May 10, 2023

Family is the basis of a community, and, therefore, nationhood. It is for this simple reason that the family is hated and scorned by those who wish to see nations destroyed and remade into a bland homogenous polyglot. The assault against the family by liberals and Marxists rooted in their denial of a summum bonum (the highest good) in life.

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Liberals are ultimately relativistic hedonists. As Steven Pinker says in his sermonizing myth defending “liberalism,” any religion, or philosophy, or school of thought which elevates a moral good above “human well-being” — which he means material comfort and pleasure — is antagonistic to humanism. How interesting. Moral flourishing is antithetical to humanism even though moral virtue is the basis of humanist thought from the Greeks, Romans, and further elaborated upon in the Christian tradition.

Contrary to relativists, human well-being, which is moral flourishing — something Pinker would know if he had studied philosophy — is dependent upon actualizing the moral good in one’s life.

Liberalism, in its denial of the summum bonum, denies the life of a higher calling and anything that binds individuals to others. Family naturally and necessarily suffers. In the liberal mind, by being tethered to families, communities, and any organization, individuals are harmed. Thus they must be liberated to choose to be whatever they want. The logic is played out today: biology is also repressive and harms individuals unless they choose to liberate themselves from biology.

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Marxism also denies the summum bonum and agrees with liberalism that the highest good is material comfort and pleasure. Socialism and liberalism are mortal enemies because socialism and liberalism both agree on the same end but differ on the means to actualize that end. Liberals believe the free-choosing individual can best achieve their own comfort and pleasure. Marxists believe universal comfort and pleasure is only possible through class warfare which will redistribute all wealth (comfort and pleasure) to everyone equally.

Leo Strauss aptly writes in assessing modern politics, “the increased emphasis on economics is a consequence of this.  Eventually we arrive at the view that universal affluence and peace is the necessary and sufficient condition of perfect justice.” Since affluence and peace are the conditions of perfect justice, and since affluence is disturbed by the sexual division of labor which is instantiated in the family according to Marx, Marxism’s attack on the nation is through its attack against the family as the means to derive that universal affluence which is necessary before the arrival at perfect justice.

Marx himself writes:

“With the division of labor, in which all these contradictions are implicit, and which in its turn is based on the natural division of labor in the family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution… the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labor-power of others.”

By destroying the family, Marxism is also destroying nations, since they understand the two are fundamentally interlinked. And since families and nations create inequality, families and nations must be eliminated for a consummated universal order of peace and affluence.

The individualism of liberalism, though, is ironically statist. As the individual grows in power, through “rights,” the state must also grow in power to enforce those rights. As John Locke wrote, the role of government in the commonwealth society is to decide the rights of subjects. And as Rousseau said, we are forced to be free by the coercive “general will.” This is achieved by the full power and weight of the state.