Banality and grotesquerie are the words that describe our times. The worshippers of reason have, over the centuries, betrayed their idol and lost touch with reality on more than one occasion — but now, that betrayal has become permanent. Its perfidy lies in the fact that it rolls forward under the mask of progress and enlightenment. Yet after a longer analysis, I come to the conclusion that today the main drivers of change in the world are laziness, pleasure, and... the contraceptive pill. All three have acquired their ideological underpinning and the backing of global "authorities." At the same time, voices sounding the alarm are systematically silenced or discredited, while the reality presented by the media is most often a fabrication, on the basis of which we build our worldview — remaining in the bubble of fellow-feelers they have created for us.
Already "The Right to Be Lazy," the product of the warped mind of communist philosopher Paul Lafargue — who, incidentally, was the son-in-law of our friend Marx — corrected the Marxist offer to the proletariat known as the famous Communist Manifesto. It turned out that when a normal person receives a clear signal, backed by concrete reality, to study, to work — to live a decent life, in general — riots and strikes are not exactly at the top of his mind. Proof of this was the technological revolution (not to be confused with the industrial one), which created demand for educated, responsible, and therefore decently paid workers who preferred to learn, work, and buy — for example, automobiles at three times their monthly wage (Ford's factory at the beginning of the 20th century) — rather than raise hell. This was supported by Catholic social teaching, which is probably the only doctrine that, expressis verbis, distinguishes profit from exploitation, in Rerum Novarum of 1891, and affirms the right to be treated as a human being as belonging to every person regardless of origin, skin color, or minority status — in Sublimis Deus, note well — from 1537!!
The Marxists, in order to seize the power they craved, therefore had to react. They had two choices: drive the masses to wholesale slaughter — which, Russia aside, generally did not work out — or act upon the nature of societies so that the proletariat would once again become a degenerate, purposeless human mass that a small group of activists could easily steer. A magma that would lose its backbone, its new DNA — the work ethic, integrity, responsibility. And so, over the years, those qualities were replaced by the glorification of profit, pleasure, and self-actualization. In other words, in the light version: how to earn without really working; in the hard version: how to steal without getting caught. The human mass thus produced and sustained — first cut off from culture, later cutting itself off from practically everything that was too demanding for its withering intellect — became, and remains, a crowd that joyfully swallows every conceivable piece of nonsense fed to it. All you need to do is prefix the next serving of stupidity with the adjective scientific — which need not have anything whatsoever to do with actual science, and in fact is better if it does not — and humanity, wholly consumed by consumption, will swallow and accept the next absurdity as revealed, indisputable truth.
An example? Not long ago, people who felt they were someone other than themselves were simply treated medically. Today we fight for their right to be Napoleon, a teapot, or a non-binary person who changes gender once a week. Our friend Margot crossed yet another boundary of absurdity by identifying as a lesbian — and immediately scientific authorities, and God help us, moral ones too, appeared to support him in this absurdity, worthy of the international prototype of the kilogram at Sevres. What is more, money was found to finance this farce. Gender studies is the generalization of Margot — a sort of core curriculum for him. It was invented not at a university, not in a department of anthropology, but by a fiction writer, Ms. Ann Oakley. Wrapped in smart-sounding jargon, the negation of the social role of biological sex conveniently gives a wide berth to the experience of the first Israeli kibbutzim, where they tried to raise girls and boys in a unified way, offering them the same toys, activities, and ultimately equal access to all professions, including military service. Very quickly it turned out that girls, somehow on their own, chose dolls to play with, in their later years gravitated toward childcare, and professionally sought careers involving contact with people. It was similar with boys, who chose toy cars and tools, and in adult life generally pursued technical occupations. All of this is described in anthropology textbooks — yet somehow, at the same time, it is studiously avoided by gender ideologues and virtually all media.
The sexual revolution, conceived in the 1920s in the ideological stable of the Communist International — the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt — by Wilhelm Reich, and later refined by a student of Sigmund Freud, one Erich Fromm, very quickly led to a state in which the meaning of life became pleasure. It was therefore entirely logical that later the significance of a family with children would be equated with homosexual relationships, polyamory, and other sick inventions. All the more so because, thanks to the contraceptive pill, we had effectively separated sex from procreation. It is no coincidence that most Polish married couples have one or two children.
Today's social diagnosis is therefore simple: we have masses, especially in the youngest generation, who basically want to have fun — preferably on someone else's dime — and copulate without any responsibility. One-night stands or friends with benefits fit perfectly into this, and abortion, which is sometimes the lesser evil but always a tragedy, has suddenly become an element of women's dignity — simply her choice — the extreme form of which has been given the name partial-birth, meaning killing during delivery. On the other side of this paranoia is euthanasia, now reaching children as young as twelve. And all of this in the name of so-called civilizational progress.
In Europe, the game is already over, and here in Poland, the last line of defense — the Catholic Church as a bastion of values — is just now cracking, unfortunately in part through its own doing. And Chinese Confucianism, souped up with Mao's brand of communism, is already knocking at Europe's door, making itself more and more at home here. For the curious: one of the fundamental tenets of his philosophy is dependence on one's rulers, which — combined with the fact that the Chinese language has no word for compassion — takes on a rather unappealing character. It is worth digging into what Chinese nursing homes look like, because in Europe we have aging populations...
