this self-knowledge at its root by insisting that everything is a “construct,” a plot by the “privileged.”
Once again, phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny instead of the reverse: The primal, universal, species-wide story (phylogeny) is buried deep within each individual organism (ontogeny), within the heart, soul, and psyche of every human being. Story is not a reflection of the world but its engine and essence. Story alone will not achieve the final triumph of Good over Evil, but it propels the way.
“For Germany, the criticism of religion has essentially been completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism,” wrote Marx in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, published in 1844. “Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call upon them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call upon them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” (Emphases are Marx’s.)
These are the demented ravings of a dangerous idiot, given a claim to legitimacy by the facile turns of phrase, the insistence on having it both ways (for the Unholy Left, something can be itself and its exact opposite at the same time), and the rage against reality, in this case the “vale of tears.”
Goethe’s Mephistopheles—a literary adumbration of Marx if ever there was one—could not have said it better, for it takes a Father of Lies to convince others to rebel against the evidence of their hearts and their senses, not to mention their own self-interest. If we simply analyze the words of Marx’s famous statement about the opium of the masses, what do we get? References to “protest,” of course—that would become a staple of leftist agitation for more than a century afterward—as well as “illusion.” This recalls the scene in Faust, Part One, outside the venerable Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig, in which Mephisto frees a group of students from a spell with these words: “Irrtum, laß los der Augen Band! Und merkt euch, wie der Teufel spaße.” (“O Error, let loose their eyes’ bond! / And heed how the Devil jokes.”)
Lying is the centerpiece of both the satanic and the leftist projects. Since few people would willingly consign themselves to Hell, the rebels (for so they always reflexively think of themselves) must mask their true intentions. Reviewing François Furet’s 2014 book, Lies, Passions, and Illusions, Brian Anderson, editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, wrote in National Review:
Communism’s power to seduce, Furet begins, was partly based on the mendacity of Marxist regimes and their followers. “Communism was certainly the object of a systematic lie,” he writes, “as testified to, for example, by the trips organized for naïve tourists and, more generally, by the extreme attention the Soviet regime and the Communist parties paid to propaganda and brainwashing.” Yet these lies were exposed quickly and often, almost from October 1917 on. They wouldn’t have remained so effective for so long without the emotional pull of the grand illusions that they served: that the Bolsheviks were the carriers of history’s true meaning, and that Communism in power would bring about true human emancipation. . . . Describing Communism as a secular religion isn’t an exaggeration.
Faust’s famous bargain with the Devil (made at Easter, let us recall), was not simply for perfect wisdom (he expresses his frustration with imperfect, earthly modes of study in the poem’s famous opening), but also for a brief moment of perfect happiness, a moment to which he can say, “tarry a while, thou art so fair”—something he believes to be impossible. To Faust, this seems like a good bet:
FAUST
Were I to lay me down, becalmed, on a idler’s bed,
It’d be over for me in a trice!
If you can fawningly lie to me,
Until I am pleased with myself,
If you can deceive me with gaiety,
Then that will be my last day!
This bet I offer you.
MEPHISTOPHELES
You’re on!
FAUST
And you’re on!
Were I to say to the moment:
“Abide with me! You are so beautiful!”
Then you may clap me in irons,
Then will I wish to go to perdition!
Faust, so very German, is also the perfect modern man: born in the nineteenth century, wreaking havoc in the twentieth, and still battling against both God and the Devil in the twenty-first, often while denying the existence of both. He is the essence of the daemonic, if not quite the satanic. After all, in Goethe’s telling, Faust is ultimately saved, in part by Gretchen’s sacrifice—saved, that is, by the Eternal Feminine, the sexual life force greater than the power of Hell, which pulls men ever onward and closer to the Godhead—and also by God’s infinite grace, which can even overcome a bargain with the Devil, if man only strives hard enough.
What would the Unholy Left do without illusion? It is the cornerstone of their philosophical and governing philosophy, a desperate desire to look at basic facts and plain meanings and see otherwise, to see, in fact, the very opposite. From this standpoint, nothing is ever what it seems (unless it comports with quotidian leftist dogma), and everything is subject to challenge. At the same time, the Left’s fondness for complexity over simplicity betrays its affection for obfuscation and misdirection. The reason the leftist program dares not show its true face in an American election is that it would be overwhelmingly rejected (even today, after a century of constant proselytism from its redoubts in academia and the media). But in an age when credentialism is disguised as supreme, practically Faustian knowledge, and when minutiae are elevated to the status of timeless universal principles (even as the existence of such principles is otherwise denied), Leftism masquerades as sophistication and expertise. But the mask conceals only intellectual juvenile delinquency gussied up in Hegelian drag. The coat might be too small and the shoes too big, but if you don’t look too closely and really wish to believe—as in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot—the illusion might pass for reality.
Which brings us back to Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, the embodiment of the antithetical, whose adherents elevated this delinquent doublespeak into an art form, brought it to the U.S. via Switzerland after fleeing the Nazis, and—wittingly or unwittingly—injected into American intellectual society an angry, defeatist philosophy alien to the Anglo-American and Enlightenment traditions. The Frankfurt School thinkers were the cream of German philosophical society—which is to say the cream of the restive European intellectual society of the period—who had made international reputations for themselves at the University of Frankfurt and then received a warm welcome into the American Ivy League.
The
