After first reading Nock's jolting definition, I naturally did what any Christian gentleman would do: panicked and frantically analyzed myself for characteristics of masses-hood. No symptoms here, currently. Though I'm sure it will be a lifelong battle to stave off that disease.
And in the way it spreads, being a member of Nock's masses certainly is a just that - a disease. Much the same way the rot of an apple extends to the bunch, apathy toward the most important subjects of life - social, political, and religious - extends stupidity over large swaths of any population.
Without doubt, we know a majority of the modern American citizenry is miseducated at best regarding these subjects, and fully ignorant of them at worst. Why? How did the Land of the Free - so politically literate at one point that it staved off tyranny better than any other nation in human history - lose that knowledge, as well as the will to obtain it? How did a nation of fierce individualists spawn so many of Nock's masses?
If we can liken that trend of degeneration to the disease of AIDS, then clearly "Cultural Marxism" was its HIV precursor...
Born in a German city of the same name, "the Frankfurt School" housed no little boys or girls for decent education. No teachers inspired future greatness there. No professors, doctors, or students solved the mysteries of existence, made important discoveries, or added any value to life. Indeed, it was no such "school" of any education at all. Its aim was to provide quite the opposite.
The early 20th century Marxist Revolution in communist Russia failed to garner military and governmental control over Europe and America as its creators had hoped. Realizing the futility of openly vying for such control, they then turned to a more covert method. Tyranny would now be achieved via slow and steady subversion of European and American values, not through government force as before, but with a secret manipulation of culture. Through that poison the West would be made to bow, desensitized so thoroughly to the nature of their slavery they wouldn't even realize once they wore its shackles.
One of several original conspirators, Georg Lukacs, said:
“I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch.... Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.”
It was through such wordy intellectualizing that the Frankfurt School dressed its brainwash in presentable terms. By labeling its' deviant machinations the academic-sounding "Critical Theory" and employing other such highbrow jargon, the less educated public didn't realize the emporer had no clothes, nor that his aim was to strip them as well. The "new" values which Lukacs schemed for would be those directly necessary for the implementation of communism/socialism - in short, full government control.
Another quite telling line to come from the school (its originator is currently disputed) regards the destructive plan for Marxism's "long march through the institutions" - institutions like the family, education, and Christianity. One "student" of the school described its body of academic work as the
"destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention, and conservatism."
The Frankfurt School moved from its European base to New York City in 1935. It was welcomed with open arms by the politically left-leaning Ivey League college system and stationed at Columbia University. As that cluster of universities still remains today, its place at the top of American education ensured that the Frankfurt School's plans for subversion of family, religion, and traditional values would reach a level of influence only dreampt of previously. Other universities of lesser standing would emulate its new "approach" to culture, while its own studentry - the nation's most powerful and influential future citizens - would be awash in the Frankfurt School's hidden Marxism.
Today, "Critical Theory" has seeped into the veins of the entire American educational establishment. It "plays a major role in ideological reproduction, and in enculturating individuals into the dominant system of needs, thought, and behavior," as told from the horse's mouth in the form of Prof. Douglas Kellner, Frankfurt School adherent and UCLA's chair "in the Philosophy of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies."
Kellner reiterates:
"The critical theorists have deeply influenced contemporary social theory, philosophy, communications theory and research, cultural theory, and other disciplines for six decades. The dream of a interdisciplinary social theory continues to animate the sociological imagination. In recent decades there have been many different attempts to articulate the connections between the economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions of contemporary society in the spirit of critical theory."
The degree to which Kellner says the Frankfurt School influences American thought is staggering. I surmise that the Frankfurt School ignited latent fires awaiting in the darkest desires of America's political and industrial Establishment. They now had the Critical Theory's camouflage of false intellectual, academic justification with which they could gouge the power-restraining, freedom-conducive institutions from the mind of the West - primarily, traditional, familial, and Christian values.
The plethora of cultural upheavals in the 1960s presented a prime opportunity for Frankfurt School theorists. Anger at the Vietnam war draft turned many young people against older groups keen on military action. They opened their minds in rebellion to many varieties of new and foreign ideas. Frankfurt-influenced universities, as well as Frankfurt-influenced individuals in prominent positions and the arts and entertainment industry, went to work tearing down time-tested, proven traditions.
The federal government, likely under the influence of its many Ivey-Leaguers, certainly acted in the spirit of the Frankfurt School by beginning its program of expanding single parenthood with tempting welfare offers for such families, despite the almost nonexistent need. By the end of the next decade, the black family unit was all but decimated.
The demonizing of the traditional American way of life, coupled with the simultaneous promotion of fringe groups - women, black militants, gays, Marxist college graduates, immigrants - seemed an obviously calculated attempt to create a new political class - the "alienated" and similar "victims" - to replace the old Soviet "proletariat" in the coming Communist/Socialist/Marxist revolution. Antonio Gramsci, who is perhaps the father of this entire movement, began to see his idea for "cultural hegemony" come to life - that is, the concept that a diverse society in continuous cultural disruption is most conducive to rule by an elite class.
We see this same plan still holding strong in the modern day "Democratic Party." Fringe groups are herded together every four years to form the Democratic voting block. All of society's outskirts are gleaned for any potential voters. Propaganda reigns supreme as it is blasted from the rooftops in effort to unite the victims "rejected" or "hurt" by traditional American value-holders. Any effort to disprove their "oppression" is quickly demonized as the flawed product
of traditionalist, racist, misogynist, or homophobic thought, currently known as "privilege."Reverberations of this effect cruise through the culture of its adherents and their minds. Lewd music lyrics become defended as "art". Displays of once-private or even detested behaviors become publicized. Critics become "oppressors." Desensitization to all explicities grows exponentially. Those who are taken in by this scheme become distracted, dumbed down, and, for all political purposes enslaved by their most base, animalistic desires. Hence the need for explicit sex scenes and explosions in movies, drugs and alcohol at social functions, violent and sexual lyrics in music, "twerking" in dance clubs and entertainment videos, and of course, nonchalance toward and distraction from the use of violence at home and abroad by the government.
There are reasons why your grandparents' generation largely didn't partake in such things, but you and yours do, and it wasn't because they were less free. It was because they were more free.
Although the most fitting name for this most unfortunate phenomena is "Cultural Marxism", today it is commonly known as "political correctness."
William S. Lind, head of the Free Congress Foundation's Center for Cultural Conservatism, tells us:
"Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious."
Lind argues that political correctness has resulted in Americans becoming "afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic" and that that fear can be attributed to cultural Marxism as peddled by the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory influences.
DiscoveringTheNetworks.org says the following regarding political correctness/cultural Marxism:
"When addressing the general public, contemporary advocates of Political Correctness – or Cultural Marxism, as it might just as easily be called – present their beliefs with appealing simplicity as merely a commitment to being “sensitive” to other people and embracing values such as “tolerance” and “diversity"... The reality is different. Political Correctness is the use of culture as a sharp weapon to enforce new norms and to stigmatize those who dissent from the new dispensation; to stigmatize those who insist on values that will impede the new "PC" regime: free speech and free and objective intellectual inquiry."
Today, culturally marxist, left wing influence is a threat to Christendom's very existence. Government-driven mass immigration dilutes the influence of freedom-minded people by replacing them with socialists, communists, and theocratic third worlders. Public education is producing children unable to evaluate and execute successful life choices. The welfare state has devastated the poor. Politically correct speech imperatives prevent scientific inquiry into key population demographics. Feminism, gender fluidity, and abortion continue to injure the prominence of the family unit, which has always been the cornerstone of a free society. Wild and frenzied accusations of racism threaten to reduce race relations greater than ever before, with current race relations at a twenty year low.
The nation's young people, in particular the elites and Ivy-League types, exhibit religious and maniacal adherence to the above mentioned problems, championing them not only as good, but as deserving expansion. They will eventually leave their coddling universities and become senators, presidents, governors, congressmen and industrial leaders. They will take their idiocies with them.
The promotion of their destructive behavior as virtuous is ceaselessly promoted by Big Government through law, speech, and Hollywood film subsidies. When leftists assert claims of “racism”, “sexism”, or “homophobia”, they are aiding in the growth of government. It matters very little whether they explicitly request for government to repsond. They are spreading State "anti-discrimination" propaganda, the hidden aim of which being to drum up the fear and discontent necessary to outlaw virtually all criticism, which has long served as a natural deterrent to degenerate behavior and societal decline.
They promote rampant hedonism, irresponsibility, and reality detachment, because this destabilizes a society and encourages it to readily acquiesce to new laws, even beg for them. If a woman can become a man, or if a caucasian like Shaun King can deem himself black, then the idea that reality and nature are concrete becomes disempowered. Silly politically correct beliefs and federal diktats can take the place of obvious truths, and once a people may no longer declare plain truths without persecution, a New Tyranny becomes ripe. And of course, if reality is fluid, then so are economic laws, which can then be decided by the almighty Marxist State.
Albert Nock's definition of the "masses", was, again, those people of any demographic who are unwilling to learn civilized decencies and do not have the values to adhere to them anyway. After that group the rest, Nock said, can be likened to the faithful “remnant” that our dear Yehovah commanded Isaiah to save from destruction. Let us pray that God would show us how to see through the machinations of Marxism in this troubled time, that we may survive it as well as rescue our friends and countrymen.
Long live the remnant!
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