How liberalism leads to satanism

(Note: See Moron Perspective Alert, below.)

Commenting on the satanic rap scene (or whatever the correct word for it is) that the murdered pastor’s murdered daughter Emma Niederbrock and her murdered friend Melanie Wells belonged to, James M2 writes:

“Stabwound Orgasm,” the name of Melanie Wells’s MySpace page, is the title of an album by a Spanish death-metal band called Avulsed.

“Lyrical themes: Death, Gore, Mutilation, Sex, Perversion”

This may be too obvious to mention, but don’t you think kids like Melanie Wells and [the murdered 19 year old British model] Amy Barnes find the “sex-death combo” so engrossing because those are the only two influential forces in their lives? They’ve rejected or have been dispossessed of everything else. No religion, no morality, no culture, no family. Sex and death are just what’s left over.

LA replies:

Well, as I said the other day: liberal parents, satanic children.

You are completely correct about the final destination of liberalism. What is liberalism? The reduction of all values to the radically autonomous self and the equality of all such selves, and thus the emptying from life of every substantive good that is larger than or outside of the autonomous self. But the problem is, once all larger substantive goods have been gotten rid of, and the only thing left is the autonomous self and its free choices, what goods are left for the freely choosing autonomous self to choose? All that is left to choose are the two “larger things” that are so fundamental to human life they can never be gotten rid of, even by liberalism: sex and death. But sex deprived of the normal context of culture, morality, family, religion tends to become extreme or perverted sex in which one seeks—in the absence of and as a substitute for any normal good—ever more extreme sensations; which leads to sex connected with death; and thus the marriage of sex and murder; and thus “Stabwound Orgasm.”

Liberal parents, satanic childen. Q.E.D.

- end of initial entry -

September 23

LA writes:

I’m going to borrow a device of Paul Mulshine’s and post a Moron Perspective Alert. Anyone who believes that this entry is saying that all children of liberal parents, or, simply, all liberals, are satanists is suffering from lack of thinking ability so severe it can be described as moronism. What I am doing in this entry explaining, in paradigmatic form, how liberalism leads to satanism. I am not saying that all liberals are satanists. Only a moron could believe that I am saying that or that I believe that.

Richard W. writes:

There are two additional points that I thought of while reading your excellent article:

The next phase of this episode will surely involve the high-priests of liberalism, psychiatrists, explaining how the killer is not fully responsible for his actions, due to mental illness. Given that all of the currently in-vogue psychiatric theories of mental illness and are based on chemical imbalances in the brain, we are sure to be told that the damaged brain of the killer is the root cause of this atrocity. (Extending your logic a bit, at that point I think it would be fair to say that liberalism causes brain damage!)

Such analysis leaves out the traditional explanation for crimes such as this: Satan has found a willing accomplice and worked through him to do terrible things. Catholics, among whom I was raised, traditionally take Satan very seriously. He is a powerful supernatural being who is capable of inflicting huge evil on this world, through his agents, principally fallen men.

Assuming the killer does not recant his beliefs he might very well agree with this classical interpretation of events. This would provide a sterling example of the secular religion of liberals, psychiatry, insisting upon its own interpretation of events and causes as definitive. And, all those insisting on a more spiritual (or even simple morality) based interpretation of these events will be lumped in with the killer as suffering from “the god delusion.”

This insistence of not just supremacy of their belief system, but their claims of exclusive ownership of the truth while simultaneously denigrating all other belief systems as sickness sets modern liberals a notch above all other believers in hubris. Even Islam, the least tolerant of modern religions, permits that other “people of the book” are basically on the side of God.

As for the interpretation of the event, I ask you, which theory fits the facts better?

Kathlene M. writes:

An excellent entry! I woke up this morning thinking about this very same topic before I saw your post. It’s good you noted the Moron Perspective Alert because you just know that someone somewhere is going to strongly accuse you of saying all liberals are satanists.

In the absence of God-based morality as a guiding force in society, society will fill the vacuum with poor substitutes. There’s a very old saying in the computer world: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO). This means that if you put faulty information into a computer, you will get faulty output or results. The same principle applies to the human brain. If you fill your brain with evil thoughts, songs, or beliefs, you may very well manifest evil actions. Modern Liberalism produces alot of Garbage in, Garbage out as we can see all around us today.

A reader who received the entry on the VFR mailing lislt this morning writes:

This is just moronic—but what else can one expect of the brilliant and illustrious Lawrence Auster?

Now here’s the assignment, class: write a companion piece of idiocy, stating how conservatism leads to mental illness, murderous nihilism and death? Since anyone can say anything with impunity in the Austrosian world, such an assignment should be a snap.

LA replies:

You’re just namecalling, you’re not making an argument. What is wrong with my argument, why is it moronic?

Reader replies:

Your “argument”—less an argument than a dogma dressed up as an argument (“QED” indeed!)—is itself a form of name calling: liberalism is evil incarnate. Ja? You just have to take a couple of steps to get from the liberalism part to the incarnate part.

Look: it’s NOT EMPIRICAL. If you think you can’t find oodles of Satanists from right-wing homes, you are a silly man indeed. And you can find oodles of decent folk from liberal homes. So what is the common factor? I silly ideologue will blame liberalism and conservatism for whatever evils he wishes. This is simply not worth talking about, and if you don’t know why, I ain’t a gonna tell you.

And by the way, I ain’t no liberal.

LA replies:

Given your lack of reading comprehension, in which you construe my step by step argument as “calling liberalism evil incarnate” (which was not at all what I said, I said that liberalism leads to evil, not that liberalism is evil); and given your hostility to me and my positions, and given that when I replied to your initial namecalling not by calling you names but by politely asking you for arguments, you explicitly refuse to give arguments but instead continue to call me names, I am astounded that you have been on my mailing list for all these years, receiving scores or hundreds of my articles, and have never complained before. I will relieve you of any further annoyance from my quarter.

LA writes:

Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative adds a further element to the picture. He quotes the main part of my comment in the initial entry, then writes:

Auster posed the question to explain why two American girls would be attracted to a sex and death music subculture, leading to their own murder. He observes that sex and death are two significant aspects of existence left to the liberal autonomous self.

The other side to the answer, though, is that once you get rid of the larger substantive goods you are left with the trivial ones. The autonomous self can encompass smaller goods such as entertainments, dining experiences, consumer choices, socialising and so on—so this is what the modern West excels at.

April 22, 2010

LA writes:

I just came upon this entry and I have a reply to Mark Richardson’s point. He is correct that the autonomous self can encompass smaller goods such as entertainments, dining experiences, consumer choices, etc., and I would further add that the elevation of such trivialities to the meaning of life describes modern liberal culture to a great degree. However, for those members of liberal society who desire something larger and more meaningful than entertainments, dining experiences, consumer choices, etc., and who are unwilling to go beyond liberalism or construct major unprincipled exceptions to liberalism, all that is there is sex/death and various nihilistic variations on sex/death.

The above analysis leaves out another larger good that people might pursue: the leftist political good of saving the human race, creating the Equal Fraternity of Man and so on. But such a fraternity, constructed of nothing but the assertion of the equal autonomy of all its members and their equal right to all the material and experiential goods of life (including, now, their equal human right to have vacations), requires the increasingly coercive redistribution of the goods of life from those who have them to those who don’t, inevitably devolving downward into the sheer assertion of will by rulers and mobs, and thus to death. Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the United States represent very different stages of this process, with Zimbabwe the most advanced, the United States the least advanced, and South Africa in the middle, but they are all located on the same continuum of leftist equality.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 23, 2009 05:38 AM | Send