More on frauds, quacks, and hoodlums:
We shouldn't be so quick to dismiss DeSade. He gained notoriety for writing Justine: Tales From the Bedroom, but most of his writing dealt with social and political issues of the day. He had quite a following, the bohos of the day thought he was quite the hep cat.
I only mentioned Rousseau and not Voltaire et al because Rousseau was the most radical of the bunch. I remind you of what Voltaire wrote Rousseau after receiving a copy of his Social Contract, "I have received your new book against the human race, and I thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit more than sixty years ago, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it." Like most of his ilk, Rousseau was good at demolishing, but clueless as to what to construct. Verdict: quack hoodlum
Thanks to Darwin we had the lovely racialist and eugenicist theories masked as science, which killed millions of people early in the century. Verdict: hoodlum
Margaret Sanger picked up on Darwin's idea and ran with it. See above for the consequences. Verdict: hoodlum
No need to single out Madame Blavatsky. She was one of many spiritualists and mediums that are forerunners of our silly New Age movement. Certainly less harmful than Crowley.
You call Marx a quack. The air we breathe today is Marxist. The damage done is irreperable. I don't have my copy of The Communist Manifesto handy, but off the top of my head I can think of at least two of the ten planks in the platform that are ingrained in American life; the progressive income tax, and government run schools. We are well on our way to abolishing inheritance as well. Verdict: hoodlum
Don't know enough about Freud to assess honestly, but he seems like a quack, so I thought I'd mention him.
You rather blithely dismiss Margaret Mead as being a victim of a con job. Do you think she was that stupid? No, of course she wasn't. She knew the real construct of societies she was studying, but in order to hurry Europe and America down the progressive path she knew she had to paint a picture of this utopia, and if only the West would drop their materialism and that pesky Christian teaching we could all experience paradise on earth. She suffered from that leftist malady that Tom Wolfe called nostalgie de la boue, glorifying the mud. Verdict: fraud
You're right about Havelock Ellis. I mentioned him because he was an ally of Margaret Sanger and a forerunner of Alfred Kinsey. Verdict: quack and wannabe hoodlum
If I pondered the matter, I'm sure I could come up with a slew of names for The Index of Frauds, Quacks, and Hoodlums. |
