Norms and Values? Give me a Break!

This article was written for the Yearbook of the Association of Clerks. With the debate on integration alive and kicking again, the big question arises: what is the culture in which to integrate?

An analysis of a degrading culture

When I was asked to contribute to this unique Yearbook, I was surprised. In current times, political tensions are rising so much that there is little room for dissident opinions. However, it has never been more important to provide a full analysis of what is going on, both in the Netherlands and in the rest of the world. 

We live in times of uncertainty and uprooting. Globalisation, the fading of traditional family structures, immigration and large-scale information flows are upon us. These social phenomena are all consequences of conscious political choices. 

Therefore, I will first describe in a nutshell the moral decline of the West. Before I do so, I will first explain what I believe moral decay and the resulting norms and values mean. This essay aims to introduce the reader to the world of reactionary traditionalism.

Moral Decay

With his best-known work, ‘The Decline of the West’, Oswald Spengler analysed the so-called cycle of empires. In his analysis, he found common factors in each historical example which could be seen as predictors of the rise and fall of societies. His analysis can be most easily summarised with this sentence: ‘Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, bad times create strong men again.’ In other words, material prosperity has a negative effect on strength of mind. Man becomes increasingly alienated from himself.

We see this reflected in the modern West. We have lost connection with our roots. This is what moral decay is at its core. Norms and values are based on a certain morality. This morality has to be based on a certain core, a core that is at the beginning of our cultural-historical outlook and human view. Morality can only emerge when a group of people is in touch with this core. The traces which eternity has left in all cultural-historical traditions we know prove this. A grounded human being is embedded in his nature, history, environment and metaphysics. A grounded person is also a humble person in the face of the inexplicable.

This is no longer the case in the modern West. In fact, the West is in the midst of an identity crisis. This crisis has to do both with the individualistic, universalistic nature of Enlightenment thinking and the lack of meaning. Enlightenment thinking is seen as the very cause of Western dominance in the world today. The paradoxical nature of this phenomenon therefore requires not only some explanation but also a historical analysis. It is a story which begins with the Enlightenment and the ensuing French Revolution.

Enlightenment and Revolution

Liberty, equality, fraternity - it all sounds so beautiful. The idea of the dawn of the French Revolution was that we were moving towards a new world, a world where the individual would no longer be oppressed by the pettiness of traditions. Rooted, traditional structures would no longer stop us from reaching our full potential. Man would be freed from the dogmatic thinking that had oppressed him for so long. A very positive attitude emerged with the new focus towards certain civil rights, the separation of church and state and the split of science and metaphysics. Whereas before this, scientific thinking had a spiritual dimension, after the Enlightenment developments, science focused only on the materialistic domain. Through induction and deduction, it had become man's task to figure out reality and, if possible, improve it. The advent of this new thinking was a fundamental reckoning with ‘old Europe’.

The changing society was also accompanied by a different social division. Where previously there was a class society, these classes were shaken up.  A new merchant class emerged. Capitalism soon reigned supreme and caused tremendous social growth in many areas. People actually became more prosperous. The advent of the industrial revolution obviously played a fundamental role in this. In addition, the 20th century was the scene of the great struggle of the three ideologies that emerged from Enlightenment thinking: liberalism, Marxism and fascism.

To make sense of the practical impact of Enlightenment thinking on our norms and values, I will discuss the course of these ideologies over time.

The Battle between Ideologies

Liberalism places an emphasis on individual freedom. Ultimately, the fundamental idea of liberalism is that traditional structures (the complementary nature of the classes/social groups, state structures, family and faith) are restrictive of the individual. These structures stop the individual from being able to develop. It should be the task of the modern individual to pry himself loose from the chains of these structures. Liberalism arose in conjunction with the rise of capitalism. Many people became richer because of the liberal outlook and capitalism. However, this was not the case for everyone. The ‘winners’ during this time were factory owners, through industrialisation, and these factories had to be manned. From this, the working class then emerged. While these factories were still mainly focused on making profits for the factory owner, there were deplorable conditions for the workers. This phenomenon was the breeding ground for Marxism.

Marxism mainly emphasised another value of the Enlightenment, equality. Marxism argued that the worker was disadvantaged compared to the factory owner. This was wrong because the promise of the Revolution was that everyone would become equal. Marxism was therefore a clear reaction to the rise of capitalism. According to Karl Marx, man was essentially a social being. The redemption that the Enlightenment would bring to man - the promise of the new just world - could only be achieved if a transformative process was fulfilled to achieve a new collective. Liberalism and Marxism did share with each other the belief that man is inherently benign, that history is progressive (mankind is capable of improvement) and that man is at his core a rational individual.

In response to both theories, fascism emerged. Fascism denounced the universalist nature of both liberalism and Marxism. According to fascism, paradise - what the Enlightenment had promised - could only be achieved when it assumed an exclusive character. Fascism is paradoxical in this, given that fascism itself is also modernist and has some of the same materialist assumptions as both other ideologies.

National Socialism argued that only its own people (the German) had the ability to reach this new world. Other ideologies would therefore aim to break down German strength and undermine Germany. This resulted in World War II.

After World War II, an international community was created and spread around the world by the winners of the war. Under the guise of ‘never again’ and of the American thinking prevailing at the time (the United States gained enormous political military economic and cultural influence in Western Europe after World War II), various international organisations emerged which were supposed to promote international cooperation along the American model. Globalisation really took shape from this point onwards. Meanwhile, the communist power bloc that had now taken over Eastern Europe still existed. The Cold War had begun.

The United States continued to develop itself into an economic Powerhouse. The years that followed saw the emergence of a veritable consumer culture, which, combined with ever-increasing globalism, continued to expand. In 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet empire came to a definitive end. Classical Marxism collapsed and liberalism, led by the new world order of the United States, triumphed. A new era of optimism dawned in which the culture propagated that there would be eternal growth and that the liberal ideals of the American Dream would become available to everyone and thus also to people in the Netherlands.

The United States' gains ensured that its model of society was spread around the world. This happened not only through military might but also through culture and economics. At the same time, however, liberalism had already undergone a strong transformation and had now reached a synthesis with Marxism. 

The Current Degradation Culture

The current culture of degradation is a consequence of the flight of great Marxist thinkers to the United States. In the United States, a new form of Marxism, called cultural Marxism, emerged in the intellectual world. The classical idea of the oppressor and the oppressed class of Marxism was applied to culture with this new movement. Gradually, (especially after the May ‘68 revolution of student protests), a new culture emerged here in Europe as well. For the most part, our current norms and values still reflect that change that started then. This brings us to the philosophy of the Frankfurt School.

The Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School is the name of a group of Marxist thinkers who tackled the major problem of communist thought. Communist revolutions sprang up in the East but not in Western Europe. On the contrary, workers sided with fascism in the run-up to World War II. The members of this philosophical school were Jewish and saw this as the great betrayal of the working class: after all, fascism led to the Holocaust. They argued that this was because of the still-present aspects of traditional pre-Enlightenment Europe which would present people with a false consciousness which caused them to allow themselves to be oppressed. Philosophers of this school made the absurd analysis that the entire history of Europe was be a straight line. This line runs from the beginning with the stories of Odysseus to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The aim of the Frankfurt School was therefore to analyse these - in their view, erroneous - elements of culture and then systematically to demolish them.

The Frankfurt School analysed the institutions of power in society which ensured that ‘the worker’ was manipulated. They called the idea that the workers had been made to believe things by the capitalist elites ‘false consciousness’. This idea was elaborated by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci,.

According to Gramsci, capitalist elites not only dominated the economy alone but also owned the culture. This propagated culture became dominant because elites used their cultural institutions to spread these patterns of thought over the populations of countries. These cultural institutions could include education, the media, Hollywood and the rest of the structures that hold a society together, such as the judiciary and the illusion of freedom of choice within parliaments.

The ideas of the Frankfurt School were soon picked up by the already existing cultural institutions. This led to the emergence of the cultural revolution of the 1970s. Young people were pitted against the generations before them through universities and pop culture. According to the famous ‘hippie generation’, anything and everything had to be possible, because the freedom of the individual to set himself against traditional dangerous structures had to be unlimited.

The young people of the ‘hippie generation’ of the time who were imbibed with these ideas, then entered society armed with them and took up positions of power. This period is known as ‘the march through the institutions’.

At the time, institutions were already highly liberalised. Cultural Marxist thinking fitted well with already existing liberal thought. The individual could best flourish when he managed to pry himself loose from the chains of the old world. As a result, this cultural revolution went very easily.

At the same time, capitalist domination from the United States continued unabated. Besides the synthesis which emerged from liberalism, on the hand, and Marxist cultural thinking, on the other, a synthesis also emerged within economic thinking. This is how the welfare state came into being in Europe. From this point on, in the Netherlands, but also in the other Western countries, only a very marginal change of power could take place within parliaments. The struggle took place only between the branches of the ideologies of Marxism and liberalism (the socialist and liberal democratic parties) while the larger frameworks remained unchanged. These larger frameworks were, on the economic level, based on increasingly globalised consumerism and, on the socio-cultural level, on the synthesis between liberal and Marxist thinking. From then on, we can speak of a progressive liberal hegemony in the West. This is how we have arrived at the current situation.

The West Today

Cultural Marxism has caused the West to suffer definitively from an autoimmune disease. In today's culture, all attempts to re-root people are decried as wrong. At the same time, the last vestiges we have left from our traditional core are under full attack (see the current gender debate). The current emergent culture says that the individual should not be held back by the gender categories which were so normal before. According to cultural Marxism, the gender division is just a social construct which is part of the oppressive false consciousness of the worker. However, this is not true. Whereas it is quite possible to say that, on an individual level, you can have some masculine women and feminine men, there is a fixed core behind the concept of gender - a fixed core which reflects the eternal, the reproductive function of human beings, the categories that are carried from our collective subconscious already with us from conception. These are categories which, whatever what we as humans think of this, will always remain. They are categories which have an important function in a functioning society.

As Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School described, minority groups are a tool to bring about norm blurring. This is what is happening now. The power institutions of cultural Marxism use minority groups to break down the self-evidences of majorities. This effectively cuts the roots from under society.

The Enlightenment revolt (in present times in the form of cultural Marxism/progressive-liberalism) against creation, nature and eternity is the main problem of humanity today. We must ask ourselves whether we have gone too far in our drive to dominate nature. The past shows what this Utopian thinking leads to. Both other Enlightenment philosophies (Marxism in the Soviet Union and fascism in National Socialist Germany) led to the greatest massacres in history.

Man in our modern age thinks he can play God.  But man is not God. It is the classic story of the tower of Babel. There too, mankind tried to reach heaven from earth and was mercilessly punished for not knowing his place in the hierarchy of things. Perhaps, then, it is time to start seeing the Enlightenment in a different context. Above all, the Enlightenment brought us the normalisation of capital sins. It cannot be denied that sins (pride, greed, lust, gluttony, revenge and laziness) have become our current norms and values. Family structures have completely collapsed, the street scene has completely changed and there are hardly any differences between Amsterdam, Paris or Washington anymore.

Obviously, we have improved materially but this materiality has also made us close our eyes to what is spiritually higher. It was also Satan who thought he knew better than God. Satan's revolution towards God is beginning to look more and more like modern man's revolution towards nature. So was the flame of Enlightenment given to us by Lucifer after all? Is this drive to achieve paradise on earth not part of this destruction agenda we have been warned about so many times in history? Has not the material gain of the past hundreds of years come at the expense of our spirit? We have never reached such high levels of prosperity in our current society, but at the same time, never were so many people on antidepressants. So does matter actually make us happy?

Under the guise of ‘liberation’, we have emancipated ourselves away from our affluence. What is the end of this thinking? That through transhumanism humans will emancipate themselves away from being human? That humanity will voluntarily abolish itself? That would be (if we remain in Christian terminology for a while) Satan's ultimate revolt.