also have society’s guarantee that when the woman does accept sexual regulation by entering a marriage contract the contract will be enforced. The legal system is not responsible to create motherhood; it is responsible to create fatherhood and to support it. The fathers’ rights movement must make judges and lawmakers understand this. Only in this way can the male’s non-biological contribution to marriage be made equivalent to the female’s biological contribution. Only thus can men have stable families. Only thus can marriage be made meaningful.

We have on page 24 quoted feminist Susan Faludi’s explanation of how the feminist program proposes to make marriage meaningless. She follows this with the Cosmopolitan quote we have had from Ehrenreich et al: “The woman we’re profiling is an extraordinarily sexually free human being” whose new bedroom expressiveness constitutes a “break with the old double standard.” Ms. Faludi cites Cosmo’s figure that they have a 41 percent adultery rate. There seems to be no comprehension of how this female sexual promiscuity, this rejection of the double standard, removes the husband’s economic responsibility to the wife and along with this the grounds for mother custody. This female withdrawal of sexual loyalty to husbands and to marriage positively requires a complementary male withdrawal of subsidization of these promiscuous women and a switch to father custody. Otherwise there will be matriarchy—since “an extraordinarily sexually free human being” can not have a stable family. Fathers should be grateful to Cosmopolitan, to Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs and to Ms. Faludi for throwing this ball into their hands. What need is there of further witnesses?

Let me repeat, for it is crucial: Married men bound by a marriage contract are not “at liberty to have sex on their own terms.” They pay for it. Women who suppose themselves at liberty to control their own bodies are entitled to no bargaining power at all, for they will use it, as Ms. Faludi acknowledges, to undermine patriarchy and restore matriarchy. “Women were at last at liberty,” Faludi says—oblivious to the distinction between good and bad women, women willing to give a man a family and women who marry in contemplation of divorce and continued subsidization by an ex-husband.

It is women’s loyalty to the male kinship system and to their families which entitles them to the benefits bestowed by patriarchy on good women. The female sexual disloyalty which Ms. Faludi celebrates is incomparably more threatening and damaging to civilized society than men’s philandering. It makes the man’s role in reproduction meaningless and reduces the woman’s role in reproduction to what it is in the ghetto. It forfeits the woman’s right to subsidization by the man not only following marriage but within marriage.

Ms. Weitzman has been quoted on page 26: “Our major form of wealth comes from investment in ourselves—our ‘human capital’—and in our careers. Despite the ideology of marriage as a partnership in which both partners share equally in the fruits of their joint enterprise, the reality of divorce is quite different. When it comes to dividing family assets, the courts often ignore the husband’s ‘career assets.’”47

Ms. Weitzman’s plea is that divorce should benefit the woman equally with marriage. For women this would be an incentive to divorce. The wife could reason, “I don’t need a husband since I can exchange him for an ex-husband who can be compelled to subsidize me since I have custody of his children.

My contribution of going through a marriage ceremony is equivalent to his contribution of getting an education and acquiring status in his field of work and raising my standard of living by 73 percent.” Ms. Weitzman is really pleading that the wife’s non-assets ought to be considered as assets, at least as long as she can cling to “her” children and make her demands in their name. The wife’s greatest asset is having a husband; Ms. Weitzman’s program for shafting ex-husbands by punitive divorce awards will deprive a very large number of women of husbands.

Ms. Weitzman wants us to suppose the ex-husband’s previous earning ability was made possible by his ex-wife’s previous services to him. But obviously the withdrawal of these services must cripple him, as the providing of them formerly benefited him—especially if their withdrawal is accompanied by the deprivation of his children, the chief “assets of the marriage” from his point of view. What she calls assets of the marriage are really assets of the husband, the chief inducement he had to offer his wife to marry him.

If the male has no Money Card to offer the female, or if the female doesn’t think his money is worth the trouble of her submitting to sexual regulation, the male can forget about having a family.

As pointed out on page 33 men have not yet woken up to what this means to them and to their children, a return to Stone Age arrangements, to the worship of the Goddess under whom, as in Crete, “the fearless and natural emphasis on sexual life that ran through all religious expression and was made obvious in the provocative dress of both sexes and their easy mingling.”48 Homosexual Arthur Evans, tells us (no doubt correctly, since the human Id is always the same, whether in the medieval witch cult or in the hypnocracies of remote antiquity), “The old religion, was polytheistic”:

Its most important deity was a goddess who was worshipped as the great mother. Its second major deity was the horned god, associated with animals and sexuality, including homosexuality. These and other deities were worshipped in the countryside at night with feasting, dancing, animal masquerades, transvestism, sex orgies, and the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Sexual acts were at the heart of the old religion, since theirs was a worldly religion of joy and celebration…. The material substructure of the old religion was a matriarchal social system that reached back to the stone age….In later European history, witchcraft retained this characteristic hostility to institutional authority.

Evans appropriately quotes Jeffrey Russell:

In the history of Christianity, witchcraft is an episode in the long struggle between authority and order on one side and prophecy and rebellion on the other.49

So is feminism, the revival (or continuation) of this rebellion against male authority. “The sexual autonomy of women in the religion of the Goddess,” says Merlin Stone,

posed a continual threat. It undermined the far-reaching goals of the men, perhaps led or influenced by Indo-European peoples, who viewed women as property and aimed at a society in which male kinship was the rule, as it had long been in the Indo-European nations. This in turn required that each woman be retained as the possession of one man, leaving no doubt as to the identity of the father of the children she might bear, especially of her sons. But male kinship lines remained impossible as long as women were allowed to function as sexually independent people, continuing to bear children whose paternity was not known or considered to be of any importance.50

This focuses on the essential difference between the two kinship systems. Patriarchy decrees that Women must not be permitted to function independently of men in reproduction.” Patriarchy requires that she must share reproduction with a man.

Is paternity of any importance? Not in the ghetto. Not among “primitives,” Evans’s “nature people,” for whom the purpose of sex is its own pleasure:

Among nature peoples…sex is part of the public religion and education of the tribes. It becomes a collective celebration of the powers that hold the universe together. Its purpose is its own pleasure.

Among nature peoples, sex is unregulated by marriage or by shame. In patriarchy, it is put to work:

Sexual relations [says Evans] have been reduced to productive relations. The basic unit of people-production is the monogamous heterosexual family. Sex itself is locked up in secrecy, privacy, darkness, embarrassment, and guilt. That’s how the industrial system manages to keep it under control.

It is left uncontrolled by “nature people”51 and “Any group of people with such practices and values can never be dominated by industrial institutions.” This is to say, among nature peoples sex is merely recreational, whereas among patriarchal peoples it is regulated. Among nature peoples marriage is virtually meaningless and sex is public; among patriarchal peoples marriage is a public ceremony and is stable, and sex is regulated and private.

That’s why the first thing industrial societies do on contact with “primitives” is make them feel guilty about sex and their bodies. The historical tools for doing this have been patriarchal religions…. The whole industrial system is like one great night of the living dead where the entire populace has been reduced emotionally to the level of zombies.52

Among the ancient Celts, says Evans, “nudity was never regarded as shameful since the nude body was respected as a source of religious power.”53

The clothed body is likewise a source of religious power; and the disciplined sexuality represented by clothing has greater power—deriving from the same “nature” as that represented by nudity and the sexual anarchy represented by nudity. Patriarchy is also “natural”—in a deeper, less obvious way, however, than matriarchy and sexual anarchy.

Daniel Amneus
From:
THE CASE FOR FATHER CUSTODY

This book deals with the problems of:

  THE FEMALE KINSHIP SYSTEM OR  MATRIARCHY OR  THE CLASSIFICATORY SYSTEM OR  MOTHER-RIGHT—   —the system of female-headed “families” which has created ghettos and barrios by encouraging women to marry the state and breed fatherless children who are eight times more likely to become delinquent.


Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Manifesto For The Abolition Of Interest-Slavery - Gottfried Feder


Volumes of books have been written on the 3rd Reich and the Second World War that deal primarily with Adolf Hitler, his generals, the War, or other “exciting” tangents from the European Theater in that period of time.

However I doubt that the families of the millions of men and boys who died in that tragedy known as WWII would refer to any of it as “exciting,” and this publisher would be in agreement with them. What is often left out of these books are the core principles and foundations of National-Socialism (Nazism) that got Hitler elected and brought Germany out of the depression before any other affected nation had.

Adolf Hitler’s economic system – heavily influenced by the genius of Gottfried Feder – was unlike anything the world had ever seen, and it worked better than anyone predicted at the time. National-Socialist economics were of pivotal importance to Hitler’s government, but those policies are sadly very poorly understood today for a variety of reasons, including the aforementioned lack of “excitement” surrounding economic policies of 70+ years ago on the other side of the world. As the reader will soon come to understand, “breaking the bondage of interest-slavery” was strongly emphasized, though most Americans have never considered the idea of life without interest on a house or car payment. Gottfried Feder discusses this in his Manifesto, and almost all of what he says in it applies today as it did in 1919. Some authors and Nazi sympathizers have even suggested that if Germany’s brilliant economic ideas had spread to other nations, this would soon lead to the end of endless profits and power for the banksters, and hence the need for the Allied powers to bring Germany to her knees.

Germany’s currency and trade systems begin to give one an understanding of the causes of World War II. This was stated by Hasting W. S. Russell, who wrote at the beginning of the War: “A war of financiers and fools, though most people, on the allied side at any rate, do not yet see very clearly how financiers come into it. . . . Financiers also desired war as a means of overthrowing their rivals and consolidating still further their immense power. . . . Hitler not only engaged in barter trade which meant no discount profits for bankers arranging bills of Exchange, but he even went so far as to declare that a country’s real wealth consisted in its ability to produce goods; nor, when men and material were available, would he ever allow lack of money to be an obstacle in the way of any project which he considered to be in his country’s interests. This was rank heresy in the eyes of the financiers of Britain and America, a heresy which, if allowed to spread, would blow the gaff on the whole financial racket.”

Gottfried Feder (an early mentor of Hitler) had been advocating banking reform as early at 1917, and was ardently against interest slavery and usury. In his Manifesto he stated that the source of the banker’s power and wealth comes not from work, but from “the effortless and infinite multiplication of wealth which is created by interest.” Instead, the German State offered loans for a set price. For example, marriage loans up to 1000 marks were implemented and were repayable in interest free installments. A quarter of the loan was forgiven at the birth of each child. Via this method, people were never stuck paying off an interest charge each month like they are today with the credit card scam, but instead their payment actually went towards paying off their initial debt.

Adolf Hitler describes the National Socialist monetary system in a succinct paragraph: “If ever need makes humans see clearly, it has made the German people do so. Under the compulsion of this need we have learned in the first place to take full account of the most essential capital of a nation, namely, its capacity to work. All thoughts of a gold reserves and foreign exchange fade before the industry and efficiency of well-planned national productive resources. We can smile today at an age when economists were seriously of the opinion that the value of currency was determined by the reserves of gold and foreign exchange lying in the vaults of the national banks and, above all, was guaranteed by them. Instead of that we have learned to realize that the value of a currency lies in a nation’s power of production, that an increasing volume of production sustains a currency, and could possibly raise its value, whereas a decreasing production must, sooner or later, lead to a compulsory devaluation.” He added, “We were not foolish enough to try to make a currency [backed by] gold of which we had none, but for every mark that was issued we required the equivalent of a mark’s worth of work done or goods produced.” The National-Socialist economy is one based off work and production.

The twenty-five point “Program of the NSDAP” reflected the teachings of the influential Feder.

Among these points are: “10. It must be the duty of every citizen to work either mentally or physically. The activities of the individual may not conflict with the interests of the general public but must be carried on within the framework of the whole and for the good of all.”

Within two years of Adolf Hitler being elected, the unemployment problem had been solved and the country was back on its feet. It had a solid, stable currency, no debt, and no inflation, at a time when millions of people in the United States and other Western countries were still out of work and living on welfare. Germany even managed to restore foreign trade by using a barter system: equipment and commodities were exchanged directly with other countries, circumventing the international banks. This system of direct exchange occurred without debt and without trade deficits.

Economist Henry C K Liu wrote of Germany’s remarkable transformation:

“The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, at a time when its economy was in total collapse, with ruinous war-reparation obligations and zero prospects for foreign investment or credit. Y et through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began.”

In Billions for the Bankers, Debts for the People (1984), Sheldon Emry wrote:

“Germany issued debt-free and interest-free money from 1935 and on, accounting for its startling rise from the depression to a world power in 5 years. Germany financed its entire government and war operation from 1935 to 1945 without gold and without debt, and it took the whole Capitalist and Communist world to destroy the German power over Europe and bring Europe back under the heel of the Bankers. Such history of money does not even appear in the textbooks of public (government) schools today.”

Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money 

Mammonism is the heavy, all-encompassing and overwhelming sickness from which our contemporary cultural sphere, and indeed all mankind, suffers. It is like a devastating illness, like a devouring poison that has gripped the peoples of the world.

By Mammonism is to be understood:

on the one hand, the overwhelming international money-powers, the supragovernmental financial power enthroned above any right of self-determination of peoples, international big capital, the purely Gold International;

on the other hand, a mindset that has taken hold of the broadest circle of peoples; the insatiable lust for gain, the purely worldly-oriented conception of life that has already led to a frightening decline of all moral concepts and can only lead to more.

This mindset is embodied and reaches its acme in international plutocracy.

The chief source of power for Mammonism is the effortless and endless income that is produced through interest.

From the thoroughly immoral idea of interest on loans the Gold International was born. The mental and moral constitution grown from the lust for interest and profiteering of every kind has led to the frightening corruption of a part of the bourgeoisie.

The idea of interest on loans is the diabolical invention of big loan-capital; it alone makes possible the lazy drone's life of a minority of tycoons at the expense of the productive peoples and their work-potential; it has led to profound, irreconcilable differences, to class-hatred, from which war among citizens and brothers was born.

The only cure, the radical means to heal suffering humanity is: the abolition of enslavement to interest on money.

The abolition of enslavement to interest on money signifies the only possible and conclusive liberation of productive labor from the hidden coercive money-powers.

The abolition of enslavement to interest signifies the restoration of the free personality, the redemption of man from slavery, from the curse whereby Mammonism has bound his soul.

Whoever wishes to fight capitalism, must abolish enslavement to interest.

Where must the abolition of enslavement to interest begin? With loan-capital!
Why?

Because loan-capital, compared to all industrial big capital, is so overpowering that the great money-powers can only be fought effectively through the abolition of interest-slavery.

20:1 is the proportion of loan-capital to industrial big capital. The German people must annually raise more than 12 billion in interest for loan-capital in the form of direct and indirect taxes, rent, and the rising cost of living, while even in the boom-years of the war the sum-total of all dividends distributed by the German joint-stock companies amounted to only 1 billion.

The avalanche-like growth of loan-capital surpasses all human capacity for calculation, through eternal, endless, and effortless income from interest, and from interest on interest.

What blessing does the abolition of enslavement to interest bring for the laboring folk of Germany, for the proletarians of all countries of the Earth?

The abolition of enslavement to interest gives us the possibility of pursuing the repeal of all direct and indirect taxes.

Hear this, you value-producing men of all lands, all states and continents: all state revenues flowing from direct and indirect sources pour constantly into the pockets of big loan-capital.

The profits of state-owned businesses, including the postal service, telegraph, telephone, railroad, mines, forests, and so on, suffice entirely for the funding of all essential state commitments for schools, universities, courts, administrative agencies, and social welfare.

Thus no true socialism will bring any blessing to humanity as long as the profits from public enterprises remain tributary to big loan-capital.

Therefore we demand as a fundamental law of the state, first for the German peoples, then as a fundamental law for all those kindred peoples that wish to enter with us into the cultural community of a league of nations, the following: (...)

9. Through intensive enlightenment of the people, it is to be made clear to the people that money is and should be nothing other than a voucher for completed labor; that while every highly developed economy of course has need of money as a medium of exchange, the function of money also ends with that, and in no case should money be lent a supramundane power to grow of itself by means of interest, at the expense of productive labor.

Why have we not already done all this, which is so self-evident, which must be regarded as the Egg of Columbus for the social question?

Because in our Mammonistic blindness we have unlearned how to see clearly that the doctrine of the sanctity of interest is a monstrous self-deception, that the gospel of the loan-interest that alone makes one blessed has entangled our entire thinking in the golden web of international plutocracy. Because we have forgotten and are deliberately kept in confusion by the omnipotent money-powers about the fact that -- except in the case of a few rich people -- the interest that seems so lovely, and is so beloved of the thoughtless, is completely offset by taxes. All of our tax-legislation is and remains, so long as we do not have liberation from enslavement to interest, only a tribute-obligation to big capital, and not, as we would imagine, a voluntary sacrifice for the accomplishment of labor for the community.

Therefore liberation from enslavement to interest on money is the clear motto for the global revolution, for the liberation of productive labor from the chains of the supragovernmental money-powers. (...)

The third and most dangerous factor is the enormous growth beyond comprehension of big loan-capital through interest and through interest on interest. I must here digress a bit more and hope through a small excursion into higher mathematics to explain the problem. First some examples.

The charming story of the invention of the game of chess is well known. The rich Indian king Shihram granted to the inventor, as thanks for the invention of the royal game, the fulfillment of a wish.

The wish of the wise man was that the king should give him one grain of wheat on the first square of the chess-game, two on the second, four on the third, and thus always on each square twice as many as on the one before. The king smiled at the seemingly modest wish of the wise man and ordered that a sack of wheat be brought so that for every square the grains of wheat could be apportioned. As we all know, the fulfillment of this wish was impossible even for the richest prince in the world.

All the world's harvests in a thousand years would not suffice to fill the 64 squares of the chessboard.

One more example: many will still remember from their schooldays the torture of calculating compound interest; how the penny invested at the time of the birth of Christ multiplies at compound interest so that it doubles every 15 years.

In the year 15 after the birth of Christ the penny has grown into 2 pennies, in the year 30AD to 4 pennies, in the year 45AD to 8 pennies and so on. Very few will remember what value this penny would represent today: a volume of gold equivalent to the volume of the Earth, the Sun, and all the planets combined would not be adequate to represent the value of this penny invested at compound interest.

A third example: the fortune of the House of Rothschild, the oldest international plutocracy, is valued today at about 40 billion. It is well known that in Frankfurt around the year 1800, old Mayer Amschel Rothschild, without wealth of his own worth mentioning, laid the foundation for the gigantic fortune of his house through fractional-reserve lending of the millions that Count Wilhelm I of Hesse had entrusted to him for safekeeping.

Had the accretion of money through interest and interest on interest with Rothschild succeeded only at the modest rate of the penny, the curve would not have climbed so steeply as it has. But assuming that the Rothschilds' collective wealth increased only at the rate of the penny, the Rothschilds' fortune in the year 1935 would be 80 billion, in 1950 160 billion, in 1965 320 billion, and with that it would already exceed by far the total German national wealth.

From these three examples a mathematical law can be derived. The curve that represents the rise of the Rothschild fortune, the curve that can be derived from the number of wheat-grains for the chessboard, and the number that the multiplication of the penny produces at compound interest, are simple mathematical curves. All of these curves have the same character. After initially modest and gradual increase the curve becomes ever steeper and soon practically approaches being almost tangential to infinity.


Altogether differently, however, does the growth-curve of industrial capital proceed. Likewise sprung mostly from small beginnings, soon a strong escalation of the curves appears, until a certain saturation of capital is reached.

Then the curves run flatter, and in certain industries will perhaps even decline slightly, if new inventions have led to the devaluation of existing factories, machines, and so on. I would like to select only one example here, the development of the Krupp works. In 1826 old man Krupp died almost without assets. In 1855 Alfred Krupp received his first order for 36 cannons on behalf of the Egyptian government. In 1873 Krupp already employed 12,000 workers. In 1903 Frau Berta Krupp sold the entire works and property to the Alfred Krupp joint-stock company for 160 million. Today the total value of the stock-capital amounts to 250 million.

What does the name Krupp connote for us Germans? The acme of our industrial development. The world's first maker of [steel] cannons. A vast sum of the most tenacious, purposeful, intensive productivity. For hundreds of thousands of our folk-comrades the Krupp endeavor has meant bread and work. For our nation, weapons and defense – and yet it is a dwarf compared to the Rothschild billions. What significance does the growth of the Krupp fortune during a century have compared to the growth of the Rothschild fortune through effortless and endless accretion from interest and interest on interest? (...)

Thus for example the curve of the Rothschild fortune must be set 80 times so high as the Krupp curve. The purpose of showing the curves of course is only to demonstrate the fundamentally different character of the two types of capital. The curves of loan-capital show at first a quite gradually rising development; the development then goes faster until, ever wilder and dragging everything with it, it raises itself far beyond human concepts and strives toward infinity.

The curve of industrial capital by contrast remains in the finite! However strong the divergences that a trace may show in detail, overall the fundamental character of industrial development will always be such that after strong initial development a certain period of maturity, of saturation, follows, after which sooner or later the decline ensues.

  Nothing shows us more clearly the deep essential difference between loan-capital and industrial capital. Nothing can make the difference clearer for us between the devastating effects of loan-capital and the business-profits (dividends) of business-capital put up and risked in large industrial enterprises, than this comparison.

It cannot be emphasized enough that the recognition of the mathematical laws that loan-capital and industrial capital follow, alone shows us the clear path where the lever is to be applied for setting aright our wrecked finance-economy. We recognize clearly that not the capitalistic economic order, not capital in itself and as such, is the scourge of humanity. The insatiable interest-need of big loan-capital is the curse of all laboring humanity!

Capital must be! Labor must be! Labor alone can do little. Capital alone can do nothing!
Capital without labor can only be sterile! Therefore the most important demand, the most noble task of the revolution, the most sensible meaning of a world-revolution, is the abolition of enslavement to interest on money.

The House of Rothschild today is valued at 40 billion. The billionaires of American high finance, Misters Cahn, Loeb, Schiff, Speyer, Morgan, Vanderbilt, and Astor, are valued together at 60-70 billion at the least. At an interest-rate of only 5% this means an income for these eight families of 5-6 billion, which, according to the researches of Karl Helfferich, is roughly 75% of the annual income that all taxpayers in Prussia had in the year 1912. (There were at that time around 21,000,000 taxpayers, 75% of that would be about 15,000,000. For every taxpayer there are on the average 1.56 relatives; hence 23 million relatives.)  Around 38,000,000 Germans thus have had to live on what the afore-mentioned billionaires have as a yearly income.

Certainly the American billionaires are not pure loan-capitalists in the same sense as the House of Rothschild and so on. I do not care at all to argue about whether the American billionaires are really “100-million-dollar millionaires” or “1000-million-mark billionaires”; in the former case one would just have to reckon in one or two dozen additional Croesuses. Or let us simply accept Rathenau's “300”; then our inventory will certainly be in order. Here it is not important to give an exact number, but the acknowledged ratio of 300 to 38,000,000 opens our eyes about the brutal reign of international loan-capital.

Therefore let us cast off these terrible chains that can only strangle all energetic labor; let us tear away from money the power to bear interest, and ever again to bear interest until all humanity has become entirely obligated for interest to international loan-capital.

Thus it is these three points that make clear to us for the first time where alone the lever may be effectively applied for the alleviation of our internal financial distress.

For another thing, we recognize that the assault of the entire socialist world of ideas against industrial capital has been completely off the mark, because even an intended complete regulation or socialization of all entrepreneurial profit – assuming an unweakened economy – would yield a laughably meager sum, compared to the enormous financial burdens of the budgets of our Reich and our State.

Through the abolition of enslavement to interest on money the entire financial malaise can be eliminated with one blow. At once we feel solid ground under our feet again; at once it must and will become clear to us that we have only deceived ourselves in the most grotesque manner with this wretched bond-economy.

For what else is loan-capital, but debts? Loan-capital is debts! One cannot repeat that often enough. What form of madness is it when the German people in its totality have borrowed 150 billion for its war? When it has even promised itself for this a quantity of 7½ billion in interest and now feels itself shifted into the awkward situation, inevitable from the start, of trying to collect this 7½ billion from itself in the form of entirely fanciful taxes?

**

The tragic thing about this self-deception meanwhile is less the stupidity of this whole war-bond economy, of which we have always made so much better use than the rest of the world, than the fact that only a relatively small number of big capitalists derives enormous benefit from it, while the entire laboring folk, including the medium-sized and smaller capitalists, as well as business, trade, and industry, must pay the interest. And here the political side of the whole idea comes to light. Here they can recognize that in fact big loan-capital and only this [i.e. not industrial capital] is the curse of all laboring humanity. One may twist and turn the thing as one wishes, but always the mass of all hard-working people must in the end bear the cost of interest-payments on loan-capital. The middle-sized and smaller capitalists have nothing to show for their lovely interest-payments; can have nothing to show, for the sums of interest must be entirely taxed away. Whether in the form of direct taxes or indirectly in the way of indirect taxes, stamps, tariffs, or other burdens on commerce, the hard-working folk is always the sucker and big capital the beneficiary.

It is now quite astonishing to see how the socialist idea-world of Marx and Engels, from the Communist Manifesto to the Erfurt Program (especially Kautsky), and even the current socialist leaders, spare the interests of loan-capital as if on command. The sanctity of interest is taboo; interest is the holy of holies; no one has yet dared to call it into question. 

While property, nobility, security of person and possessions, the laws of the Crown, privileges and religious conviction, honor of officers, fatherland, and freedom are more or less outlawed, interest is holy and unassailable. Confiscation of wealth and socialization, thus outright violations of the law that are only somewhat sugarcoated, insofar as they are committed ostensibly in the name of the totality of individuals, are the order of the day: all of that is permitted, but interest, interest is the noli me tangere, the “touchmenot.”  The interest payment on the Reich's debt is the alpha and omega of the state budget. Its gigantic weight drags the ship of state into the abyss and yet … it is all a big swindle ... a monstrous self-deception, fostered only and solely for the benefit of the great money-powers. (...)

Swindle, I said! Interest-swindle! A strong word. But if this word has justification, which during the war was perhaps the most used word in the field and at home, it has the most justification in regard to the interest-swindle.

But what about the war-bonds? With the first 5 billion, the Reich took out of the pockets of the people savings that actually existed. The money flowed back again. Then came the new loan to suck up the money again, and with that the last residual savings. And again came the pump and sucked up the billions, and again they ebbed back again, until merrily, after this charming game was repeated nine times, the Reich had incurred 100 billion in debt.

In exchange the people of course held in their hands 100 billion in finely printed paper – at first we imagined that we had become so much richer – but then comes the state and says, “I am facing bankruptcy.”

Yes, but why? – I myself certainly cannot go bankrupt even if I occasionally take a hundred-mark note from the right upper pocket and put it into the left.Certainly it would be the biggest folly of all if we continued the folly of our war-bond economy by declaring bankruptcy.

[* Feder here is regarding the German nation as a unified entity rather than a mere aggregation of individuals: the money that has been transferred from some Germans to other Germans remains within the German nation, which means that it is within the power of the German government to adjust the distribution, perhaps to the immediate disadvantage of some individuals but for the good of the nation as a whole.]

Let us break the enslavement to interest on money! Let us declare the war-bond certificates to be legal tender with interest canceled, and the nightmare of state bankruptcy will melt away from us like March snow under the Sun.

People say to me, the cancellation of interest-payments is a disguised state bankruptcy. No, that is not true! – The specter of state bankruptcy is really only a fairytale and a bogeyman invented by the Mammonist forces. (...)

Further Program 

Although the abolition of interest-slavery is not the final goal of the new statecraft; it is truly the most incisive deed, the only deed that is able to unite all peoples into a true league of nations, against the tyranny of Mammonism that encompasses all peoples. But it is not the end. On the contrary, the abolition of interest-slavery must lead to further steps, because, as we have seen, it lays hold of the global evil by the root, and indeed by the main root.

Only when the groundlaying demand for abolition of interest-slavery is fulfilled, is the path cleared for the first time ever for the social state. This must be clearly recognized, and it must be accomplished in spite of all Mammonistic powers. The cry for socialization [while interest-slavery persists] is nothing more than the attempt to bring about the formation of a trust of all industries and to create giant conglomerates everywhere, over which big loan-capital, in spite of all wealth-taxes, will naturally also have the deciding influence again in the future. A socialistic state on a Mammonistic foundation is an absurdity and leads by nature to a compromise between Social-Democracy, already strongly contaminated with Mammonism, and big capital.

We, by contrast, demand radical rejection of the Mammonistic state and a reconstruction of the state according to the true spirit of socialism, in which the ruling basic idea is the obligation to nourish -- in which an old basic demand of Communism can find its rational and useful satisfaction -- in the form that every member of the folk shall receive his assigned entitlement to the soil of the homeland through the state's allocation of the most important foodstuffs.

We further demand, as a skeleton for the new state, a representation of the people through the Chamber of People's Representatives, which is to be elected on the broadest basis, and next to that a permanent Chamber of Labor, the central council in which the nation’s workers have a voice in proportion to their distribution by profession and economic class. Finally we demand the highest accountability for the directors of the state. This new construction of the state on a socialist-aristocratic basis will be treated in an additional work that will appear soon from the same publisher.

The prerequisite for all this construction however remains the abolition of interest-slavery. My unshakable belief, nay more, my knowledge makes me recognize clearly that the abolition of interest-slavery is not only enforceable but will and must be taken up everywhere with indescribable jubilation. For bear in mind: in contrast to all other ideas and movements and endeavors, however well intentioned, that aim at the improvement of mankind, my proposal does not want to try to improve human nature; rather it applies itself against a toxic substance, against a phenomenon that was artfully – no, diabolically – invented, completely contrary to the deepest feeling of man, in order to make humanity ill, in order to ensnare humanity in materialism, in order to rob from it the best thing that it has, the soul.

Hand in hand next to it goes the frightful, pitiless tyranny of the money-powers, for which people are only interest-slaves, exist only to work for the dividend, for interest.

Deeply troubled we recognize the frightful clarity and truth of the old Biblical proverbs, according to which the god of the Jews Yahweh promises to his chosen people: “I want to grant to you to own all treasures of the world; at your feet shall lie all peoples of the Earth and you shall rule over them.”

This global question is now laid out before all of you. Global questions are not solved with a wave of the hand, but the idea is clear as day. And the deed must be diligently propagated; we must understand clearly that we face the most formidable enemy, the world-encompassing money-powers. All force on the other side, on our side only justice, the eternal justice of productive labor.

Extend your hands to me, working people of all countries, unite!

Publisher’s Afterword 

While repetitive at times, this Manifesto clearly stresses the importance of ending interest-slavery and presents some of the many benefits that would arise from such a radical departure of what we know as the "norm." What most Americans are unaware of is how much emphasis the Nazis placed on uplifting the working class. This lack of awareness comes in spite of the NSDAP name: National-Socialist German Worker's Party.

Concern and struggle for the working class continues today, as does the movement to end profits without work - interest-slavery. Such modern struggles have been far more successful in Europe than in the United States, but there is a single American organization calling itself the "American Nazi Party" ( www.anp14.com ) that continues to harp on very similar economic principles as Feder and the NSDAP. In fact, due to the ever increasing wage disparity in the US, coupled with high unemployment rates nationwide and general dissatisfaction with the current government, such movements are currently seeing relatively strong growth.

It is clear as to why Feder's ideas have not taken root in modern society, and that is because of the influence that the international banking powers wield over most nations. In the US, the Federal Reserve is a private banking entity that is not accountable to the US Government, yet they hold tremendous power over the American economy. Had Feder's ideas been implemented here in the States, Ceteris paribus, it is almost certain that the recent mortgage crisis of 2007, which led to deep recession, high unemployment, and the big bank "bailouts" wouldn't have occurred.

This publisher hopes that the Manifesto was read with an open mind, free of any preconceived ideas about "Nazism" or the horrors of war that are so often associated with the 3rd Reich. Clearly there was much more to the ideology and practices of National-Socialist Germany than the History Channel or even most "history" books provide. Modern governments have taken much from Nazi Germany such as laws protecting animal rights, the "green" movement (see Richard Walther Darré), paid vacations and other labor comforts that we take for granted today. Would it be too absurd to suggest that maybe their economic policies held some merit as well?