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As novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand once noted, philosophers determine history. They establish the ideologies that form the basis for cultural development and outline values that are to be considered popular in society. Philosophers shape the cultural worldview and consequently, the accepted narrative in society. The choice of ideology and the establishment of what is to be the “politically correct” paradigm is therefore of the utmost importance. The hypothesis, assumptions and argumentation must be based on realistic models and the correct values. If they are not, the worldview will create an ongoing misbalance in society, resulting in cultural decline.
A destructive ideology will spread its venom like the snake that lured Adam and Eve into their own self-destruction. This is precisely what has happened with the advent of atheist Marxism.
In the aftermath of the highly destructive French Revolution (1789 onward), which saw law and order completely abolished in France, the middle-class rebel, Karl Marx and his wealthy friend, Friedrich Engels, wrote “The Communist Manifesto” (1848). They outlined communism and socialism as the solution to problems in society by radically “melting the solid into air,” changing the entire value system in the West. While advocating bloody revolution and support for the working class and the poor, it may be argued that the masses were enticed and consequently cynically used to carry through dramatic changes that suited the Marxist leaders and gave them the elite power they sought after.
This ironically happened at the very height of Western civilization and its immense worldwide success, in which capitalism had brought millions out of poverty in a liberating economic process of hard work, personal accountability and individual freedoms. The Marxist aim was to tear down the capitalist economic method, traditional religious values and the family structure, loyalty-based duties and rights in the “old regime,” as Alexis de Tocqueville so eloquently describes it in “Democracy in America.”
The movement has been immensely successful in destroying the values that built the West and social fabric of Western societies. For example, consider the post-World War II philosophers in the social sciences in Germany. Watching how the Bolshevik Revolution swiftly implemented communism in Russia in 1917, much faster than they were able to do in the West, they looked for solutions. The philosophers were left with two choices: either support the communism of Moscow or the more moderate socialism of the Weimar Republic in Germany. These variations of Marxism all came from the same pool of thought, yet they disagreed on the methods that should be used to change society. A third option gradually emerged as a viable alternative. German intellectuals rebranded Marxist theory as neo-Marxism, and repackaged it. This led to the establishment of the Frankfurt School, Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany, which achieved significant influence in reshaping social structures in the West. The development of Western neo-Marxism is described in “The Dialectical Imagination.”
Philosophers such as Theodore W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock and Max Horkheimer launched the concept of Critical Theory, stating that science should not only objectively describe, but politically work to actively change social structures. Science thereby became politicized, with a goal of indoctrinating young students to become good Marxists – then hiring the best ones at the universities. Later neo-Marxists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida followed in their footsteps.
Critical Theory analyzed language as a tool of suppression as applied in propaganda, as well as institutionalized language used by an oppressive bureaucracy. In left-wing socialist NAZI Germany (NAZI is the abbreviation for The National Socialist Labour Party), it was precisely the excellent organization of the bureaucratic democratic system and its think-in-groups mentality that had made state-controlled Nazism function so well. The aim became to suppress conservatives and others who disagreed with them, and through a social revolution (which happened in the 1960s) demolish historic values in the West.
A prime example is Herbert Marcuse, who is considered the father of the Marxist 1960s student rebellion, which introduced free sex, free drugs, free abortion, borderlessness and a culture of hedonism into the West. He openly endorsed the repression of conservatives and others who did not support the Marxist views, calling for “repressive tolerance” as a tactic to stop free speech. Marcuse defines his progressive despotism this way in “A Critique of Pure Tolerance”: “The objective of tolerance would entail the adoption of an intolerant stance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions that are outlawed or suppressed.” The authoritarian despotism in Marxism has since put on display its lack of respect for different opinions and the democratic process, as it threatens to end Western greatness once and for all.
