Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control By E. Michael Jones
Libido Dominandi is the first draft of a great work. As it is, it is a failure, suffering from shoddy writing, poor research, and a wandering and inconsistent thesis. What should be an erudite and compelling polemic against the the sexual revolution—Western culture’s death knell—is an inconsistent and often unreadable mess.
A bird’s-eye view of Jones’s thesis—that our inability to control our sexual drive has been used for the purpose of political suppression—is beyond reproach. Of course, Catholic leaders have been saying the same thing for years. Leo XIII’s Humanum Genus operates as a rough outline of the book, beginning with Augustine’s distinctions between the City of Man and the City of God, and going on to condemn freemasonry. Who know if Jones himself was actually aware of his debt?
Regardless, Jones is not exactly marking new ground here. For this book to be worthwhile, it must function as a polemic which inspires the vanguard, and provides grist for later scholars. Dr. Jones’s work does neither. I was hoping for a traditionalist version of Das Kapital, but instead got a book that was barely worth finishing, let alone carrying into the trenches.
First and foremost, his writing is very, very poor. The overall structure of the book—jumping from year to year, place to place, vignette to vignette—makes it hard to follow intellectual rather than a thematic elements. Given the fact that the book’s thesis is nebulous and has a tendency to change as Jones goes along (more on that below), reading the book is a major slog.
A inquiring reader can jump to any given page to witness Jones’s lame writing. More shocking is his plain sloppiness and failure to edit himself. Just one of many many examples: On page 88, the author quotes Abbe Barruel, ending with “for men may be turned into any thing by him who knows how to take advantage of their ruling passion.” ONE PARAGRAPH LATER Jones uses the SAME EXACT QUOTE, except he finishes with the word “passions”—not “passion.” In other words, Jones repeats the exact same argument by using the same quote in succeeding paragraphs—and cannot even get the quoted material right! To call this a first draft is too kind—it is a first draft seemingly written the night before it was due! This is simply unforgivable.
What about the research? A good bibliography may still be helpful even if the prose is abhorrent. But the bibliography of this 600-page behemoth is surprisingly spare, and utilizes discouragingly few primary sources. And from the get-go, I couldn’t help notice two noticeable absences from Jones’s bibliography: Camille Paglia and Pitrim Sorokin.
Paglia is an atheist and a feminist, but like Aldous Huxley before her, she understands conservatism better than most conservatives. Paglia knows the power of sex, and her Sexual Personae, for all its flaws, is one of the most compelling studies of sex ever created, and in Jones’s case could provide an undergirding to the larger theoretical construct. That Jones does not avail himself of Paglia’s work is a sign of weakness; it is here that Jones’s literary inadequacies overlap with his inadequate scholarship.
Let’s start here: Jones has habit of noting tacit connections between his characters rather than connecting the intellectual undercurrents which united them. This method moves along more like a conspiracy theory or a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game than scholarship. For example, in the early chapters, Jones repeatedly tries to unite the Marquis de Sade, William Godwin, Abbe Barruel. It really does not work; Jones is forced to use lame narrative devices such as speculating what Mary Wollstonecraft must have been thinking while she trudged through the blood-drenched Paris streets; speculations over how affected Percy and Mary Shelley were by Sade; huge leaps of faith over the effect the good priest Barruel had on later sex perverts. With regards to the English liberals, it is clear that Jones simply does not respect their work enough to learn it and refute it—Paglia's work would serve him well here. More than this, the idea that later sex-mongers were inspired by the Jesuit reactionary Barruel’s is largely speculation; even if it were true, who cares? There are countless secret societies; the question is why the secret societies promoting sexual perversion ended up so popular. Instead of adequately defining the relevant intellectual undercurrents, Jones is reliant on his vignettes and weak editorializing.
It is Sade who Jones tries to shoehorn in most often. He suggests that the de-mastication of the Princess de Lamballe at the hands of an angry mob was in part due to the dissemination of Sade’s work. Bunk!—would Jones suggest that the sodomizing of Col. Qaddafi at the hands of Muslims was influenced by Eva Ensler? Even in his day, Sade was a literary and intellectual mediocrity. Chesterton makes the point that Nietzcheans have existed all throughout history; the only difference between those Nietzscheans and Nietzsche himself is that only moderns were so foolish as to take the man seriously. The same with Sade. He was a talentless buffoon with a rapport to the dark undercurrents of human nature; nothing he says is particularly interesting, but for the fact that Sade was able to get away with saying it was. And yet the Marquis de Sade, who for all his inadequacy as a thinker and writer, is, as Ms. Paglia says, one of the most influential figures of the past 200 years. To understand why this particular pervert was able to gain a following is a worthwhile task. Trying to understand the pervert himself is not. And anyway, the ideas proposed by Sade—that the populace must promote sexual license in order to remain revolutionary—was not actually tried until the 20th Century—but more on that below.
Paglia is interested in the intellectual undercurrents behind the sexual revolution in a way Jones is not. Even if Paglia’s assessments are wrong, she at least attempts to give a unifying idea—an overarching story rather than a bunch of vignettes. Freud once suggested his method of psychoanalysis was used to exploit his clients (Jones, in his weak style, uses the same quote countless times); when discussing Margaret Sanger, he states that her opinions about birth control resemble the statement by Freud. This is nothing but a weak literary comparison between two people whose thoughts were greatly different. What could be the jumping-off point to a sociologically-complex theory is merely lame editorializing, pattern spotting, and name dropping.
Perhaps Paglia’s absence is a bugaboo of mine. Worse is Dr. Jones’s elision of Sorokin’s work. Sorokin, a reactionary a sociologist at Harvard, charted the decay of sexual morality in the West and elsewhere and accurately described the relationship between decaying sexual morality and the decay of society as a whole. His work is all but forgotten now—Mary Eberstadt is responsible for making me aware of his books—but it’s hard to think of another academic who could provide so much grist to Jones’s intellectual mill.
But upon closer reflection, it becomes clear why Sorokin is not given a prominent role in this work—much of Sorokin’s analysis is so similar to Jones’s, and so much better documented and argued, that Jones can’t help suffer by comparison. For example, Sorokin actually delves into the state of marriage laws at the beginning of the French Revolution and elsewhere. From the perspective of a scholar, Jones’s elision of this topic is unforgivable. Marriage laws provide an excellent barometer of a society’s opinions about sex and the family. But again, Jones’s scant bibliography leaves his general theory with nothing but interconnected anecdotes as support.
Bad writing, poor scholarship. But how does Jones’s thesis as a whole stand up? Not all that well. Jones, in his salutary hatred for the Enlightenment, cannot draw a distinction between the Behaviorist who was truly a product of Enlightenment ideology, and Sadism, which was not.
Take the Bolshevik Revolution, the Enlightenment’s crowning achievement. In the early 20s, the Bolsheviks used sexual liberation as a cudgel against the ruling elite, and the Soviets liberalized marriage laws, decriminalized homosexuality, and in general made the nation a hotbed of sexual decadence (Jones dedicates a whole chapter to this). But as Sorokin notes (as does Jones—a credit to his honesty though not his ability to follow through with a thought), by the time Stalin came to power, sexual liberation had been condemned by the ruling Communists, with sexual immorality being seen as harmful to the nascent socialist state. In other words, insofar as sexuality had played a role in the initial overthrow of the Romanovs, the powers of sex had been curtailed by the time the Communists were solidifying their power. Most good Marxists will claim that Stalin’s plans were a betrayal of the Old Master’s conception of socialism, and that by the time of Stalin’s reforms in the 20s and 30s, the “revolution” was over. But this is self-serving; Lenin and the NEP were far more conservative, insofar that it slowed the progress of state ownership to the benefit of wealthy landowners and peasants, than Stalin’s massive land redistribution and industrialization. The revolution (tainted or not) continued into the 20s and 30s. But in readopting marriage norms and recriminalizing the perverse, by the time of Stalin’s purges, the sexual revolution in the USSR had ended.
Stalin’s return to sexual conservatism saved the Soviet Union. Witness its experience in the 30s and 40s—no nation has ever been subjected to such incessant turmoil, upheaval, and slaughter. And yet the population and economic statistics in the 50s and 60s were healthy. Why was this? Because Soviet women took it upon themselves to bear and raise children. For all the drastic changes which occurred following the revolution, the women never lost sight of their sexual significance to their families and—yes—to the state. It was this commitment to sexual normalcy that saved the Soviet Union. Amazingly, it was not until the imposition of capitalism that Russian birthrates plummeted to suicidal levels.
That was Russia, but the same story played out in revolutionary France. The libertine atmosphere of the early Revolution died out quickly. By the time Robespierre rose to power, sexual liberation was not a philosophy of the ruling government. English liberals may still have held onto pipe dreams of open marriages and orgies, but the revolutionary government certainly did not. Robespierre inveighed against atheists and wantons as fervently than a pope; go to nearly any of his speeches and try to find that does not put great emphasis on public virtue. Nowhere are Sade’s perversions evident in the Terror government or its successors; truly, even the liberal madmen who composed the French government were sane enough to lock up Sade. Virtue, not sexual vice, was what the revolutionary leaders wanted from their subjects.
Was the Russian revolution an outgrowth of the French Revolution and Enlightenment? Assuredly so. But the unifying thread was a belief in the prefectability of man. Sexual liberation was used as a tool of the revolution, but not as a tool of the government. Jones seems to suggest that liberal/Enlightenment government innately desires to use its subjects sexual desires as part of its ruling philosophy. But the facts just don’t back this up. Jones’s thinking in this regard is fatally muddled.
To put it simply, Jones is not able to draw a distinction between Malthus, who studied the sexual habits of a population in order to better the material prosperity of its members, and Sade, the anarchist. Malthus is a man of the Enlightenment; Sade is a character from human prehistory. The behaviorists and eugenicists were sex rationalists like Sanger, Watson, and the Rockefellers may have had their sexual failures (Jones doles out stories of these rather too readily), but Freud, Reich, and Kinsey were clearly of another breed—modern Sadists. These two programs are not the same. The Eugenicists and birth controllers had serious, broad political programs in line with the liberal state; the Sadists did not.
Sadism is not a ruling philosophy. It is innately revolutionary, but has no power to govern. Part of its attraction to the New Left is in this revolutionary character. The lament of the leftists—the true leftist, who has revolution in his blood even when he has nothing to revolt against—is that beautiful insurgencies must inevitably become ruling parties. Thus the Trotskyite calls for “eternal revolution,” desiring to keep the springs of leftism flowing. This is impossible, of course; the closest a ruling regime ever came to this was in Mao’s disastrous Cultural Revolution. Regardless, the Trotskyite knew that the key retaining Bolshevism from turning into Stalinism was this “eternal revolution.” Sade's position comes close to this: that “the revolutionary state must promote sexual license if it is to remain revolutionary and retain its hold on power.” (p. 57). Of course, this is contradictory—a state that is revolutionary is one that is by definition not holding onto its power. Sadism is the fruit of a madman; but to put Sadists in power is a death wish.
This is the fascinating question: How did the rationalistic sexual regime of the first sexual revolutionaries transform into the wholly Sadist regime regnant in all levels of American culture? How has the Sadist impulse, which is eternally anarchic and revolutionary, come to be tolerated by the ruling class?
Jones gives us little towards answering this question. Unable to differentiate the sexual rationalists from the Sadists, he gives us little as to why we are mired in our current state of insanity. Indira Gandhi and the Chinese Communists promoted birth control; this doesn’t mean they promoted homosexuality and other ghastly perversions. Yes, they treated their citizens like rabbits, but from a Benthamite perspective, they could make an honest claim that they were benefiting the welfare of their citizenry. The means may have been oppressive, but the ends were rational and utilitarian. Malthus and Sanger would approve of everything but the skin pigments.
Compare this to modern Western Europe and North America. The “heights” of sexual gratification are wholly separated from the generative act—masturbation, anal sex, oral sex, and the like—and so births fall far below replacement rates. Unsexed demons are granted the civil right to expose themselves next to children, sexually deviant men given the right to undress amongst women, and the devious sodomite is allowed to corrupt every institution and poison every tradition: Sodomites in the Church rape children; sodomites in the County Attorney’s office prosecute the Church—change the institution, repeat.
The American ruling class is not subject to the worst depredations of this increasing perversion—the proliferation of prostitutes and surrogate parenthood among the lower classes shows how the sexual slavery of the poor will proceed—and yet the ruling class sends its children to schools that teach the same filth. The elder-day Rockefellers forced their sexual oppression on the sons of the poor; the modern-day Rockefellers are content to turn their sons into daughters and their daughters into whores. It is not as if the lower classes were ruled by a Behaviorist ruling class anymore; Sadism runs all the way through.
One cannot understand the modern world without having a theory of suicide. Why are we slowly and intractably killing ourselves—letting our children be mutilated, our women defiled, every institution corrupted? Malcolm Muggeridge called this the “great liberal death wish;” no closed conspiracy of Illuminati or Jew, but an open adoption of self-hatred. The poison of the Enlightenment regimented and etiolated all man’s pleasures of life, from religion to art to childrearing; enslaved him to the state. The materialist is beggared in trying to describe the effects of these changes; the spiritual wounds are captured best in our rising suicide rates; more than this in our television and pornography consumption. Of course, the Enlightenment could not help but ruin sex as well. The unitive component of sex is destroyed by latex—man is so fragile compared to women, who require the complete corruption of their reproductive organs! Sex is no longer perilous. And the one death-defying (le petit morte,), heroic act decent men could perform with regularity has been turned to a rote messiness, closer to a bowel movement than a transcendental act.
This is another contradictory truth Jones cannot grasp: The problem of the modern sexual regime is that people do not enjoy sex enough! The regime imposes great suppression on its subjects; men and women are only allowed to enjoy sex so much. It would actually be an improvement if men were allowed to follow their libidos away from latex; if they were allowed to guide their fat, masculine girlfriends away from the pill. In the West, there is no oppressive regime as in China, no forced sterilizations as in India—but of course, this would require turning those girlfriends into wives… And meanwhile Western women despise the elements of their womanhood not conducive to male pleasure. They shave their pubic hair, mutilate their pudenda, despise the effects of childbirth, and contort their maternal impulses towards serving the state—witness the army of elementary teachers, social workers, youth ministers, medical caretakers: motherhood grafted onto the technostate. If women were to assert the rights they have had since Eve, our regime would break down. Why don’t they?
Libido Dominandi should be a much better work. My anticipation of it was great; I yearned for a manifesto to stand like a beacon among the ocean of dross and squalor of the modern day. What I got was a poorly written, poorly researched, poorly argued, overpriced, oversized disappointment. Some of the stories are valuable—from the number of footnotes, Reich’s work seems more essential than Jones’s—yet the book as a whole is not worth the effort. E Michael Jones is a crank; I knew him from his scurrilous and cruel assault on Michael Voris, but also his compelling radio interviews; I hoped the mettle of his work would outweigh his unpleasantness. Nope. There are nuggets hidden in these 600 pages which are useful in combating the modern regime of sexual anarchy, but I wanted a cannon. 9781587314650 This, without any doubt, is one of the most important and insightful books I have EVER read.
Please note that what follows is a very unorthodox, politically incorrect to the extreme, and personal reflection. Read at your own risk. You are free to disagree, but do not try to correct any misconceptions you might possibly detect and respect my right to hold a different opinion.
If you want to understand the key method of control that has been used against the populations of the West since the Enlightenment, you need to read this book.
We have today a horribly corrupted notion of freedom, one that is endorsed to the greatest extent by our cultural guardians, politicians and those who stand behind them, pulling the strings. They see freedom as the ability to attempt to gratify every urge, slake every thirst and consummate every passion we, humans, are prey to. That is held up as a community good; indeed, something worth fighting and dying for.
I used the word prey on purpose, because that's what practitioners of this form of freedom ultimately are, once you wipe away the righteous post-Enlightenment rhetoric. They're not driven to commit these acts because that's what freedom is; they're compelled to do them because - like any form of personal compulsion - they're addicted to the short-term happiness they derive from it.
The main thesis of Libido Dominandi is that your passions are, to those in power, like the reins on a horse, or a leash around a dog's neck. It is the means by which you are controlled. It is the leverage by which you are kept compliant. You are, to use the ancient terminology, in thrall to your sins. Enslaved. They are your masters; you answer their sweet call whenever you can, and all the while you think you're in charge. In short, the male sexual drive was weaponised. If you would be free men, wrote St. Augustine of Hippo, be moral. You only have as many masters as you have vices.
Over nearly 700 brilliant pages Jones argues and shows evidence how meaningless sexualised lifestyle forms the slave collar around the necks, especially around the necks of the youth. Young people are, by their very nature, dangerous. A toxic mix of hormones, energy, idealism and ambition, they have been the greatest agents of societal change in human history. The great wars in history were fought primarily by young men, and the next generation of warriors were raised by their young wives. Alexander the Great was 19 when he invaded the greatest empire in the world at that time. He scorned the peace offers by an emperor twice his age and eventually beat him, his generals and his massive armies into the mountains of the Hindu Kush.
Young people are terrifying to those in power. In traditional societies it wasn't such a concern, because the youth were anxious to become elders themselves, and their elders weren't afraid of them. Modern rulers are, argues Jones. They aren't your pater familias, linked to you by bonds of kinship and ancient duty. They're professional caretakers who get into power for a short time, rack up huge debts by bribing voters and padding their donors' nests, as well as their own. Then they retire to a huge pension which, again, young people will need to eventually pay for, and hope that they are never, ever held accountable. They have an agenda.
That's where the controls and distractions come in. The rulers of our countries know human nature very well, and are adept at exploiting its weaknesses. If you know what drives a man... and you are in a position to make sure he gets it, that man is in your power. He is dependent upon you.
If you live in the West, it should strike you swiftly that sex and sexuality is everywhere. Grindr posters on the bus stop walls. A guy cruising tinder on his phone next to you. Victoria secret shops. Practically all advertising, music, film and television. We are being quite literally bombarded by it all day, every day. We are, quite literally, being kept in a reduced version of the Matrix. Startled by glitzy distractions and petty pleasures as your labour, your strength and potential are sucked from you. Then, when the older generation has died, we will be left with the tattered remnants of balkanised, soulless societies, trillions of dollars in debt and on the verge of civil war.
It didn’t happen overnight. To know all the hows and whys and what fors read Libido Dominandi. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
---
Disclaimer: I am not against sex; in fact the very puritan (or gnostic if you prefer) approach to all things flesh is entirely alien to me. My understanding of sexuality has been shaped by an incomparable Fabrice Hadjadj in La Profondeur des sexes: Pour une mystique de la chair and above all by Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (not for the faint-hearted!). 9781587314650 I read the first 300 or so pages of this massive tome earlier this year before I gave up on it.
Perhaps if I ever find myself locked in a dungeon somewhere, or alone in a monastery for ten years, I’ll get around to finishing it.
But I’ll share my thoughts on what I read below, though be forewarned, I’m not going to hold back in my opinions of it.
First, E. Michael Jones is a good author. While this book could have done with a heavy edit to trim it down, Jones is able to write in an engaging way that pulls you in. I have no issues with Jones as a writer. And some of his details and tidbits on figures such as the Marquis De Sade are pretty fascinating.
But as far as the ideas propagated in this work - I find most of them laughable.
If you believe that a secret cabal of “elites” is controlling the world’s populations, and if you believe that our current world is more corrupt than centuries past, maybe you’d love this book.
In short, this book provides ample fodder for right wing conspiracists. And, like all conspiracists, Jones picks and chooses aspects of history to fit neatly into his narrative that secret elites are controlling us through sex.
Browsing through positive reviews of this book, I find many readers praising Jones for revealing evidence that our current, modern world is more “corrupt” and “debauched” than years past.
I find this notion so utterly insane and ridiculous, frankly.
As history clearly shows, inequality and the corruption of power has been going on since time immemorial.
So it blows my mind that people can believe that somehow the times we are living in now, are worse and more “morally corrupt” than previous times.
Really? Worse than life under Emperor Commodus or Nero?
Worse than life under Genghis Khan?
Maybe if you’ve fallen into the abyss that is modern right-wing conspiracies, you would believe so. I don’t know. 9781587314650 I feel compelled to point out that this book would have benefited from a firm editorial hand. It can be rambling, sometimes disorganized, often repetitive, and several of the twisting meandering yarns of thought that weave the chapters together could stand to be drawn straighter and tighter.
Having said that, this book's thesis -- that sexuality (and particularly sexual appetites and permissiveness) is increasingly becoming a tool of cultural and political domination -- is too important to be ignored.
It is difficult to see a positive way forward, and the book paints our prospects as decidedly bleak. What is needed is not a simple correction or adjustment of policy; man does not need techniques, but resolute character shaped by the moral law. The book presumes that it is the role of the state to cultivate virtue, or at the very least to repress agencies which drive the worst kinds of vice, but that prospect worries me just as deeply as our current moral anarchism. (My concern can be summed up thusly: whose definition of virtue will the state champion? Naturally I would like for it to be my own, but so would many others, including precisely the kinds of wicked men who are leading us down our current primrose path.)
Consider, for example, the book's supposition that pornography is highly addictive. By analogy to other aspects of current US law, it seems that it should therefore be regulated; see, e.g., how the law treats alcohol (age limits), tobacco (age limits plus compulsory anti-advertising), and narcotics (prohibition). But such a proposition puts our current power brokers in a bind; pornography has already been not only loosed upon the masses but mainstreamed, making masturbation a national sport and sucking the political wind from the sails of any effort to cram that cat back into the bag. The result is a state which may claim as many of the people's liberties as it wishes, so long as it is not seen by them as taking away any of their precious vices. Huxley's Orgy Porgy suddenly seems much more prescient than Orwell's Big Brother.
Absent from the book is a notion of repentance, and I think this is the key to unlocking the bind of sexual-political domination. Throughout, it is asserted as fait accompli that once sexual corruption has gotten its hooks into someone, that person is then and must perpetually remain a slave to the whims of whomever is able to manipulate those passions (by being seen as their guarantor, linking them with some other political end, capitalizing upon them through commerce, etc). But what would happen if, as a rule, we took to confessing our sexual sins instead of trying to hide them? Not mere private confession (in which dark secrets remain in our closets) and not mere exhibitionism (that would just be more public pornography) but earnest, public confession that we have sinned against God and man, that we recognize it as sin, that we make no excuses for it, and that we do not wish for others coming after us to bear the terrible weight of the same sins of which we are guilty? In the default human mode of secrecy and shame, people are unable to turn against their sexual masters for fear of being outed (e.g. by Masters, who took sexual histories from politicians and wealthy men who then promptly decided to fund his work) or of being called hypocrites (usually by others so enmeshed in fornication, adultery, and lust that the accusation is itself hypocritical), but does this power not disappear as soon as those same people are willing to replace secrecy and shame with a truly Christian lifestyle of confession and repentance?
9781587314650 This book (in my case experienced as an audiobook read and slightly augmented by the venerable Alex Linder, who has many audio books up in the Audio Books forum of vnnforum dot com) is downright amazing. It's like E! Behind the Music, except instead of being written by )oos and their minions, it is written about )oos and their minions. You learn lots of amazing, horrible, depraved, deceptive, manipulative (and so forth) things about many people you've heard of, or should have. In just one chapter, if I recall correctly, you learn that Bettie Page stabbed one or more people... like in their front yard or something...and ended up in a mental hospital, perhaps permanently; Linda Lovelace's name was actually Linda Boreman, and she was manipulated by basically a professional emotional/sexual conman, and he whored her out and even forced her to get screwed by a dog and maybe other animals; and something else I can't remember in that chapter.
If nothing else, the last chapter is absolutely incredible in how it lays out how the powerful sell sexual liberation to the demos as something good, but it really disempowers and enslaves them, making them vulnerable because when the moral order is removed (which they are also less able to defend after becoming complicit in crimes there-against), all that's left to protect them is wealth and power, which the demos by definition doesn't possess. I give this book 14 out of 14 stars. Would heilen. 9781587314650
Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices. - St. Augustine, City of God Writing at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, St. Augustine both revolutionized and brought to a close antiquity's idea of freedom. A man was not a slave by nature or by law, as Aristotle claimed. His freedom was a function of his moral state. A man had as many masters as he had vices. This insight would provide the basis for the most sophisticated form of social control known to man.
Fourteen hundred years later, a decadent French aristocrat turned that tradition on its head when he wrote that the freest of people are they who are most friendly to murder. Like St. Augustine, the Marquis de Sade would agree that freedom was a function of morals. Unlike St. Augustine, Sade proposed a revolution in sexual morals to accompany the political revolution then taking place in France. Libido Dominandi - the term is taken from Book I of Augustine's City of God - is the definitive history of that sexual revolution, from 1773 to the present.
Unlike the standard version of the sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy. Aldous Huxley wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. This book is about the converse of that statement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used to engineer a system of covert political and social control. Over the course of the two-hundred-year span covered by this book, the development of technologies of communication, reproduction, and psychic control - including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and plain old blackmail - allowed the Enlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustine's insight on its head and create masters out of men's vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of how that happened.
Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political ControlThis book has much to offer, but with a careful eye
A man, Augustine had written, has as many masters as he has vices. This is a tagline for Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control by E. Michael Jones, and he keeps returning to this theme throughout this massive work.
This book has something to offer, but with a careful eye. Jones tackles an enormous topic and comes out mostly sideways. He's neither a good scholar nor a good writer. Still, the text is readable and enjoyable, if not a bit like racing through a museum with a curator who's calling your attention to all the things plastered all over the walls and ceilings. But it's what kept me reading to the end.
Jones is part historian, part biographer. He's wide ranging in his approach because he loops in any event or any person he believes to be connected to his current discussion. He unearths minutia that doesn't seem to readily fit the context of his larger issue. He can literally jump back and forth 200 hundred years within a sentence or two. What I'm saying is that reading the book can be a bit dizzying. Sure, each chapter is headed with a city and sequential date, but that often doesn't matter. For example, Part II Chapter 7 is titled Baltimore, 1916, and the chapter begins: In the 1930 edition of his famous book... Wut? You just told me were in 1916. And by the end of each chapter you're sometimes years or even *decades* ahead of where you started. It can be a bit confusing until you get used to it.
Then there's the name dropping, or I should say: lack of tight scholarship. Jones quite often assumes you know who or what he's talking about when he mentions a new name or term or event. I found myself many times re-reading paragraphs above the text where I was in order to see where this name appeared before. But that's just how he writes. He'll often quote other writers writing about events or other people and simply write something like this: Hitler, according to Igra, was a homosexual prostitute in Vienna. (p. 198) Hitler was gay? Wut? Huh? Imagine your shock if you've never read anything about this in any other book. And who is Igra? Check the notes. Nothing. Check the bibliography. Nothing. Check the index. One instance. On page 198. Google his name. Samuel Igra is the author of a book titled Germany's National Vice. Okay. So this happens a lot. Jones drops names and events without any context. (He's not as bad of a writer as, say, Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, though, which I couldn't get through.) Other books and authors are mentioned in passing, not fully explained, and then left behind. (One of note is The Clam-Pate Orgy; google it; I'm old enough to remember when this book came out. Another is the Moynihan Report of the 1960s. Again, if I had not known of both of these before reading Jones' book, I would have been left staring at the page wondering what and why they were in his book.) And some names you'd think he'd use are never mentioned or lightly passed over (The Frankfurt School, Jews and Hollywood, Operation Mockingbird, Hugh Hefner and Gloria Steinem being CIA assets, among others).
Jones drops a variety of Latin phrases left and right, too, ad nauseam (heh); have your laptop or mobile handy as you read to provide translations. Several times he provides a title of a movie or pamphlet or book in the original language (for example, French or German), without an English translation. Not helpful. I had to search many terms and after a while simply gave up. One was the German word Kulturbolschewismus (Cultural Bolshevism). Now, if you don't know this term you will miss a lot of the deeper meaning of Jones' text. So be prepared to do a bit of your own digging as you're reading the book.
In many cases Jones assumes much from his reader, too. He doesn't go into much detail at all about the decadence and excesses of Germany's Weimar Republic. (And decadence and excess don't really do the period justice. Look this stuff up for yourself.)
He needed a good editor, desperately. Typographical and grammatical errors abound.
I can't recall Jones using any passages from the Bible to support his thesis, which is a real shame, because it would have illuminated one of the many axes he's grinding here, which is: some people enjoy the evil they do. The light has come into the world, and people who do evil things are judged guilty because they love the dark more than the light (John 3:19). It's even more of a shame when he gets so entangled in his Catholicism that he's blinded to the basic tenets of Christianity. His misreading of the concept of the priesthood of all believers is particularly troubling (p. 499). I was also disappointed in what Jones *didn't* discuss: real pornography and its affect on the human mind. He literally skips over the 1950s founding of Playboy and the 1960s, too, and dabbles in it when he gets to the Meese Commission on Pornography.
But there is good stuff. Much of it.
You'll read about such disparate men and events as Augustine, Plato, the Marquis de Sade, the French Revolution, the Illuminati, Nietzsche, Freud, Jews, Christianity, the Bolshevik Revolution, communism, the Armory Show, Margaret Sanger and the early eugenicists, Kulaks, Bernays (father of modern advertising), Madison Avenue, race relations, white flight, contraception, Planned Parenthood, Thomas Merton, Jack Kerouac, Kinsey (his open marriage, his bisexuality, his self harm issues--an attempt to circumcise himself and his urethral sounding fetish; liberation is fine, but yikes!), Norman Mailer and his essay The White Negro, Skull and Bones, Aleister Crowley, encounter groups, MK Ultra (the list is nearly endless), and Jones wends and winds and ties them all together. Sometimes not so neatly. But it's always interesting, and he drops gems throughout. Such as:
Liberalism, by the inner dynamic of its logic, was forced to become an instrument of social control in order to avoid the chaos which it created by its own erosion of tradition and morals. Democratic man could not be left to his own devices; chaos would result. The logic is clear. If there is no God, there can be no religion; if there was no religion, there can be no morals; if there are no morals, there can be no self-control; if there is no self-control, there can be no social order; if there is no social order, there can be nothing but the chaos of competing desire. (p. 187)
It [feminism] entailed the systematic re-engineering of the morals of women as a way of moving them out of the home and into the workforce, thereby lowering wages and weakening the power of organized labor and the working-class family. (p. 255)
The state can tolerate only those mores compatible with its system of values... The classical state must foster virtue; the revolutionary state must foster vice. (p. 260-1)
Those who look at the Betty Page photos fifty years later wonder what the big deal was all about without realizing that the big deal lies in the very fact that the viewer can no longer feel the passion the photos were intended to incite. Pornography is something based on transgression, and the boundaries of 1950 have been so often and so thoroughly transgressed, that no one can see that they were once boundaries. (p. 367)
Written 20 years ago, Jones seems prescient across the culture to what we see today: child drag queen shows (10-year-old drag kid Desmond is Amazing on Good Morning America), Drag Queen Story Hour at your local library, children under 10 transitioning genders and having gender reassignment surgery, suburban moms skyrocketing 50 Shades of Gray to national bestseller lists, off-the-charts STD rates, Sugar Baby/Sugar Daddy websites, NEXIUM sex cult, Epstein Island horror show (dentist chair, baby toys; google actively censors this, so use duck duck go), young women being more promiscuous than men (General Social Survey), children's creepy clothing lines Caroline Bosmans, the UK trying to ban porn for under 18s, cannibalism in our TV shows and movies, and on and on.
How did we get here? A wise man told us 2,000 years ago: A little leaven leavens the whole bunch.
I liked it
3/5 Goodreads
4/5 Amazon
PS: If Libido Dominandi is your type of book, other readings and viewings you might enjoy (and which will help your reading and understanding of it) include Staring into Chaos (nonfiction history), The Kulaks Must be Liquidated as a Class (article, National Review), Bob Fosse's Cabaret (article, The Unz Review), and Century of the Self (documentary). 9781587314650 sheeeeeeeesh. California is making better sense since I started this one. Sometimes his catholicism creeps in and taints his analyses slightly, but it is still quite helpful, and you could probably actually defend your family from political control by throwing it if you needed to, because it is really heavy. 9781587314650 This is a very informative book. After reading it, I realize I was victimized long ago by a diabolical plot. Sadly, this diabolical plot is continuing to victimize people without their knowing it, and with the victims believing they are being liberated when, in fact, they are being enslaved to their passions, and to their political masters.
“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.” ~ St. Augustine
“Those who relinquish reason are controlled by their passions, which are exploited financially and politically by those who control the flow of transgressive imagery. The people who profit financially and politically from promoting the imagery contribute to the election of those who will protect it politically, and so a form of political control evolves from a system of financial exploitation.” ~ E. Michael Jones
A good interview with the author can be found here: AUDIO - Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation as Political Slavery - http://youtu.be/FwhFLdSqqv0
9781587314650 Jones never says in five-hundred words what can be said in ten-thousand, which wouldn't be a problem if his thinking was a bit more concise. And it isn't that his paleo-conservative/Jesuit-honed ideas are so off-putting (at least Buchanan and Gottfried are capable of cogent thought); it's that his long-winded discursions many times lead to dead ends, or go on so long that Jones seems to lose the thread. He can be a deep thinker when he's focused, but this book is more padded than exhaustive.
The thesis Jones presents (that there is an inverse rather than positive correlation between sexual liberation and political oppression) has been put forward before (by Huxley) and later (by Devlin and Faye) much more cogently. Skip this one, unless you plan on becoming a hermit or serving a very long prison sentence, and you need something to do when not attempting to build a Westminster Abbey model with toothpicks and glue. 9781587314650 The usual sick banter of a sexually repressed mind. The woman is a whore and can generate bouts of madness. Oh! I thought that was god and his servant Satan. Whatever. 9781587314650
free read Ä eBook or Kindle ePUB ☆ E. Michael Jones
