All Hell Has Broken Loose

 

The cities of the plain

The trans community is all narcissist. Justin Trudeau is a narcissist. Joe Biden is a classic narcissist. Megan Markle is a narcissist. Amber Heard is a narcissist. Jada Pinkett Smith is a narcissist. Was narcissism always so common, and we are just beginning to notice it? Or has something changed?

Something changed. This is one more disaster among so many that we can assign to the social sciences.

Narcissism is, to begin with, an alternative to religious faith: if you turn from God, one obvious alternative is making a god of your own desires. The social sciences from the outset sought to take the place of religion. Its influence on society in general has grown, especially in the past sixty or seventy years. Freud insisted that the goal of life is to satisfy your animal desires. More recently, the social sciences have aggressively advanced the dogma of “self-esteem,” and “unconditional” love in parenting. This is grooming for narcissism. 

But this is not the only, or the worst, thing the social sciences have produced. Here’s a partial list.

1. Mental illness generally. There is a reason that the incidence of mental illness has grown by leaps and bounds in the past sixty or seventy years, on pace with the growing influence of the social sciences. The very concept, of course, of a mental “illness,” comes from the social sciences. Earlier generations would have talked of demonic possession. But was the thing itself, however it was defined, common before the social sciences? Not really. In the ancient world, it seems to have been a problem—witness the demoniacs of the New Testament. But not in Christian Europe. In pre-modern times, Bedlam hospital, Britain’s only facility for the insane, had at most a few hundred occupants. Moreover, mental illness was understood to be curable. But to psychiatry and psychology, it is incurable—all that can be done is to manage it with pills. According to a large study in the Seventies by the WHO, mental illness is still curable in the Third World. It is generally something temporary, like fever. So the true case of mental illness is social science. As to why this is, probably all of “mental illness” is caused by a perceived loss of meaning. That is a direct product of the social sciences stripping God and the spirit from our world view. Social science produces a wholly inadequate understanding of the world, that cannot account for much of human experience. When human experience refuses to conform to the model, “mental illness” is declared. This is probably the worst holocaust in human history, causing the most suffering and death.

2. Racism. There has always been xenophobia, and prejudice, and discrimination over “breeding” and ancestry. But race as such is a scientific construct. It emerges from Darwinism’s view of the human as just another animal, classifiable into physical subgroups the same way horses or pigs are. And Darwinism justifies racism, as the imperative of “survival of the species.” It simply stands to reason in a Darwinian world that our own race is locked in a life and death evolutionary struggle with all other races. It is kill or be killed. People pretend that “social Darwinism” is some perversion of Darwin’s theory. It is not. Darwin himself was a social Darwinist. It was the topic of his second great book, The Descent of Man. Race had no meaning or significance in the Roman Empire, and no meaning in Christianity. While there would remain excuses for discrimination, without the social sciences, race would be removed from the mix. And worst examples of genocide in history have been based on race. The term “genocide” is itself from “genus,” a biological concept equivalent to race. Without the social sciences, we would not think in these terms.

3. Marxism. Marx is often called the father of the social sciences. Marxism is “scientific socialism.” It offered a supposedly scientific explanation of human history. Chalk up the dead of the Holodomir, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields. 

4. Fascism and Nazism. Fascism is a form of Marxism, admixed with social Darwinism. The associated artistic movement was called “Futurism.” Chalk up the dead of the Holocaust.

5. The two world wars, and the Cold War. Both the first and the second war were primarily initiated by Germany on the premise of social Darwinism. The social sciences were especially influential in German culture, home of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. It is the German proclivity for social science that Kipling warns about in 1897 in the poem “Recessional”: “For heathen heart that puts her trust/  In reeking tube and iron shard,/ All valiant dust that builds on dust,/ And guarding, calls not Thee to guard.” Christian morality had no place in this brave new world of scientific objectivity: it was survival of the fittest, meaning in this case the most powerful nation. Chalk up tens of millions more deaths. Had the Cold War gotten hotter, this could in turn be laid at the feet of the Marxist social theory of class warfare.

6. The decline of civilization and culture. Education is how civilization and culture is passed on. Education has since the early 20th century, on a German model, been declared a social science. This means our civilization and culture is no longer passed on. It is supplanted in the classrooms with crackpot theories like Marxism, Freudianism, racism, feminism, and Fascism, if this latter not by name. A civilization and culture that is not passed on dies within a few generations, and we are back in the forests of the night.

7. The death of romantic love. Feminism killed all romance, re-imagining interaction between the sexes as being about power. All is either dominance or submission, and the fulfilling of animal desires. There is no room for altruism or beauty. Feminism derives from Darwin; a Marxist analysis traceable through Freidan to Engels; and a heavy dose of Freud.

8. The death of the family. Feminism killed women’s traditional role of nurturing the next generation. Abortion is only the most direct expression of this, an overall devaluing of and contempt for children. A contempt for children seen also in the current promotion of sex change operations on the underaged, and a growing grooming culture in the schools. Children interfere with the Freudian dogma of satisfying animal impulses. If they are not themselves of some utility for sexual gratification, what purpose do they serve? Again, the suffering and death this is causing is incalculable. It is a larger ongoing holocaust than Hitler could have imagined. Moreover, the direction this leads is the gradual extinction of humanity itself.

All this is the Devil’s work. The social sciences are built upon an initial pact with the Devil. The social sciences treat human beings as objects; this “objectivity” is essential to science. Yet human beings are not objects; they are subjects, and morality requires us to see them as such, as ends, not means. All possible horrors follow from this violation of the second most basic moral principle: to love your neighbour as yourself. 

The solution is a religious revival. We can only hope and pray that God is intervening.