Oct. 27, 2023 - The Truth Central - Dr. Jerome Corsi
35:55
Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno and Neo-Marxist Theory - Where Woke Came From and Where it's Going Pt 6
Dr. Jerome Corsi digs deeply into Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, who despised capitalism and the "enlightenment morality." The two men canonized the Marquis de Sade, celebrating him in their own collaborative works, and advocated the abandonment of objective classical values for a more self-centered inhibition-releasing cultural direction. Dr. Corsi takes a critical look at Horkheimer's and Adorno's worldview and influence on modern Neo-Marxist theory.Today's The Truth Central features commentary from Dr. Corsi's new book: The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism and Anarchy. Pick up your copy today on Amazon: https://www.thetruthcentral.com/the-truth-about-neo-marxism-cultural-maoism-and-anarchy-exposing-woke-insanity-in-the-age-of-disinformation/Get your FREE copy of Dr. Corsi's new book with Swiss America CEO Dean Heskin, How the Coming Global Crash Will Create a Historic Gold Rush by calling: 800-519-6268Follow Dr. Jerome Corsi on Twitter: @corsijerome1Our website: https://www.thetruthcentral.comOur link to where to get the Marco Polo 650-Page Book on the Hunter Biden laptop & Biden family crimes free online: https://www.thetruthcentral.com/marco-polo-publishes-650-page-book-on-hunter-biden-laptop-biden-family-crimes-available-free-online/Our Sponsors:MyVital https://www.thetruthcentral.com/myvitalc-ess60-in-organic-olive-oil/ Swiss America: https://www.swissamerica.com/offer/CorsiRMP.php The MacMillan Agency: https://www.thetruthcentral.com/the-macmillan-agency/ Pro Rapid Review: https://prorrt.com/thetruthcentralmembers/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-truth-central-with-dr-jerome-corsi--5810661/support.
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This has been Drone Course here. Today is Friday, October 27th.
Thank you for joining me on vTruthCentral.com.
I'm traveling again today, so you get to see another hotel room, and I can't really control the lighting in here particularly well, so we'll have to deal with it.
We're going to talk again today, this is the first week of publication, it's out, The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy, Exposing Woke Insanity in the Age of Disinformation.
You can see it's a substantial book, I mean it's got 1,441 Footnotes in it and it's about 400 pages long.
I think it's over 400 pages long.
We're talking about the the whole nature of how woke came to be and trying to get you to understand that this it took a long hundreds of years of development that started out with the with Immanuel Kant, German philosopher in the 1700s, who was saying that our Experience of everything, of objective reality, is subjective.
In other words, we experience through our senses.
And therefore, there is no objective reality as such, except that Kant said we had an a priori, kind of a built-in sense of how things really were.
There was an objective reality and there were values and there were truths and falsehoods.
This evolved over time.
Where the Marxists took over and began to really say that the Marxists did not, they weren't atheists.
Karl Marx was not an atheist.
He hated God.
He hated God because God ruled.
And he wanted, he wanted to rule.
He did not want to be subject to a God who had moral values.
Satan was his preference.
Basically the whole idea that Garden of Eden was constructed so that we wouldn't attempt to be God.
We wouldn't attempt to know what God knows, that God had designed this place so that we would be limited, we would die, we'd be limited, and we wouldn't know what God knows.
Of course, the Garden of Eden was supposed to be perfect, except if we violated this one law, which is to eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree, and Marx certainly did.
Now, We're going to talk about two figures of the Frankfurt School today.
One is Theodor Adorno, and the other is Max Horkheimer.
The two of them were very influential.
A couple of points in the comments.
Frankfurt School is not strictly a Marxist orientation.
Pure Marxism, which is back to the original Marx, either the young Marx or the older Marx, has to do a lot with the overturning of capitalism.
And the injustice of alienation of labor that we are working and yet the benefit of our work is gained by the capitalists, not by the workers.
And so therefore, the original idea was the workers of the world would revolt.
Private property would be eliminated.
We would share private property in common.
It would be common property.
And a lot of the disputes from inequality The capitalism brings about economic inequality would be eliminated.
Now, the 1848, the revolt that occurred across Europe against the established order did not result in communism.
The workers of the world did not rise up and revolt.
So, you have a disconnect in that Gramsci, an Italian communist in the World War II, or run up to World War II era, in Mussolini period, Uh, was in prison and he wrote these prison notebooks and he reformed, reformulated Marxism to say we need to have an attack on the culture.
Now the Frankfurt school is no longer pure Marxist.
It has to do with a blending of Marx and Freud.
That's the, that's the building with the Frankfurt school was housed, uh, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and Horkheimer, uh, was ran the, The Institute, and I'll give you a little bit of background on the two.
Adorno was born in Frankfurt on September 11, 1903.
His father was a German Jew who converted to Protestantism about the time that Theodore was born.
He owned a wine wholesaling business established in Frankfurt in 1822.
He was very successful in business.
Okay, and Adorno He had a very protected childhood and youth.
He was very musically inclined, and the great tension in his life was the love of music and his desire to be a composer, which competed with his fascination with the German philosophic tradition that grew out of Immanuel Kant.
He studied philosophy, psychology, and sociology at the Goethe-Institut in Frankfurt, and he took his doctoral dissertation On Husserl's Phenomenology, which is a very abstract phenomenon.
Husserl is difficult, like many of these people are, to read.
So, when World War I started, World War II started, Horkheimer, who had headed the Institute, went to Los Angeles and he joined, was joined by Adorno, who came to Los Angeles as well.
And Adorno and Horkheimer wrote a book called The Dialectics of the Enlightenment, which is a very important book in the history of the post-modern, post- the neo-Marxist movement.
They are becoming neo-Marxist because they're evolving Marxist theory into more of an attack on the culture.
The book, this whole dialectic of enlightenment, was an attempt to understand how, and I'm reading from the book a bit, The incredible barbarism of Nazi Germany was the culmination of the Enlightenment's Age of Reason.
So the Age of Reason was about how reason applied like in science.
The 17th and 18th century was believed would lift human beings to a new higher spiritual level of freedom through advances in the sciences.
And this was all to be an experimental method test and retest and Test hypotheses and search for the truth by the scientific method.
Again, exploring objective reality with objective tools and reason.
But for Horkheimer and Adorno, the Enlightenment was a failed project because it produced the grotesque horror of Hitler and Nazism.
Both Adorno and Horkheimer were Jews.
Neither one could comprehend why the German proletariat did not join the communist left Even more puzzling to Horkheimer and Adorno in Germany in 1933, when Hitler assumed power, is that Hitler enjoyed the admiration of a large significant number of the German population.
So this book, The Dialect of Enlightenment, was written during World War II, when it was raging in Europe.
And they were trying to explain why mankind, instead of entering a truly human condition, is shrinking into a new kind of barbarism.
Their investigations concluded that the Enlightenment age of reason had self-destructed, based on the proposition that social freedom is inseparable from Enlightenment thought.
In other words, they concluded that the dialectical extension of capitalism had now not produced Social Freedom.
Instead, Enlightenment produced a cultural of capitalist enslavement in Germany that the authors feared was developing in the United States.
Okay, so they're fascinated with how this age that had produced Beethovens and all these and, you know, Goethe, all the artists, the poets, the musicians, had also produced Adolf Hitler, which was one of the greatest horrors in human history.
The chapter that made the biggest impact on the Frankfurt School's development of Neo-Marxist theory was called the Cultural Industry, Enlightenment as Mass Deception.
Now here we're getting into the idea at the beginning of postmodernism that you create a constructive reality through language and through the idea of the images you put forward, which are largely cultural images.
So what Horkheimer and Adorno explained was that in Germany and the United States, that the cultural, the culture industry was established, became an established religion, like as it were a secular religion of objective truth and morality.
And it led to Hitler.
And that, you know, culture stamped everything and this whole post, you know, the whole capitalist culture was producing Adolf Hitler.
So they say films, radio and television, this is reading from their book.
Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part.
Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system.
These people are very hard to read and hard to understand what they're talking about.
It's very dense.
The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are outward signs, in other words, skyscrapers.
of the ingenious planning of international concerns toward which the unleashed entrepreneurial system
whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and and businesses business premises in grimy
spiritless cities was already hastening now the older homes just outside the concrete
city centers look like slums and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy
structures of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand
to be discarded after a while like empty food cans so So these people basically despised anything that had to do with material culture.
And they felt that the consumers of the culture were the workers and employees, the farmers, the lower middle class who were confined in body and spirit.
And that they became a working class that was imprisoned with a conspicuous consumption of goods not truly needed and the passing of idle time with amusements not designed to be uplifting.
So they felt we were trapped in this culture which kept life to be basically vacuous.
I'll read another paragraph.
This is from, again, the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
When German fascists decide one day to launch a word, say, intolerable, over the loudspeakers, the next day the whole nation is saying intolerable.
By the same pattern, the nations against whom the weight of the German blitzkrieg was thrown took the word into their own jargon.
The general repetition of names for measures to be taken by the authorities makes them, so to speak, familiar Just as the brand name on everybody's lips increased sales in the air of the free market.
The blind and rapid spreading repetition of words with special designations links advertising with a totalitarian watchword.
Okay, so the general thrust of this entire outlook is focused on culture.
And it's culture, the same way that we talked about yesterday with Marcuse, what comes later in the 1960s, 1968 period, the materialism, the working necessity to produce goods and to have to work in order to eat and to live, is somehow offensive to these Frankfurt School thinkers.
They think that we need to be at a higher level of fulfillment in our lives so that we are more actualized human beings, whatever that means, and we would not engage in atrocities like World War II or the concentration camps and Hitler.
Now the bizarre feature that I'm going to go into next is that their hero was Marquis de Sade.
They devoted a chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment to Juliet, who was the evil hero Marquis de Sade's saga, in which the virtuous sister Justine is destroyed.
And the title of the chapter, Excursus 2, Juliet on Enlightenment and Morality.
What this suggests is that we can stay with the Enlightenment and its morality of subjugation, you know, liberating, or we can liberate ourselves if we choose to do so, but liberating demands embracing Juliet's sexual revolution, to be liberated We must mock Enlightenment's reason and break the chains of its subjugation morality.
Sade's Enlightenment dialectic posits Juliette's outrageous immorality against Justine's Enlightenment morality to demonstrate that Horkheimer and Adorno conclude that the ultimate conclusion ultimate outcome of the enlightenment's enslavement
morality was the abandonment of human freedom.
Juliet comes to ruin because she's a slave to the enlightenment morality
that she virtuously follows. Just that's Justine. And Juliet, who does not, is a libertine.
They are saying it's the liberated self-actualized human life.
Now Horkheimer and Adorno began their treatment of Juliet with the following reflections on Immanuel
Kant.
I'm going to read one more paragraph that I think I'm going to ask Chris to comment.
The paragraph from the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
The conceptual apparatus determines the senses even before perception occurs.
A priori, the citizen sees the world as the matter from which he himself manufactures it.
Intuitively, Kant foretold what Hollywood conspicuously put into practice in the very process of production.
Images are pre-censored according to the norm of the understanding, which will later govern their apprehension.
Okay, so again, it's this convoluted world in which our perception of reality is subjective, and so the culture we experience Is it socially constructed reality because we're having to agree upon it?
and or at least enough to communicate but Horkheimer and Adorno concluded the Marxist
working-class revolution failed because the enlightenment empowered capitalists to create
an enslavement culture in which we could would enslave ourselves rather than reading Freud into
Marx. Horkheimer and Adorno unleashed libido, unbridled sexual energy, eros, into their agents
of destruction.
So once they unleashed Eros, they had the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the 1960s, which was a massive change force to abandon the idea of the traditional marriage between a man and a woman, to abandon the idea of family and raising children.
The idea that we needed to have fidelity in order to preserve the continuity of the family.
All these things that they doubted, they substituted with, you know, sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Under the justification that Juliet was the truly liberated of the two sisters in Marquis de Sade.
Chris, you want to comment?
Yeah, it sounds like they want a combination of Caligula and Mao's administrations.
Yeah, well, it is a, It turned out to be a very seductive argument and it, you know, comes at the, it gained, was written during World War II to explain Hitler.
But what it influenced was the, you know, the hippie cultural revolution of the 19, late 1960s, anti-war movement, which was itself very revolutionary oriented, embraced sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
So they embraced this indulgence in a cultural break From classical objective morality, which said there's a heaven and hell, and there's going to be consequences for living a certain way, because they moved beyond... I mean, what I found shocking is that they insist Kant's critique of pure reason led to Nietzsche's genealogy of morals.
In other words, the Marquis de Sade is the one person who'd cracked the code for Adorno and Horkheimer of explaining Why the Enlightenment had led to a fascist totalitarian state?
More specifically, they noted that Marquis de Sade understood the capitalist enslavement culture as a bourgeois individual freed from tutelage.
Okay, so in other words, once we've internalized the capitalist values, we have self-enslaved ourselves because we have now Determined that we are acting from these values that subjugate us and were designed to subjugate us.
And we go along with the limited morality of having one spouse, of having men and women be the traditional family, of raising children being the purpose of marriage.
And we embark upon this Wide open sea that you determine your own reality and your own reality is subjective and whatever you subjectively experience, whatever gender you are, whatever etc you are, that has to be embraced by everybody.
Chris?
Exactly.
It's basically do as I tell you to do.
I want the world to revolve around me, but it's going to be a utopia.
These people never realize that this can be and will be corrupted.
You have one spoiled kid saying, well, I want you to call me star self because my pronouns are star and star red or whatever you want to call it.
And that might be fun and well amongst your circle of friends.
You try to force other people to do it.
There's going to be a hierarchy saying, wow, we could take advantage of this and make it some kind of movement.
When this happens, you see it all around.
People start feeling, oh, maybe I should do this or else I'll be shunned or I wouldn't feel bad.
And you have a group of people who are taking care of the whole thing and making money off everything.
This is where the issue is.
You have guys like Horkheimer and thinking, hey, Let's imagine a nice utopia where there is no hierarchy, where we can do the sex, drugs, and rock and roll and do whatever we want, and nobody will take advantage of it.
That, my friends, is not reality.
Somebody's going to make money off of it, and somebody's going to control others off of it somehow and somewhere.
You've got human beings in the mix, and they're still human beings.
There you go.
Ever notice that all the world's problems boil down to one thing?
What's that?
People.
Right, yeah.
And these guys ultimately want to get rid of people because they're tired of them and they don't think they're worth anything.
People, the new climate change.
That's where the New World Order evolves out of the woke.
Okay, so I'm going to continue to go back to this book, The Reremembering, The Misremembered Left, by Conflit and Higgins.
And I dedicated the book to Coughlin and Higgins.
They're two intelligence analysts who I thought really cracked the code in understanding how woke was developed.
They commented that the Marquis de Sade's appeal when it came to Horkheimer and Adorno came from Marquis de Sade's willingness to assault the Enlightenment directly.
He didn't believe that reason, Marquis de Sade, did not believe that reason was our highest facility.
Sade does so by confronting all the personal, familiar, and social relationships with their antithetical forms.
It's a dialectic.
So you've got marriage.
So Horkheimer and Adorno celebrated Sade's libertine sexual wantonness that attacks the family.
So, quote, there is a dialectical tension between the sisters as Justine is sweet, virtuous, faithful, and in despair and always getting brutalized and dies a premature death, while Juliet is an amoral atheist, nymphomaniac, and murderer who is successful and happy in life.
Coughlin and Higgins Note this.
It is hard to explain the ugliness that Horkheimer envisions without entering the morbid details that Juliet and Justin and Juliet experience in Marquis de Sade's universe.
These two are... I've never been able to read more than a couple of paragraphs of Marquis de Sade.
It's just repetitive nonsense.
He absolutely relished in group sex and bizarre activities, and any kind of sex you can imagine.
The more bizarre, the better.
Now, we feel tempted to sympathize with Justine, because she's the one who suffers in this, in Desaad's fiction, but she's the one who is morally oriented.
Horkheimer and Adorno reject our sympathy for Justine as disgusting.
They end the chapter on Juliet with a question Nietzsche once posed to himself.
Where do your greatest dangers lie?
Nietzsche's answer was in compassion.
They commented with his denial he redeemed the unshakable confidence in man that is Constantly berated by every form of assurance that seeks only to console.
We should not sympathize with those who have self-subjugated in a capitalist slavery by embracing the synthetic reality the culture industry creates.
Horkheimer and Adorno stated that their Thomas Serato, their compassion, is sick and useless because the opposite is manly prowess.
They explained that compassion is not consistent with Roman virtue by way of the Medici's down to the efficacy required by the Henry Ford family.
It's always been about, you know, about the only bourgeois capitalist value, which is, you know, essentially the ability to work, produce, etc.
Horkheimer and Adorno point out that De Sade and Nietzsche had in common a doctrine of sinfulness, of compassion.
Agreeing that compassion is an old bourgeois heritage crafted by capitalists to feign sympathy for the prowess and weakness of weak people.
So, again, you find a strong When you first read it, when I first read it, I mean, I couldn't... I had to really double check and make sure they really were going to go into this Marquis de Sade.
And then I realized that the whole Frankfurt School was obsessed with sex.
They were all involved with Freud.
I cover many of them that were from... several of them who were just involved entirely in developing from Marxism into free sex.
And uninhibited sex.
That became for them the liberating factor that would destroy the authoritarian personality who focused on taking the enlightenment and making it into an instrument that led to Nazism when Hitler produced Hitler.
The over-rationality, the over, you know, that basically you've got a structure where the Focus on rationality, rationality, rationality produced weapons.
And that was his logical outcome to Horkheimer and Adorno.
Chris?
The idea is if it feels good, do it.
But they want to couple that up with something, well, Marxism's not going to feel good for everybody.
But if you have all that free sex and free love, everything will work out just fine.
This is why you see a lot of these communist countries find ways to give people these free little perks here, where they can get just enough of their fun, they can do what they want to a certain degree, but don't speak up against the government, do what you're told in that respect, and nobody gets hurt, I guess.
But you distract people with the shiny keys, the carnal pleasures, if you will, give them as much as they want, and they will refuse to worship a church, they'll worship the state, basically thank the state for putting this all together.
Again, we're combining Caligula with Mao.
Yeah.
I want to comment on one other, we'll wrap up here by going to A couple of points on how this morphs into postmodernism.
David Harvey was a distinguished professor of anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
In 1989, he wrote a book called The Conditions of Postmodernity, and he described it as a breakdown of the Enlightenment project.
He explained that the Enlightenment took it as axiomatic, that there was only one possible answer to any question.
It was objective reality.
If you were trying to measure gravity, it had a measurable quantity to it.
It was a fixed entity that you couldn't change by wishing it away.
And so therefore, the world could be controlled rationally if we could only picture and represent it rightly.
But this presumed there existed a single correct mode of representation in which we could uncover it.
Scientific and mathematical endeavors were all about doing this.
It would provide the means to enlightenment ends, which were the evolution, you know, the raising of human culture, the raising of human beings to a higher, more rational level.
Now, Jean-Paul Lyotard, which is L-Y-O-T-A-R-D, was a postmodernist thinker, and he Um, talked about meta narratives, which undermine the enlightenment confidence and certainty of reason and the advances in progress, progress promised by science and technology.
So for leotard, there's postmodernist condition.
There is no one of multiple competing worldviews can be determined to be the final word on some objective reality.
What that does is it empowers the.
The schizophrenic to be the cultural savant, cultural genius.
Identity politics in which each person's subjective experiences, equally valid with other competing subjective experiences, elevates schizophrenia to the realm of morality and politics.
As Gramsci pointed out, attacking the culture is the only way to undermine established orders, including capitalism.
Thus, the Frankfurt School became determined to undermine establishment culture, As their methodology of choice for destroying capitalism.
What they did is they went after the traditional family.
They went after the idea that incest is a bad idea.
They went after the pedophilia ought to be accepted.
Homosexuality, lesbianism, transsexualism, all were okay with them.
And it was simply a matter of the real attraction was that these, the core values that held The Enlightenment family together were that there was objective reality that was right and wrong.
There was morality that could be taught to children.
And God exists.
There's a purpose to life.
There's consequences to our behavior in terms of our ultimate destinies, good or bad.
And that the most solid social institution was the family.
And it was necessary for raising, for procreating, And for raising children when he had a man and a wife as husband and wife together, man and woman together, and the children were raised in that family unit.
But when you get to all these other differences and all these other insistences, that that is a life that's captive to producing goods, to making goods, leading a vacuous life.
And there's a higher life that has to do with on artistic enjoyment, music,
and let the machines do all the work.
These people, the Frankfurt School really does not see a need for humanity unless it's enlightened
according to their principles.
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This is Dr. Jerome Coursey.
Thank you for joining us.
In the end, God always wins.
God will win here too.
We are going to go through the judgment of God for allowing God to be taken out of our hearts, out of the public square.
All these millions of babies killed in the womb viciously, violating God's law.
The remedy is 2 Chronicles 7, 14.
If we get on our knees and pray and ask God's forgiveness for allowing the world to get to this point and removing God from our consciousness and our lives, God will hear our prayer and heal our land.
It's not going to be easy.
It's not going to be fun.
But I think in the end, We are not going to be dominated by this woke nonsense.
I think it will be a passing phase, and people will look back to see how crazy it was.
But you've got to understand, and that's why I've written this book, The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchism.
We are going through this phase.
We are now into cultural Maoism, and it will produce anarchy, and it has already.
This is Dr. Jerome Corsi.
This is Friday.
It's October 26, 2023.
Thank you for joining us on TheTruthCentral.com.
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