Utopian Thinking (lll) On Wokeism, Perversion, and the assault on reality: Stephen Rittenberg, M.D.
“It was exhilarating, It was exhilarating, it was energizing.”
–Russel Rickford, Cornell, Associate Professor of History on learning of Hamas atrocities.
In earlier essays we have warned of the threat posed by Utopian ideas and ideologies. These generally involve the attempt at transformation and perfection of human nature. From Rousseau to the present, utopians view human nature as innocent, malleable and corrupted by social institutions. When those institutions are torn down by revolutionaries we can regain Paradise Lost where innocence will once again prevail. Regrettably the route to this utopia requires the elimination of millions who insist on holding on to an imperfect reality. Still that’s an acceptable cost to the utopian ideologue.
In this essay we will focus on an unacknowledged aspect of Utopian thinking—psychosexual perversion, in the form of sado-masochism, and particularly the sadistic pleasures of child murder.
In mankind’s long climb out of chaos and barbarism, the Old Testament is of primal significance. In Genesis G-d, the father, separates light from darkness, separates species of plants from each other and divides the animals into separate species. G-d divides man from woman and children from adults and forbids the hybridization of seeds, animals and plants. Parents are parents, children are children, animate and inanimate differ. The principle of separation and division is the means of bringing order out of chaos. This principle also underlies the incest prohibition and the prohibition of perversions. It clarifies and creates order. The book of Genesis is based entirely on the principle of separation and differentiation. These principles became the basis of our civilizational reality. However, there has always been pushback against this difficult reality. The pushback can be found in the perversions, all of which contain elements of sadism that appeal to the perverse longings universally present.
The French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet Smirgel enlarged the definition of perversion to include, not just unusual sexual behavior but also modes of thought. Perversion of thought expresses the wish to overturn reality, the laws of nature including the distinction between male and female, established by the God of the Old Testament- the “paternal order.” These wishes may remain private, or may be expressed in literature and movies, but they can also find expression in ideologies that motivate sado-masochistic acting out, like the torture, rape and murder of children. Civilized people are horrified by child murder; it attacks the most fundamental creative element of reality—the parent-child connection by which new, unique human individuals are created and nurtured. It is a demonic attack on the paternal universe defined in Genesis. Hamas killers relished forcing parents to watch helplessly as they slaughtered their offspring. Like the rape of women and children these were acts of sadism committed by young death loving men. The pleasure of these killers, the orgastic thrill was so intense they memorialized it in videos which they proudly made for the world to see. And yes, the torture porn has already found its audience, to such an extent that Israel is trying not to have the videos widely seen. Many, many enjoy the sight of babies beheaded and being burned to death in ovens just as was done by Hamas predecessors in Nazi camps. No doubt they will be masturbating to those images. The Marquis de Sade often made clear in his writings that he was attacking the God of the Old Testament and celebrating the pleasures of a return to chaos. For Hamas, children and parents are no different; they are both ‘colonists” and the killers are happily Satanic. So too, civilians are no different than soldiers and therefore can be killed. Unlike the pre civilizational sadists, Israel does try to differentiate between civilians and soldiers, though their enemies make that very difficult. This is crucial because our individual humanity can be attacked and destroyed by an ideology that places group identity above the individual. If a baby can have its gender “assigned” and re assigned, then an individual baby can be dehumanized as a “colonist”—tortured and murdered.
Chasseguet Smirgel argued that torture, rape and bodily mutilation originate in a megalomanic wish to rebel against and overturn reality. I would add that the murder of children is the supreme expression of the sadistic wish to destroy our civilizational reality and replace it with chaos, It is not just Israel under attack but all who value individual life and freedom. Hopefully we can mobilize strength to win as we did against the Nazis. Let Israel, on our behalf, ‘bare the iron hand.’
There is sobbing of the strong,
And a pall upon the land;
But the People in their weeping
Bare the iron hand
Beware the People weeping
When they bare the iron hand.
—Herman Melville
Whether you are a believer or a non believer there is much in our Judeo-Christian tradition as well as in our great literary works that help us understand psychologically, the dangers we face. The Marquis de Sade’s writing is particularly useful. In it will be found all variety of perversions that attack the Old Testament principles of separation and differentiation. Sex between parents and children, between humans and animals, rape, sex between men dressed as women and women dressed as men. Marriage is mocked and satirized as part of DeSade’s assault on the sacred. He wished to undermine the distinction between the sexes and the generations and create a utopia in which all distinctions and differences would be eliminated, an egalitarianism devoutly longed for by our woke followers with their diversity, equity and inclusion mantra and their transsexual dogma. He constantly links his perversions with attacks on God. Chasseguet-Smirgel called this the “Sadian universe” of utter chaos and “fecal sameness.” Woke gender ideology should be kept in mind, not just as a set of utopian fantasies, but as an ideology that leads to real world consequences as surgeons prescribe and carry out ‘cures’ for what psychoanalytic observation reveals as normal developmental conflicts. Meanwhile our woke psychotherapists normalize perversions or even valorize them as bold expressions of rebellion against oppressive social institutions. The result is heterosexual individuals are devalued and renamed as “cisgender” presumably to educate them that their sexual identity is not fixed and can change. They too can join the ranks of the woke elect and be praised for their courage if they choose bodily mutilation, i.e. “gender affirming care”. Again, underlying these utopian longings are sado-masochistic fantasies and pleasures. Psychoanalysts are very aware of the ways people hide such pleasures from themselves. The mobs of Hamas sympathizers think of themselves as virtuous while they dehumanize Jews.
Marquis de Sade was, like Orwell, a prophet of the coming age but unlike Orwell he wasn’t warning, but welcoming it. Reading de Sade also illuminates the importance of utopian ideologies like Nazism, Communism and Wokeism that seek to impose group identity over individual identity. This begins with biology. Anyone who has recently filled out forms at their health care provider will notice a question: “what gender was assigned to you at birth?” You may have thought your biology is a solid and unchanging aspect of your identity, but apparently not- it was ‘assigned’ and is thus a matter of choice. This is one utopian element of woke dogma. Our institutions of higher learning have been teaching this dogma even before it was named and formalized. Before wokeism there was post modernism, a very popular theory in humanities departments of our elite universities in the last decades of the 20th century. Former Nazi supporters like Martin Heidegger and Paul deMan taught that reality is a social construction, and that individuality is a fantasy, a myth. The family is an artificial, suffocating construct.Particular individuals must see themselves as members of a group. There are no values that apply to all. Judeo-Christian values are just one set and they are largely the cause of guilt and unhappiness. Collective emotion is far more important than abstract reason—a Jewish creation.
Many of these ideas were taken up by intellectuals in our elite universities. Why is it that so many of these Western intellectuals are fascinated by and welcoming of revolutionary violence? Perhaps because they are, for the most part wordsmiths. Wordsmiths won praise from teachers but were often unable to win praise from their physically oriented peers who fought it out for status, rough and tumble on the playing fields, not in the classroom. Perhaps these wordsmiths are drawn to what they wished they were, men of action. Stalin had the support of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski and Jean Paul Sartre, long after his murderous crimes were known. Hitler had his admirers in Heidegger, Carl Jung and Gertrude Stein—who nominated him for a Nobel Peace prize. Chairman Mao had his Edgar Snow, and Erik Erikson. More recently there was Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist who prescribed revolutionary violence to restore mental health of the “wretched of the earth.” He said approvingly: “Violence is man recreating himself.” The fantasy of self creation or re-creation is a violent fantasy aimed at eliminating the parental past. It was articulated by Satan in Paradise Lost, when he denied God’s paternity: “We know no time when we were not as now/Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised/By our own quickening power…”
Woke beliefs, held by social justice warriors supposedly to bring about a perfected world are in themselves quite intolerant and aggressive. They preclude rational discussion and argumentation. Reason, they insist, is a Western, white tool of racist oppression. Ring Lardner perfectly foretold the woke approach to discussion with their non-woke critics: “Shut up, he explained”.
“The worst difficulties from which we suffer come from within..they come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture take much from its strength…”
—Winston Churchill
It is not surprising that woke Professor Rickford, experienced orgastic thrills while celebrating the rampage of Hamas. After all, as psychiatrically prescribed by Fanon, violence is therapeutic. The combination of pleasure in rapes of the very young and very old, the torture and murder of children provid an added thrill: it was all inflicted on innocent Jews, the perfect scapegoats for the failed utopian dreams of the likes of Professor Rickford.
Freud pointed out in Civilization and its Discontents that civilization imposes limits on erotic satisfaction. Our Western democratic laws, derived from Mosaic law, strictly prohibit sexual violence and treat it as a crime. Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her book Prey: Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, established the link between immigration from Muslim majority countries to Europe, and a rise in violent crimes against women. The Hamas sadists committed their crimes while yelling ‘Allah Akbar’. They are fighting for Islam, and rape, torture and murder are their weapons. Our “intersectional progressives” around the world are not troubled at all by the Hamas GoPro videos. After all, they are victims of Western and Jewish ‘colonisation’ It is the intellectuals who provide the ideas that rationalize their sadism and allow them to feel they are true and good progressives.
Outside the civil garden
Of every day of love
There crouches a wild passion
To destroy and be destroyed…
-W.H. Auden
Language itself has been perverted in Orwellian fashion by our “progressive” intellectuals. The word “progressive” now describes its exact opposite: a regressive longing to return to pre-civilizational chaos, where differences between the sexes and the generations are erased and, a world of perversion prevails. One could think of the woke phenomenon as the eruption into consciousness of a Satanic impulse; the opposite of the Old Testament religion, hence its unsurprising antisemitism. We can think of the Woke as followers of a “Devil religion.”
The war between Israel and Hamas is an actual killing war between the defenders of civilization against barbarism. While missiles are flying there is also a war of ideas being waged on campuses and in the media. Winning on the battlefield is crucial. It is also critical that we win the war of ideas. People are willing to die for ideas. The ideas that support barbarism are being taught to impressionable young minds in our universities and even in early education. I have seen the consequences in my own field, Psychoanalysis. Brought to us by the young, the woke sensibility seeks to turn the discipline into a “social justice” enterprise. Psychoanalysis is a discipline rooted in the Western enlightenment tradition, emphasizing the unique importance of the individual. Many who now call themselves psychoanalysts believe individuals are to be understood primarily as members of a group—oppressed or oppressors, victims or victimizers, whites (oppressors) or people of color (oppressed). Neurosis is caused not by internal conflicts but by external forces, like Western capitalism, or “structural racism” and must be opposed. Unhappy patients are urged to see themselves as victims whose health can be achieved by joining in the Progressive effort to tear down those oppressive institutions. Probe a little at these beliefs and you find Jew hatred. Jews are once again the scapegoat for the failure of revolutionary utopianism.
The time has come for those on the side of reality to fight back. As Israel is fighting a war of survival for all Jews, we need to fight against the forces of intellectual darkness and barbarism. This is my shot; may it find its target and may we all wake from our own utopian dreams.
Comments are closed.
