The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West
Language: English
Pages: 280
ISBN: 159403768X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In The Devil's Pleasure Palace, Michael Walsh describes how Critical Theory released a horde of demons into the American psyche. When everything could be questioned, nothing could be real, and the muscular, confident empiricism that had just won the war gave way, in less than a generation, to a central-European nihilism celebrated on college campuses across the United States. Seizing the high ground of academe and the arts, the New Nihilists set about dissolving the bedrock of the country, from patriotism to marriage to the family to military service. They have sown, as Cardinal Bergoglio—now Pope Francis—once wrote of the Devil, “destruction, division, hatred, and calumny,” and all disguised as the search for truth.
The Devil's Pleasure Palace exposes the overlooked movement that is Critical Theory and explains how it took root in America and, once established and gestated, how it has affected nearly every aspect of American life and society.
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(although Critical Theory presumes to do just that). It is to believe that only in the past century and a half or so have we been able to penetrate religion’s veil of illusion and see reality for what it is: nothing. This is nihilism, which often poses as sophisticated “realism,” and I argue that it is just another form of satanism. Denial of the eternal becomes a way of temporal life; and, by extension, Death is embraced as a way of Life. En passant, it is amusing to note that the practitioners
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” (“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming”) is a phrase familiar to anyone who has a passing familiarity with this mythos. Lovecraft’s works feature a panoply of monsters. They’re not from the id, as are the creatures of Forbidden Planet, the 1956 science-fiction movie that introduced a wide audience not only to bits of Freudian psychiatry but also to Robbie the Robot, with an underlying plot inspired by Shakespeare’s Tempest.
topples the Sphinx into the abyss. Thus, all art stands opposed to mythology. Its natural “material” contains the “answer,” the one possible and correct answer, always already contained, though indistinctly. . . . New music sacrifices itself to this. It has taken all the darkness and the guilt of the world on itself. All its happiness is in the knowledge of unhappiness; all its beauty is in denial of the semblance of the beautiful. No one, neither individuals nor groups, wants to have anything to
Brünnhilde’s awakening also signals her descent from demi-goddess to human woman; she consummates it by having sex with Siegfried (it’s his first time, too); their knowledge of each other is carnal. Eve’s revelation is at first spiritual, but when Adam joins her (because he cannot bear to be without her), their first act is to make love. Sex, in the work of these two great artists, is what makes us fully human. But sex comes second—in Paradise Lost it is the transcendence of the spirit, not the
necessity. For the Left of the future, one’s existence depends entirely on the whims of one’s parents. By killing their unborn, they become like gods. To change the nature of the sexual relationship—and, latterly, to add new variations to it—and to saltpeter out of the males their natural instinct to fight, which includes their natural instinct to win, to build, to succeed, to create (including artistically), is a prescription for “fundamental transformation,” and not in a good way. Its
