The Brazilian publishing house Vide Editorial has just released a Portuguese translation of The Fool and Its Enemy by Jeffrey Nyquist, President of the Inter-American Institute and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Political Science. The book is a masterful analysis of the crisis of the Western liberal democracies and its refusal to defend itself against its enemies (since those societies also refuse to recognize they have enemies).
Brazilian media has been wrongfully reporting that the Inter-American Institute is organizing event with Congressman Bolsonaro in NYC
On August 25, 2017, the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo published an article reporting a trip of Brazilian Congressman Jair Bolsonaro to the United States and claiming that the congressman had been invited to participate in a panel discussion by philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, fellow of the Inter-American Institute.
Last week, on October 3, a letter written by the current president of the Inter-American Institute, Jeffrey Nyquist, was sent to Folha de Sao Paulo, clarifying that the Inter-American Institute is not in any way involved in the sponsoring or the organization of the event in NYC, and requesting that the clarification note be published by that newspaper in order to correctly inform the Brazilian public about the fact that the Institute is not responsible for the organization of the panel discussion.
Folha de Sao Paulo, however, has not yet published the clarification letter sent 7 days ago and continues to claim that the Inter-American Institute is sponsoring and organizing the event with Congressman Jair Bolsonaro.
Therefore, the Inter-American Institute has decided to publish the letter sent to that Brazilian newspaper so that its readership might be correctly informed about the matter.
Movie tells the story of homonymous book by Brazilian philosopher and fellow of IAI
On March 23, 2017, the documentary movie “The Garden of Afflictions” will be screened at the Virginia Commonwealth University at 7 PM, in the building of the Academic Learning Commons, at 1000 Floyd Avenue, Richmond, VA. The documentary is about the Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho and his book “The Garden of Afflictions,” after which the movie was named. Olavo de Carvalho is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy (IAI), Government, and Social Thought, and the most important Brazilian philosopher in action nowadays. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with the film director Josias Teófilo and Mr. Olavo de Carvalho himself.
Women have always been exploited by men. That is a truth that nobody doubts. From the solemn lecture halls in Oxford to popular TV shows, from Collège de France to pop music groups, the world reaffirms that certainty, maybe the most unquestionable truth that has ever crossed the human mind—that is, if it ever actually crossed it, for it might have come straight out of wombs into academic books.
Not desiring to go against such an august unanimity, I here intend to list a few facts that may reinforce, in the hearts of believers of all existing and yet-to-be-invented sexes, their hatred against heterosexual adult males, those execrable creatures that no one who was unlucky enough to be born as a male wants to be when he grows up.
Our narrative begins at the dawn of time, at some imprecise moment between the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons. It was in those dark ages that the exploitation of women started. Living in caves, the human communities were constantly ravaged by the attacks of wild beasts. Males, taking advantage of their prerogatives as members of the ruling class, hurried to secure for themselves the safest and most comfortable of places of the social order: they remained inside the caves—what rascals!—preparing food for their babies, while the poor females, armed only with clubs, went outside to fight lions and bears.
When the hunting and gathering economy was replaced by agriculture and cattle-raising, men took advantage of women again, always assigning them the hardest jobs, such as moving rocks and blocks of stone, taming wild horses, and cutting furrows on the ground with a plough, while they, those lazy pants, stayed home painting pottery and weaving. That is revolting.
When the great empires of antiquity dissolved, yielding their places to a bedlam of warring fiefdoms, feudal lords quickly formed their private armies, exclusively made up of women, while men took refuge in castles and remained there enjoying the good life, delighting in the reading of the poems that warrior women wrote, in between battles, to praise their manly charms.
When someone had the extravagant idea of spreading Christianity throughout the world, which required sending missionaries to all corners of the Earth, where they ran the risk of being impaled by heathens, stabbed by highway robbers, or butchered by an audience bored with their preaching, the heavy burden of that mission was laid upon women, while men Machiavellianly stayed home and made novenas before their family altars.
The poor women were victims of the same kind of exploitation on the occasion of the Crusades, where, clad in heavy armors, they crossed deserts to be run through by the swords of the moors (female moors, of course, since the partisans of Mohammed were no less sexists than we). And what about the great voyages of discovery!? Seeking gold and diamonds to adorn idle males, brave female seafarers crossed the seven seas and fought against ferocious indigenous male warriors whose only advances towards them were, alas, of a military nature.
Finally, when the modern state instituted military conscription for the first time in history, government armies were made up of women, and beheading at the guillotine was the punishment for those who insisted on resisting or dodging the draft. All of that, of course, so that men could stay home reading The Princesse de Clèves.
In short, for millennia women have been dying in the battle field, moving blocks of stone, erecting buildings, fighting wild beasts, crossing deserts, seas, and jungle, making all sorts of sacrifice for us, idle males, to whom no challenge remains other than that of getting their hands dirty in soiled diapers.
In exchange for the sacrifice of their lives, women, our heroic defenders, have not demanded from us anything except the right to raise their voices at home, make a few cigarette burn marks on tablecloths, and, occasionally, leave a pair of socks in the TV room for us to pick up.
Translated from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota.
Olavo de Carvalho is the President of The Inter-American Institute and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Philosophy, Political Science, and the Humanities.
The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute. Translation from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota.
How Do Cultural Shifts Happen? A lecture originally delivered online in Portuguese as an introduction for Mr. Olavo de Carvalho’s Brazilian Philosophy Seminar.
Student: In an interview you gave to Atlântico magazine, you said that, instead of dividing the political spectrum into right-wing and left-wing, we should try to classify political movements as revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, because this latter pair of concepts enables us to see, for example, that some political positions and movements usually regarded as right-wing are actually revolutionary and thus belong together with left-wing movements—something which escapes our view when we use the usual definitions of left and right. Regarding this problem you have been addressing so far, have you developed another key to understanding the problem of progress, something like your concepts of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary?
Olavo: No, I have not. What I am doing is merely splitting apart a pair of concepts and saying that they do not form a pair of opposites in reality. More accurately, only at the level of vocabulary—only semantically speaking―, backwardness is the opposite of progress. In historical reality, there is no such thing as a phenomenon of backwardness which is the contrary of progress. Even if in our minds we conceive progress as a forward movement and backwardness as backward movement, the fact is we know that in reality time never moves backwards and that it is impossible for it to do so. Now, let us examine the expressions “advanced societies” and “backward societies” in light of this. It is obvious that the current conditions of any society can get worse, but they cannot literally go back to a prior state because the present conditions of a society include all their prior states. Some people say: “Oh no, we’re going back to the Stone Age!” But being born in the Stone Age is one thing, and having to live with Stone Age instruments after having known all the technology we have today is quite another. This is not going back to the Stone Age. This is something totally different; this is deterioration, not backwardness.
So, from this you can see that, being among the most used, the most imaginatively powerful, and the most entrenched in our culture, this simple pair of concepts (progress and backwardness) can make people not to understand a number of historical processes. That is to say, if people judge historical processes in terms of progress or backwardness, they will never be able to grasp the reality of what they are considering.
Wanting to become intellectuals, historians, philosophers, and so on, the poor and naive students will naturally apply to and eventually enter universities. The problem is that as they gain entry into the world of high culture, they will receive a severe impact of a huge network of intellectual blinders/impediments. Of course, they will also get a lot of positive knowledge, but when we compare the whole of material knowledge they learned, the whole of the content they acquired at university, with the system of concepts that organize this knowledge, we see that the latter is always more powerful. Why? Because the contents and their organizing concepts relate to each other as form relates to matter, in the Aristotelian sense of these words, and because it is the form of a body of knowledge determines what this knowledge means.
Now, the study of philosophy has precisely the purpose of enabling you to create your own network of concepts according to the actual needs of the quest for knowledge and not according to pre-established social ends, which are rather focused on the creation, expansion, and conservation of cultural fashions. Philosophy is an instrument for the creation of conceptual structures capable of comprehending and transcending the structures of the cultural fashions that prevail at the moment. In this sense, philosophy is a powerful instrument of deculturation. So, since your task is to try to see beyond the horizon of the culture in which you are, the first thing you need to be able do this is to learn how to retrieve the lost cognitive and intellective possibilities from times past.
How do you restore these possibilities? In the first place, you must have the necessary materials at your disposal, that is, the texts and documents that tell you exactly what happened in the periods of the past you are studying. Next, you must use your imagination to try to understand—note well—not the authors of the past as they understood themselves but rather your own situation as those authors would understand it if they were alive.
You cannot study Plato, for example, from the viewpoint of the contemporary culture because you will never understand him. Why? Because, in addition to that series of important cultural mutations that took place in the twentieth century, we are now going through a gigantic transformation in our society, a transformation determined by a factor called “technology.”
The impact of technology on modern society and culture has been only gradually perceived and integrated into human consciousness, and, strictly speaking, we are not yet living in a technological civilization, because technology does not decide and determine all social processes, although it determines a great and important number of them. But there are still a lot of things that are based on processes which have nothing to do with technology. For example, consider the facts that in our society there is a large number of religious people and that these people live, partially at least, within a cultural environment upon which technology has little or no influence at all because it simply has nothing to do with religion.
However, it is one thing to live in an environment where people believe in the existence of a God who has created the world and who is going to drive the process of history until it reaches a certain goal—the end of the world and the passage of all things into eternity. Now, it is quite another to live in a culture where everything is a matter of technology. And the fact is that as the impact of technology on society gets stronger, our culture tends to consider all matters in the light of technology.
The first and most immediate consequence of this is that everything that lies beyond the reach of technological action ends up falling beyond the reach of people’s imagination as well. (When I say “immediate,” however, I do not mean that this effect occurs without any delay, since several decades, at least, may be necessary for it to take place.) Because if technology becomes the main lens through which we view reality, then, sooner or later we will end up only thinking about those things which fall within the grasp of technology or which will supposedly fall within the grasp of technology in the future. This means that, in a sense, the realm of human action (in its material sense) becomes the ultimate horizon of reality and that nothing exists beyond it.
It is evident that the territory which falls within the grasp of man’s technological agency is vast. For instance, we may expect that someday all currently existing diseases will be cured by technological means. This has not happened yet, but we may fairly expect it will, and it is a fact that people have hopes that it will indeed happen. When people contract a disease for which there is no cure yet, what do they usually do? They sit tight and hope that, within two, three, four, five, ten, or twenty years, a cure for their disease will be found. For example, I think that all the HIV positive people in the world entertain this kind of hope. So, as I was saying, there is indeed a realm of existence which can be affected by man’s technological action and this realm is very large. However, when technology is understood as the key to existence, then, quite naturally, all that lies beyond the theoretical possibility of technological action ceases to attract people’s interest. The world, seen from this viewpoint, becomes a sort of laboratory for us to conduct our experiments (which, of course, may go right or wrong), and everything that cannot be tested through experimentation ceases to be of any interest for us.
As a consequence, all those dimensions of existence upon which technology cannot act in any way are viewed as non-existing or irrelevant—an example of this is the phenomenon of death. Nowadays people cannot seriously think about death, only about how to postpone it, which is actually thinking about how to extend human life, or how to prolong human existence. Prolonging human existence is indeed a technological possibility, and more than that, it is a possibility that technology has been able to realize so far. But what about death itself? The fact is that sooner or later, we are all going to die, that death is part of the structure of reality, and that no life-prolonging technology can possibly change this structure. And because the phenomenon of death cannot be affected by technology, because the reality of death lies beyond the reach of technological action, the concept of death is not integrated into our society and we live in a culture where death has no place. For centuries death was one of the most predominant themes in culture, but now, suddenly, the topic of death is gone. People do not talk about it anymore; they only talk about health, about extending life, about eliminating pain, and so on.
When you set out on a quest for high culture in a cultural situation like that, you start your intellectual journey with a huge blind spot in your field of vision, because an entire dimension of reality is invisible for you, as if it has never existed.
Now, the study of high culture and philosophy can help you recover the vision of those lost dimensions of reality, that is, it can help you become capable of imagining that which is not usually imaginable in your own culture. The problem is that acquiring high culture is often identified with acquiring the credentials necessary to obtain government authorization to enter the teaching or the researching profession. This poses a problem for all those who seek to acquire high culture. For it is one thing to want to acquire high culture in order to be able to understand reality, and specially the reality of history, of civilization, of human existence throughout the ages. It is quite another thing to want to acquire high culture in order to be able to practice this or that profession. In fact, these two uses of high culture are not just different, but opposed to each other, because if have to adapt yourself to the present culture to the most, so that you may be able to represent it professionally.
This is why I consider the academic institution to be the worst enemy of higher studies nowadays and why I have remained on the fringes of academia all my life. I have always feared it because I knew it did not strengthen people’s consciousness to enable them to understand reality, but rather molded their minds to enable them to perform certain social roles. Besides, I have also noticed that the social role of the academic and the scientific profession can be so hostile to a true understanding of reality that even the best minds, to the extent they strive to adapt and be successful in those professions, have to maim themselves intellectually so as not to say things that would be incomprehensible or shocking in their professional environments. Of course, there are exceptions to this. There are people who are able to have an academic career and still remain in touch with reality, but they are very scarce.
End of the second part.
Olavo de Carvalho is the President of The Inter-American Institute and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Philosophy, Political Science, and the Humanities.
The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute. This lecture was delivered online in December 2008. Translation from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota and proofreading by Benjamin Mann.
We are not taught any more in most schools, though we ought to be, how humble grammar-school grammar is the way any language formulates logic and meaning. The lesson was implicit in the “trivium” which we inherited from that benighted Middle Ages. To learn grammar is to learn logic. As my (public) high school English teacher in 1952 strictly informed us, “If you cannot say it in good English (or whatever your language), you don’t know it yet.”
Today in some schools, she would be fired for saying such a thing. Competent science will not long survive that kind of treatment. The real target of our cultural “relativity” has not been truth. Everyone needs some bits and pieces of truth just to survive. The target has been moral truth, a casualty of our drive for moral autonomy, our drive to be independent, autonomous decision-makers, to be “as God”, as the serpent in the Garden of Eden promised Eve. Even the teenage street urchins understood the 1962 Engel v. Vitale decision to be the end of moral responsibility. They understood the power of the big “SEZ WHO???” If there is no God, or if He can be successfully dismissed by the Supreme Court, then (as Ivan responds to Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov) nothing can be forbidden.
We now have, for surely the first time in human history, school children taking deadly weapons to each other — for fun! That alone should scare the reader into asking how we got to this state of affairs. This book is part of my answer to the big “SEZ WHO???”, which is part of my answer to the science-vs.-religion “problem”. Science itself does not require morality. Any adequately trained criminal can follow scientific procedure, just as any criminal can train a football team by the rules of football.
But the scientific community and its place in society does require moral responsibility for its declarations and predictions to be believable — a passionate moral commitment for getting at the truth of a matter. That is so, just as a sports league requires morally responsible trainers, players, and referees for the results of contests to be believable. The enormous intellectual authority accorded by the public to the scientific community rests (or should rest) solidly on an earned (as in healthy track-record) reputation for honesty.
In other words, truth and morality each depend on the other. Neither will long survive without the other. And the authority which science bears in society depends fully on the commitment of the scientific community to being truth-seekers, to protecting and defending the common public ground of truth-seeking — at any cost to themselves.
If that is the case, it is worth noting that both the ontological and the moral foundations of Western science are the result largely of the Biblical worldview, and will not survive without it.
Just for good measure, I will venture another prediction, that, again, as we begin to see the essential unity of science and Biblical religion, we will discover with it the essential naturalness of what we commonly call miracles, that miracles appear “miraculous” (strange, astonishing, foreign) only from the fallen world’s point of view. If the Biblical worldview, along with the extraordinary gracefulness of the Biblical God, is true, then one might not be surprised to find that the closer one moves toward a relationship with this gracious God, sovereign over all, that the forces of nature might well obey the commands of those who have this kind of close relationship with this Creator of all things.
And in all of that, science, truth-seeking, will be fulfilled, not compromised. So, my answer to the title question of this section is that science and Biblical religion both logically and practically require each other, and that neither will survive in any very helpful manner without the other.
Dr. Earle Fox is IAI’s Senior Fellow in Philosophy of Science and the Worldview of Ethical Monotheism.
This article was originally published at TheRoadtoEmmaus.org. See also Dr. Fox’s new Book Abortion, the Bible and America.
The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.
Chillingly, the assistant regional director of the Connecticut ADL thus unmistakably indicated he was deeply disturbed that a “right” to deal in what he considered “hate” was still allowed. Presumably, in a more sensitive world, no one would be allowed to exhibit or sell either Nazi or Confederate memorabilia. Needless to say, no moral distinction was made between Nazi Germany and the Confederate States of America. They both stood, or so the ADL official implied, for pure “hate.”
Peter properly suggests if such hate-inspectors get their way, we will be living in a condition of almost Stalinist oppression. We might not be shipped off to gulags(yet), but the control of speech and thought that these professional sensitizers would impose would be reminiscent of the worst examples of Leftist tyranny. I say “Leftist” intentionally—because rightist or non-leftist regimes have never tried to control their subjects’ minds as systematically as the Left.
Even Adolf Hitler’ s Nazi regime largely lost interest in mind reconstruction. It closed up universities as an unnecessary expense by the early 1940s, left the economy in private hands except for those businesses it expropriated, and tolerated a surprisingly wide range of intellectual dissenters. Of course, this had nothing to do with being nice. It was simply that the Nazis, aggressive thugs as they were, had no interest in the worldwide indoctrination program dreamed of by the universalist, conversionary and egalitarian zealots of the true Left.
In contrast to the Nazis, the Left has regularly used every means at its disposal to reconstruct the human personality in accordance with its world vision. Perhaps even more significantly, for the last seventy years the Left has imagined itself as a brave force of resistance against a supposedly implacable but entirely fictitious and shape-shifting enemy— the great evil of “fascism.” As I document in my forthcoming book, Fascism: Career of a Concept, the Left’s eternal enemy of “fascism” is variously depicted as racism, Christian fanaticism, European nationalism, or even opposition to Israeli foreign policy.
Curiously, the post-war Italian fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano was fervently pro-Israel as well as pro-NATO. But Jewish “antifascists” can’t be bothered by such details.
The popular concept of fascism also identifies all forms of the European-wide fascist movement with Hitler, who was actually influenced far more by Stalinist totalitarianism than Mussolini’s ramshackle, not particularly repressive government. “Fascist” is arbitrarily equated with both Nazi genocide a nd anything the cultural Left disapproves of at the moment.
This propagandistic sleight of hand is so blatant that, unless one grasps the current political landscape, it is almost impossible to understand how it works every single time. We are looking here at interlocking political, corporate, and cultural elites when we search for who maintains the system. And there is a unifying doctrine, which for want of a better and more up-to-date name we shall have to call “Cultural Marxism.”
Cultural Marxism‘s central teachings go back genealogically to the Institute for Social Research in interwar Germany. Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and their radical Leftist colleagues attempted to fuse Marxist economics and Freudian psychology into a critique of bourgeois society. The synthesized result had less to do with serious Marxism than with attacking “repressive” and “patriarchal” family life and offering utopian alternatives.
A major aspect of this emerging self-described “Critical Theory,” particularly after the rise of Nazism and the transfer of the Frankfurt School to the US, was describing and combatting “fascism.” This mission became integral to Critical Theory, together with a continuing crusade against anti-Semitism, which, by a certain internal logic, always accompanied the supposed fascist threat. Since the Frankfurt school theorists were mostly Jewish leftists, these facile associations suited them and their followers rather well.
However, in their interpretation, the ominous fascist threat lurked where you least expected it. Middle-class, churchgoing goyim, even those who professed to like Jews and supported women’s rights and labor unions, could not be trusted. Those who did not resolutely break from the existing order slipped easily into such evils as “latent anti-Semitism” and “pseudo-democracy.”
![The_Authoritarian_Personality_(first_edition)[1]](https://www.vdare.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/The_Authoritarian_Personality_first_edition1-202x300.jpg)
These psychic and social dangers were described by Horkheimer, Adorno, and others in their massive anthology The Authoritarian Personality, commissioned by the American Jewish Committee after the Second World War and published in 1950, as part of a much larger “Studies in Prejudice” project. [American Jewish Committee News, March 15, 1950.] While in the US, Adorno also created the F-Scale (F for “Fascist”) in social psychology testing, supposed to determine someone’s degree of propensity to subscribe to the hated ideology.
It’s important to remember Critical Theory isn’t a weapon of revolution. It’s a weapon of repression. And it was quickly and thoroughly Americanized. It’s ridiculous to treat it as an exotic import: it took root in American society and culture almost immediately after it was introduced.
Critical Theorists not only found a congenial home in the US, but some were even sent back to “reeducate” the Germans, who had been supposedly corrupted by their “authoritarian” families and “pseudo-democratic” experiences.
Although the Critical Theorists were mostly soft on the Communists, Cold War liberals like Seymour Martin Lipset and other contributors to Commentarystressed the usability of the Frankfurt School’s form of analysis for investigating all enemies of “liberal democracy,” including the Soviets.
The Soviet enemy, in this analysis, were defenders of patriarchal repression and “authoritarian personalities” that stood in the way of democratic progress.
Lipset was also concerned about “working class authoritarianism,” a focus very much present in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer [Political Man, by Seymour Martin Lipset, by Andrew Hacker, Commentary, June 1, 2015]. Communists, fascists and all the benighted simpletons toiling in factories potentially opposed American pluralism. Since we were engaged in a struggle to preserve our democratic, pluralist identity, we also had to be sure that young Americans were instilled with the proper attitudes about tolerance and equality.
One can find in the call for war against “un-American” prejudice beginning in the 1950s the tendency toward Leftist totalitarianism. One major change since then: the number and variety of supposed victims of “prejudice” continue to grow, together with the repressive measures that must be taken to intimidate possible dissenters.
There has also been a collapse in effective opposition to the Leftist Social Justice Warriors. Recent events in the South indicate even many descendants of Confederate soldiers are unwilling to defend their ancestral heritage against hysterical detractors.
The cultural Left, and no other political force, can put gigantic, screaming crowds into the streets in any American city on the spur of the moment. The official Right, by contrast, stays home watching Fox News.
In the absence of real opposition, the cultural-social Left is free to bully and lie as much as it wants. Media-empowered anti-anti-Semites, like ADL officials, freely equate the Confederacy with the perpetrators of the Holocaust, treating both as violent haters and sources of hate for later generations.
Our bogus Conservative Establishment happily rallies to Leftist social positions. No one on the Left sounds as unhinged as “conservative” journalists like Max Boot [Furling the Confederate flag is just the start, Commentary, June 22, 2015]. Or for that matter, Jeff Jacoby [The Confederate flag is anti-American, Boston Globe,July 9, 2015]. Republican congressmen and governors have been at least as zealous as their supposedly more Leftist opposition in calling for the obliteration of Confederate symbols and names.
One also discovers from the Beltway Right press that homosexual rights, including homosexual marriage, is a basic Western value and that European leaders like Victor Orban and Vladimir Putin don’t really belong to the West because they don’t welcome gay activists into the political and educational process [The Authentic Right vs. The Neocons, by Ilana Mercer, WND, December 21, 2007].
Even the relatively isolated, belated complaints of Donald Trump about the crime caused by Third World immigration have elicited frenzied attacks on bigotry from such GOP stalwarts as Linda Chavez and Jeb Bush [Trumped Up, Townhall, July 10, 2015]. Chavez, we might note, has taken valuable time out from bashing the Confederate Battle Flag to deal with the anti-immigration bigots on the right [Linda Chavez: No defending the indefensible, Daily Local News, June 28, 2015].
The Cultural Marxist threat isn’t an epidemic coming from outside: It is raging among our make-believe conservatives, who now often sound as radical as the Frankfurt School.
The critical difference, or so I’ve been told, is that our politicians are usually not self-described socialists, whereas the Critical Theorists were. But even that distinction may no longer be important. Our government and that of other Western countries has grown enormously and now interferes in our social and commercial life far more than it did eighty years ago. Moreover, the major thrust of Cultural Marxism has never been toward the nationalization of productive forces and other classical socialist schemes. It has always been cultural—toward the smashing of bourgeois values, Christian families, gender roles, and what was viewed as a repressive political culture. Government control of the economy was merely an instrument for moving toward the social-cultural goal that the Frankfurt School set for us.
And the social goals of Cultural Marxism are portrayed as the only alternative to a dark night of “fascism” that the ADL, the SPLC, and other like organizations are ostensibly protecting us from.
Yet the specter is never banished. The “Far Right” threat always remains. And as an ever greater number of people find themselves marginalized as “haters,” the actual tyranny taking shape in America could indeed be something even worse than the fevered “fascist” nightmares of the Left’s imagination.
Dr. Paul Gottfried is IAI’s Distinguished Senior Fellow in Western Civilization and the History of Ideas.
This article was oiginally published at Vdare.com on July 21, 2015.
The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.
Notes and remarks from Olavo de Carvalho’s philosophical journal, addressing a number of timeless and contemporary issues.
The Difference Between Christianity and Philosophy
All comparison between philosophies and Christianity—an incurable vice of historians of philosophy—is complete nonsense because a philosophy is nothing but a doctrine, a man’s thoughts, and Christianity is the acting presence of God Himself in the world. They are as different from each other as the idea of a thing is different from the thing itself. If you spend the rest of your life thinking about cats, that will not make flesh-and-blood cats spring from your thoughts. A philosopher may create the most reasonable arguments to support his philosophy, but he cannot produce a miracle to bear it out, multiplying loaves of bread or calming a storm. Aristotle said that the truth is a property of judgments, that is, of thoughts; however, when Jesus Christ said that He Himself is the Truth, that truth is not present in thought, but in the reality of the world. When Christianity confronts itself with the many philosophies, it competes with them, so to speak, on unequal terms, given the utter disproportion of ontological substance between being and thinking.
Mutatis mutandis, if a philosopher wants to refute Christianity, he can only do that in thought. In fact, to suppress the Christian miracles by means of an act of thought would be the most astonishing miracle.
Logic and Philosophy
Logical contradictions are mere formal errors which can usually be corrected through the rephrasing of a sentence. Material contradictions, on the other hand, are objective impossibilities, which become even more scandalous when one attempts to rephrase them. On the level of discourse, both kinds of contradictions may be confused, but there is nothing more frustrating to me than noticing that my readers perceived only a logical contradiction where I actually pointed out a material contradiction.
That distinction is the litmus test for anyone aspiring to become a philosophy student.
To pick and hunt simple logical contradictions in a person’s argument is not philosophy. It is just grumpiness. I NEVER devote any of my time to doing that.
In general, and save for a few exceptions that can be counted in the fingers of a one-handed man, philosophy professors of Brazilian universities are incapable of not only grasping that difference, but also of making a distinction, in practice, between equality and analogy—an ability that should be almost instinctive.
ALL gender ideology derives from that incapacity, which some are born with and others acquire as a hysterical symptom, inoculated into their minds by psychopathic professors.
On Walking Before God
In my whole 68 years of life, I have met only one human being whose actions were constantly inspired by his love of God. But I have never met a single person whose actions were eminently guided by his love of neighbor.
The Cultural War Against the West
Stalin launched the Soviet cultural war in the 1920s, and it has not stopped growing to this day. The American show business industry is not only the largest anti-American but also anti-Western civilization propaganda machine there is, in the broad sense of a designed civilizational destruction. No a single movie is produced, even if apparently “conservative,” where Western man is not depicted as the embodiment of evil materialism at odds with the superior spirituality of tribal societies and even animals (see for example The Bear, 1988, Never Cry Wolf, 1983, and way before those, Elephant Walk, 1954, among thousands of others).
Economy and Society
Ludwig von Mises taught that there was no difference between a state-run economy and a completely out-of-control economy. Today we know that the Soviet government simply made up its statistics because it had no idea of what was going on in the economy. It’s Murphy’s law: the more order there is, the more chaos there is as well.
Global Elites and the Catholic Church
We should have no doubts about what’s going on today. The powers of this world are implementing by force a comprehensive and complete program to bring about a new civilization, where the state, associated with a handful of big economic groups, will have total control over society. The largest number of families will be dissolved (in the USA alone, 50% of families have already been broken), reducing the masses to an agglomerate of isolated individuals, with no organic relations, only associated with one another through a mechanical and regulated juxtaposition, that is, by the mediation of the state, living in a state of permanent sexual and hallucinogenic excitement without a break, while only 10% of the population work to support them. That is the plan. Gay rights, abortion, environmentalism, and all other topics of the leftist agenda are nothing but instruments to realize that plan. Malachi Martin’s book, The Windswept House, describes the effort by the globalist elite to integrate and use the Catholic Church as an instrument for their plan; an effort that, during the papacy of John Paul II, was already almost victorious. The adaptation of the Church to the values of the new civilization is an integral part of that plan, and it is IMPOSSIBLE that Pope Francis does not know that.
Olavo de Carvalho is the President of The Inter-American Institute and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Philosophy, Political Science, and the Humanities.
The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute. Translation from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota.
