Alienation and the Cult of the Left

When religious cults recruit individuals, the first thing they do is make the novitiate sever all ties to their former lives. This involves cutting off family, friends, all of the emotional support structure, thus making the individual vulnerable to "reprogramming" by the collectivist entity that seeks to recreate them. What cults engage in is the work of remaking the individual in the image of the collective, of alienating them to their intimates for the purposes of bonding them to their new social peers.

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Cults feed on the emotionally vulnerable by breaking their traditional ties. The modern Liberal culture works much the same; individuality is largely discouraged in favor of the group, and alienation is the key to the growth of the Left. Which is what makes some current trends in education so disturbing. There is a new campaign, this one designed to destroy the bonds of friendship among children. According to an article in the New York Times:

"Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying. “I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.” “Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”

Anyone who has read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World knows exactly what these administrators and therapists are trying to do, even if they themselves are ignorant of what that is; in Huxley's world, efforts were taken to redirect passions and normal impulses to numerous safety outlets, much like the BP people are trying to drill "relief wells" to stem the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Clearly, these moonbat educrats believe that people should have all of mankind as their best friends, and have developed a scheme whereby the child is forced to stretch his friendships and familial relations away from the "tribe" and to mankind as a whole. In the process, he learns to love the abstract rather than the concrete, learns to make many casual, inconsequential bonds rather than few strong, long lasting ones. This is the Brave New World run amok in America. And the end result is unbearable loneliness for the child; never does he or she have anyone who really matters, who really cares about him or her. The reality is that he has shallow, friendly relations with many but no real connections. He truly belongs to no-one. It is interesting that I came across this; I had to visit the hospital the other day and was speaking with a woman in her sixties who had taken her cousin to the E.R. He had nobody and neither did she, and they looked out for one another in a sibling-esque relationship. She pointed out to me this very phenomenon; the younger generation have been losing their bonds with family and friends, preferring casual relationships of middling consequence. As she pointed out, many children ignore their parents, their siblings, those who they should be close with. They are consumed with a narcissistic obsession with their own persona, unwilling to form close bonds. Now, I had to agree; that is why we have Barack Hussein Obama, after all, who is clearly such a man, a man who is wide as lake Superior and yet at most a few inches in depth, a man who is friendly and charming and who I doubt loves anyone - or ever has loved anyone. Remember the casual way Mr. Obama threw his grandmother, the woman who raised him, under the bus in his comments about racism? She is "a typical white person" in his view; what does that make him? The fact is, she was as close to a mother as he ever had, and yet he disdained her so easily. But he is not unique; he is the coming New Man. In Radical Son, David Horowitz's compelling autobiography, Horowitz discusses his father and grandfather, and how they used radicalism to salve their alienation from the rest of society. His father particularly suffered from a sense of alienation, and his solution was to build a new type of society where familial bonds and the traditional Western interpersonal relationships - family, friends, church, etc. were replaced by a communal society, one where people felt a sense of belonging to the collective. He believed that people with a sense of purpose would bond - which is true - but that the purpose was the transformation of society. According to Horowitz:

"Political utopians like my father had a master plan. They were going to transform the world from the chaos we knew into a comfortable and friendly place. In the happy future they dreamed about, there would be an end to grief from life out of control, life grinding you down and smashing your gut when you expected it least. Human cruelty would go out of style and become a memory in the museum of historical antiquities. In my father's paradise there would be no strangers. No one would feel like an outsider, alienated from others and at odds with themselves."

Horowitz's father made a tour of the Soviet Union and other communist communities in Eastern Europe, and his father was always longing for the sense of community he experienced in the collectivist entities he visited. What Horowitz Sr. failed to grasp was that he was being courted, given an untrue picture, a Potemkin village that did not portray reality for most, and that if there was a bonding it was a bonding built as much on suffering imposed by the very thing these people believed. The man failed to see that he had far better communities he could have joined had he wished. He sought not to seek outward, to find the paradise he so craved in fellow Americans, but demanded that the outside change to accommodate him, to bring socialist fellowship into his tightly circumscribed existence. (That's why in the American Declaration of Independence one of the self-evident truths is the pursuit of happiness; not happiness itself. It's up to the individual to find his own way to happiness.) That describes Barack Obama; a man more at home as a citizen of the world, a man with deep roots nowhere and shallow tendrils everywhere, he seeks to "do the work of remaking America" because he seeks to change the world to accommodate himself. Obama and his alienated friends of the New Left revel in their alienation, in their other-ness, and demand not just acceptance but community with the mainstream, a community that will be imposed by force of law. They want every human activity regulated, controlled, or suppressed so that this sense of community they long for will develop. "If all boats sail in the same direction, then we are all together, are we not?" Obama and company do not understand that compulsion does not create camaraderie, that the most isolated of individuals is the one forced into fellowship. Obama's early life was a kaleidoscope of shifting relationships and loyalties. Rooted in both Kenya and America (Hawaii, which itself is an amalgamation of cultural loyalties) Obama's father left early to sire other children in other lands. His leftist mother married another foreign man and moved to Indonesia, where Obama was raised as a Muslim in a Madrassa (he was registered for school as a Muslim there) and went by the name Barry Soetero. Moving back to the States where he was dumped off on his equally leftist grandparents. The young Barry never knew who or what he was - black, white, christian, muslim, American, Kenyan, Indonesian, etc. Given his shifting circumstances he likely did not form many close friendships, and he mentions none in his autobiography. It would seem that Mankind, that abstract thing, was his friend and family. He truly was the new man.

Engels and Marx show their disdain for the nuclear family

In Frederick Engels' The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels and Marx show their disdain for the nuclear family:

"Its essential features are the incorporation of unfree persons, and paternal power; hence the perfect type of this form of family is the Roman. The original meaning of the word "family" (familia) is not that compound of sentimentality and domestic strife which forms the ideal of the present-day philistine; among the Romans it did not at first even refer to the married pair and their children, but only to the slaves. Famulus means domestic slave, and familia is the total number of slaves belonging to one man. As late as the time of Gaius, the familia, id est patrimonium (family, that is, the patrimony, the inheritance) was bequeathed by will. The term was invented by the Romans to denote a new social organism, whose head ruled over wife and children and a number of slaves, and was invested under Roman paternal power with rights of life and death over them all. This term, therefore, is no older than the iron-clad family system of the Latin tribes, which came in after field agriculture and after legalized servitude, as well as after the separation of Greeks and Latins.

Marx adds:

'The modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus), but also serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to agricultural services. It contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state.' Such a form of family shows the transition of the pairing family to monogamy. In order to make certain of the wife's fidelity and therefore of the paternity of the children, she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband; if he kills her, he is only exercising his rights."

Here are a few quotes from The Communist Manifesto:

"Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital."

also

"And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour."

and

"Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private."

finally

"The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality."

A hostility to family, friendship, and nationality

So, it is clear that Marx and Engels bore a hostility to family, friendship, and nationality - a hostility that has been translated into the therapeutic culture of modernity as a universalist impulse. The idea that children should not follow their natural inclinations toward forming strong bonds but must be kept broken into many shattered pieces clearly flows from 19th century radical leftism. And it finds its practical application in the multi-headed hydra of modern social policy; public education to break the chain of "contagion" of traditional ideas, no-fault divorce to break the cohesion of marriage, the sexual revolution to make marriage obsolete, the elevation of "alternate lifestyles" and the promotion of gay "marriage" to remove the core meaning of marriage, the ever increasing intrusion of governmental authority into child-rearing with child abuse being ever redefined to justify the involvement of busybody caseworkers, soft criminal laws to cause chaos in society to justify government intervention in the family, of the war on religion and traditional faith, with Feminism, racial politics, etc. Now they are trying to break the bonds of childhood friendship. Those friendships are important; they teach the child how to form strong bonds with people other than their immediate family. In many ways, this is the way children learn to form marriages and other healthy traditional relationships; by learning to be a best friend, learning the give and take such friendships require, they are ultimately learning how to be good husbands, wives, uncles, aunts, and friends. Ban such relationships and you start the child on the road to being Barack Obama, a cold, loveless man, a narcissist, a despoiler for his own aggrandizement. The child who does not learn friendship will place himself on a pedestal; that is the root of narcissism. In 1944, with National Socialism having cast the world into war, F.A. Hayek made this point about the German people:

"The differences between the virtues which will continue to be esteemed under a collectivist system and those which will disappear is well illustrated by a comparison of the virtues which even their worst enemies admit the Germans, or rather the "typical Prussian," to possess, and those of which they are commonly thought lacking and in which the English people, with some justification, used to pride themselves as excelling. Few people will deny that the Germans on the whole are industrious and disciplined, thorough and energetic to the degree of ruthlessness, conscientious and single-minded in any tasks they undertake; that they possess a strong sense of order, duty, and strict obedience to authority; and that they often show great readiness to make personal sacrifices and great courage in physical danger. All those make the German an efficient instrument in carrying out an assigned task, and they have accordingly been carefully nurtured in the old Prussian state and the new Prussian-dominated Reich. What the "typical German" is often thought to lack are the individualist virtues of tolerance and respect for other individuals and their opinions, of independence of mind and that uprightness of character and readiness to defend one's own convictions against a superior which the Germans themselves, usually conscious that they lack it, call Zivilcourage, of consideration for the weak and infirm, and of that healthy contempt and dislike of power which only an old tradition of personal liberty creates. Deficient they seem also in most of those little yet so important qualities which facilitate the intercourse between men in a free society: kindliness and a sense of humor, personal modesty, and respect for the privacy and belief in the good intentions of one's neighbor." "The Road To Serfdom," p. 162-163 hat tip to Dana Mathewson.

Tolerance and respect for other individuals flows from the strong bonds, those learned in childhood. Hitler and the mystical notions of the Volk replaced love of fellow in the minds of the German people. It has been suggested that many of the youths of post First World War Germany saw Hitler as more than just a leader; he was a father figure since so many had lost their own fathers in the Great War. They found comfort in Hitler and the Nazi leadership because of their masculine presence in a strongly feminine world they grew to adulthood in, and they found the camaraderie and close bonds they were sorely needing in Hitler's nightmarish vision. Hitler himself epitomized the results of alienation; his father was stern and distant and likely abusive, he formed no close friendships as a young boy (he attended three different primary schools), he had a decidedly narcissistic streak, he placed his vision over the actual welfare of others, he seemed to be incapable of love. How would things have turned out if Hitler had a best friend, one who would have taught him the meaning of friendship? We live in an era where the bonds of community and family and friendship are increasingly stretched. Children spend time on their computers or watching television rather than actually interacting with their friends and family; this is the time when best friends are needed most. Social and technological pressures, contrived by the Left but also the result of the new technology, have atomized the young, and the worst possible thing we can do for them is try to keep them from bonding. We should be encouraging these types of friendships, not breaking them asunder. But then, how will we create the New Man if we don't? How will the cult of the Left survive? Jim Jones would have understood perfectly.