At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian suggests we consider the origins of a large part of modern progressive thoughts:
Notable members of the Frankfurt School in Heidelberg, April 1964 at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Max Horkheimer is front left, Theodor W. Adorno front right, and Jürgen Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair. Siegfried Landshut is in the background left.
Photograph by Jeremy J. Shapiro via Wikimedia Commons.
It occurs to me that Our Thing ought to take a long, hard look at the Frankfurt School.
Those were the guys, of course, who pioneered the notion that their political opponents must be mentally ill. Given that
- all sane people are good; and
- good people only want good things; and
- Socialism is a good thing;
then
- anyone who doesn’t want Socialism wants a bad thing;
- therefore is a bad person;
- therefore is insane.
Anyone with the common sense God gave little catfish recognizes this as begging the question. And not particularly subtle question-begging, either, which is why it took over 1,000 pages (!) of ponderous Teutonic prose to disguise it. It’s science, comrades. Only Socialism, or a .38 to the back of the neck, will cure us …
… assuming, of course, that we want to be cured.
The Frankfurt Schoolers assumed this, of course, as did all those freelance critical theorists running the NKVD’s torture chambers. But that was then. The Frankfurt Schoolers were shockingly bourgeois on so many things. They thought homosexuality was a mental illness, if you can believe it, and I doubt even Herbert Marcuse would’ve signed off on “drag queen story hour,” let alone the state-mandated chemical castration of 6 year old boys. Only the peerless enlightenment of the Current Year recognizes this, comrades.
