How a Dead French Pedophile Re-Shaped America’s Intellectual Landscape

When I see the crazed rhetoric of political leaders today, this quote by John Maynard Keynes comes to mind:

“Madmen in authority are just distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

Political actors, in other words, are not independent thinkers with independent thoughts – they are slaves to frameworks that someone else – an academic – dreamt up years prior.

The history of the 20th century bears this out.

World War 2 was really a dispute between fans of Das Kapital (the communists) and fans of Thus Speke Zarathustra (the fascists).[1] Russia and Germany don’t have a genocidal fight to the death without the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche.

So, if the great political actors of the 20th century were just the disciples of penniless academics from the 19th century, what are the political actors today?

The answer is that they are no different – they too are guided by the unseen hand of long dead academics.

The only difference today is that no one reads so there is little understanding of the source material that is animating our fights. But make no mistake about it, that source material exists and beneath the chaos of tweets and memes, long dead academics are molding our public discourse.

Chief among them is Michel Foucault.

Foucault was a French philosopher who came to prominence with his publication of Madness and Civilization (1960), where he argued that madness was a social construct determined by those in power – who was considered crazy was interpreted to mean different things over time depending on which group held sway.

This would be a theme in Foucault’s work – truth is subjective, and groups imposed their subjective truth on others. What society regards to be true is just an interpretation of reality that is imposed by one identity group that is in power on others in order to stay in power.

Foucault’s philosophy would give birth to the post-modernist movement, which generally regarded objective truth as a thing that cannot be discerned - truth is subjective to your identity.

It is important to note that Foucault had reasons beyond simple vanity to see his framework adapted – he had behaviors and beliefs that deviated substantially from the social norms.

Principle among them was his enjoyment of sex with young boys, which he frequently did in Tunisia (see here).

Foucault viewed the moral arguments against pedophilia as being a vestige of an outdated sexual morality that the Catholic church had imposed on the world around the 4th century through the works of St. Augustine.

Foucault argued that it “was quite unacceptable” to assume “that a child was incapable of giving his assent.” He told his biographer James Miller: “Besides, to die for the love of boys: What could be more beautiful?” (see here). He even openly campaigned for pedophilia, signing a petition in 1977 calling for the decriminalization of all “consensual” sexual relations between adults and children.

Foucault believed that man-boy relations were the only truly romantic form of love and it was impossible to refute him in the context of his philosophy. Any argument against pedophilia is simply a subjective truth that flows from the non-pedophile’s identity and is irrelevant to the subjective truth of a pedophile.

Who are you to deny Foucault feelings of love and who are you to rob these young Tunisian boys of their right to consent to that love? You are simply imposing your subjective truth as a non-pedophile on him.

The moral sensibilities that arise from Foucault’s philosophical framework might seem shocking but, in the end, who cares what some dead French academic thought?

The problem is that this dead French pedophile more than anyone else is shaping our intellectual landscape today.

You see the thought virus of Post-Modernism that Foucault created didn’t just circulate and die in some obscure philosophy department. It spread throughout universities in the 70s and 80s and started reproducing with the decaying corpse of Marxism until it yielded a new framework called Intersectionality.

Intersectionality would go on to dominate the Ivory Tower to the point that universities today can be best described as madrassas that teach Intersectionality as the new state religion – albeit this indoctrination is disguised in all sorts of ways.

So, what is Intersectionality?

Intersectionality starts with the Post-Modernist premise that the there is no objective truth or reality – just identity groups trying to impose their subjective truth on each other to propagate power. From there, Intersectionality creates a framework for understanding how this happens through a prism of oppression hierarchies.

The oppression hierarchy divides people not by class but by race, gender, religion, sexual identity etc. with those who have suffered the least perceived historical grievances at the bottom of the ladder and those with the most at the top – e.g. a trans black person ranks much higher than a white heterosexual male. It doesn’t matter if the former happens to be wealthier than the latter.

The goal of this framework is to elevate the groups higher on the victimization ladder at the expense of the groups lower on the ladder – this is where the Marxism part comes into play. The higher ladder victimization groups are to this new framework, what the godly proletariat were to Marxism. While the lower ladder groups are the new evil bourgeois/capitalists.

This new framework is more concerned with redistributing power rather than wealth and it accomplishes the redistribution of power by denying the lower groups from having a claim on reality.

If a white heterosexual male (the lowliest rank on the oppression hierarchy) makes a claim on reality – “I believe x, y, z to be true” and someone else higher on the victimization ladder disagrees, they don’t have to respond with logic or data.

What they do instead is they cite their position on the victimization ladder (“As a 1st generation gay Latina”) and then explain how that statement made them feel and that effectively ends the argument in their favor (sometimes to the point where the white male must apologize).

Whatever the merit is of what the white heterosexual male said is irrelevant, what matters is how that statement made someone else who was higher up on the victimization ladder feel. When this framework is instituted, it inverts all social relationships and power to devastating effects.

Now, the interesting thing is that that deference towards feelings is not universal. It only flows to those higher on the victimization ladder.

So, while misgendering someone or citing racial crime statistics might get you expelled at Harvard, calling for the genocide of Jews will not.

Jews are lower on the oppression ladder and so their suffering doesn’t count. They are part of the white oppressor class. Slandering them is good. You are deconstructing white supremacy when you do that, which is the all presiding goal of this framework.

When you understand the precepts of Intersectionality, the contradictory behavior of the University presidents and the general insanity of the free speech policies that exist on campus today – favoring some and excluding others – makes sense.

Now just because it makes sense does not mean it is right.

Anyone with a moral sense should understand that this framework is contradictory and wrong.

That it is that way should also not be surprising. Any moral philosophy that has its origin in one man’s desire to have sex with little boys should have been suspect from the beginning.

[1] Karl Marx published Das Kapital in 1867, which Lenin used fifty years later to justify his take over of Russia. Frederick Nietzsche published Thus Speke Zarathustra in 1881 which Baeumler and Chamberlain fifty years later reformulated to create an intellectual framework for the Nazi takeover of Germany.