Shaping Civilization: Cutting Through Ugly Forms of Control

Part One: Sexual Liberation as Enslaving the Youth and Spreading Totalitarian Democracy

From the perspective of a political philosopher in the United States, America is projecting a model of a hegemonic superpower throughout the world. It does this under the cover of democracy, but it is often democracy, plus. A series of articles in the New York Times in mid-August dealing with the role of women in the military showed that American female soldiers were being sent as model soldiers-citizens in spreading democracy. These soldier-citizens have been neutered of their gender identity and have become both killing machines and sex machines at the same time.

Another series of articles in August shows the increasing tendency to associate the spread of democracy with the spread of a decadent and prurient culture, to the point that some Iraqis and Afghanis, at least when speaking to a reporter for the New York Times, associate democracy with sexual revolution.
Wilhelm Reich understood that sexual liberation could be used as a mechanism for political control. Totalitarian democrats, following the ideals of Reich, will present this kind of freedom as a cover for creating a group of citizens who are weak and easily controlled because they simply desire their basic instincts to be fulfilled.

And so, it is not surprising that in the places where the American regime seeks to advance its interests, it first seeks to advance a decadent culture. Those who fall prey to this culture, through the media, movies, TV or now the internet, can easily be manipulated to throw off what they think are the shackles of their culture in the interest of obtaining a false freedom.

Part Two: Overcoming slavery by struggling to discover the truth

This affects the youth to an extreme degree. They are at a stage in life when their passions are strong. Socrates realized this in his struggle against the sophists in ancient Athens. He realized that his struggle with the sophists had a lot to do with what ideal to present to the young people of Athens. The sophists presented a goal of all Greeks uniting in an effort to gain hegemony over the known world. Socrates, and after him Plato, instead proposed that all Greeks unite in a search for the truth, in a hunt for the Divine. This hunt required both a moral and an intellectual preparation. As part of the intellectual preparation, the young person, following the example of Socrates, should not take a hostile or rebellious stance towards his cities traditions and customs. Instead, he should seek to respectfully test them. He should also intellectually test any individual that has the appearance of a sophist, someone who uses words to build power around himself or his projects without rooting them in the true, the good, and the beautiful.

In many Western Countries, there are few if any mechanisms that young people can appeal to in order to develop criteria for evaluating whether a piece of music, a film or a piece of art is beautiful, perhaps the first step in this intellectual process. Many Eastern Countries that have mechanisms for filtering such art are being attacked by the Western Establishment. In the West, there is a great need to develop an education in aesthetics, one that does not simply present the history of who created what piece of art, but one which enables young people to understand beauty and ugliness with respect to art.