anon_hupo said in #4395 6d ago:
What do we mean by that? Which specific brain worm are we investigating?
It's not just utopian liberalism. That tendency is epitomized by the French Revolution, whose instigators declared Year Zero, renamed the months, and argued for a total abolition of all tradition and superstition.
Nor is it just High Modern statism with socialist characteristics. There was another thread a few weeks ago that conflated "gay race communism" with the program of men like FDR who, while leftist in certain ways, were not really interested in the "gay" or "race" part at all. (FDR deserves his own thread. He held the most extensive personal power of any man in US history, was president for 16 straight years. Inherited a 63% top tax rate and grew it to 94% -- near-total confiscation of all income above some threshold. Took everyone's gold at gunpoint and replaced it with paper.)
But back to the question. We are not talking about statism. We are searching, specifically, for the cultural and aesthetic origins of Gay Race Communism.
I submit to you that Patient Zero for GRC is a bizarre old Brit who lived at the turn of the 20th century. A man named Alistair Crowley.
> Born to rich religious fundamentalist parents
> Rebelled by starting a ritual magick cult
> Spent his life as a bisexual sex-pest "philosopher", foreshadowing Foucault by 50 years
> Invented his own retarded religion dedicated to libertine moral relativism.
> "Do What Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the law."
> Calls it "theosophy"
> Starts a "commune" (a single small villa in Sicily) with his "followers" who end up with "STDs"
> Has a kid named Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley in 1904
> She dies at age 2 in Rangoon, Burma, of some tropical disease. Why were they in Burma? Why did Foucault go to Tunisia? Who can say?
> Sleeps around
> Wife becomes alcoholic. He has her committed.
> Uses his inherited British aristocracy wealth to bounce around Paris partying with artists and their patrons. This is why his ideas have Wikipedia pages today.
...
> Crowley considered himself to be one of the outstanding figures of his time. The historian Ronald Hutton stated that in Crowley's youth, he was "a self-indulgent and flamboyant young man" who "set about a deliberate flouting and provocation of social and religious norms", while being shielded from an "outraged public opinion" by his inherited wealth. Hutton also described Crowley as having both an "unappeasable desire" to take control of any organisation that he belonged to, and "a tendency to quarrel savagely" with those who challenged him
Sound familiar, anon?
Let's trace where mo