Saturday 9 November 2019

File under You Couldn't Make It Up

I have a Facebook account which I never look at but I thought I'd mention the publication of my new book there. When I'd written my message I glanced at the posts below where my 'friends' (hardly any of whom I actually know) had written various things to do with this and that. One of these was so incredible I have to share it here. It's a report from the magazine Psychology Today which is a popular psychology magazine apparently. This is what the report said.

"An interesting effect happens as people watch pornography. They become more egalitarian, and more supportive of men and women sharing roles and work, less accepting of gender-discrimination. They also become more accepting of sexual diversity and less stigmatizing towards homosexuality. They become less religious, and may even experience more crises of faith. (Pornography) leads to people changing their beliefs about sex and gender,...... and watching porn may in some cases lead to people being more accepting and less judgmental, both of themselves and others."

In other words, pornography corrupts the mind but to an already corrupted mind this corruption indicates a moral progression. The person who put this up made the comment that this showed how "Liberalism is literally rationalised sexual misbehaviour" which I thought summed it up well. The implication almost seems to be that watching pornography is a moral act. I'm not sure you can take inversion much further.

The modern world really needs to rediscover the idea of sin and not project that onto actions against political correctness. Otherwise it is lost.

9 comments:

Moonsphere said...

Perhaps our only hope is the tendency that the left takes things too far and ignite popular rage against them. We saw this with Extinction Rebellion when they climbed on top of the subway trains.

Much of the left's success is based on covert, insidious erosion of values - a tactic that the general public seems defenceless against. The left's achilles heel might just be this faulty sense of strategic timing - perhaps some egregious policy pushed forward that the public absolutely will not accept, not for economic reasons but on purely moral grounds.

The event has not yet occurred, but we might live in hope that some day soon it will.

William Wildblood said...

You may well be right, Moonsphere. I hope so but some people thought the transsexual thing might be the tipping point and it doesn't seem to have been. There is certainly some objection but the general trend is towards acceptance. A cause for hope is that things seem to be accelerating which implies some concern on the part of the corrupters. Do they suspect their window of opportunity is closing?

Bruce Charlton said...

A clear example of where we are; and of the depth of the problem. Once assumptions are inverted like this, there can be no basis for genuine improvement in things. We can't discuss things in any coherent way. If sexual depravity, exploitation, mutilation, even torture (S&M) are regarded as 'good' - then what can be said to such people?

But in a godless society, the obvious is precisely what is denied. If there was going to be a backlash against leftist excess, it would already have happened - for example that the police know and tolerate (?participate) industrial scale sex slavery, rape, paedophilia of (specifically) native white girls (in multiple places through the UK, that we already know - presumably more that we don't), *because* it is being done by brown immigrant men... well, that would have triggered a backlash and reversal, IF people were sane and coherent - so clearly they are not. We must assume that anything is possible, anything may become regarded as officially Good.

William Wildblood said...

Increasingly it seems to me that the only safeguard against all this is Christ. The only other form of religion or spirituality that holds out against the insanity is Islam but that has its own problems, too well known to list here. New Age spirituality is leftist all the way and Eastern religions, when they migrate westwards, mostly seem to adapt themselves to the prevailing ethos. I am reminded of the passage in Matthew 24 where it says "At that time there will be great tribulation. If those days had not been cut short nobody would be saved, but for the sake of the elect, those days will be shortened". Let's hope so.

JMSmith said...

This may be related to what you say in your recent post on the Left and the Good. Pornography represents men and women in purely carnal terms. In fact the word "meat" is commonly used to describe various aspects of it (just as pick-up bars were called "meat markets"). And what is more, it proposes that men and women are most "free" when they are most carnal and passionate. This of course inverts the traditional understanding that men and women were slaves to carnality and passion (what St. Paul called the Flesh), and that they were free only when carnality and passion were under the control of spirit or reason. To a traditionalist, "sexual liberation" is actually enslavement to sexual desire.

Because we are partly carnal and passionate, this part of us resents the restrictions imposed by spirit or reason, and it finds relief in fantasies of freedom. Pornography acts these fantasies out for people who have limited imaginations. And there are other fantasies of freedom, most of which are found on the left, and most of which appear from this report to grow with a pornography habit. The fantasy of freedom from the need to work, for instance, or the fantasy of freedom from sex roles.

What this comes down to is a kind of inverted Manichaeanism in which the Flesh is good and the Spirit is bad. Our response should not be Manichaeanism, but the qualified affirmation that the Flesh is good so long as it is governed by spirit.

William Wildblood said...

"the Flesh is good so long as it is governed by spirit." Yes, that sums it up. Sexual sin is not the worst of sins but when that is no longer regarded as sin it undermines everything else.

John Fitzgerald said...

That abysmal Psychology Today passage has been doing the rounds on 'Catholic Twitter' and I too found it utterly repugnant. Revealing as well. As one Catholic commentator put it, 'I love it when the mask slips.'

William Wildblood said...

I suppose I would have to see it in context to form a proper assessment of what the writer is saying but, as it stands, it's an excellent example of how corruption proceeds incrementally with each step establishing a new norm from where the next step is taken.

Anonymous said...

Regarding transexualism, I do think that there is in fact a big backlash against it. It depends whether or not someone takes the media as gauge or not to be aware of it (& it seems to be pushing people out of their tolerance of the media-world in this regard).
I don't know of anyone who believes the 'transexual' narrative (in a broad cross-section of people, exempting the fringe elements - themselves minor, few in number & unrepresentative).
Teenagers I know have come home from school giving out about the way some of their teachers have tried to foist these ideas on them.

As for 'taking things too far' - they tried that with padophilia and failed (interestingly, when cornered the child-molesting politician Daniel Cohn Bendit used those very words 'perhaps we took it too far' when asked about his efforts in the 60s to have sexual acts with children incorporated into society.)
There's another area where people aren't being taken for fools anymore - the sexual crimes of high-ranking politicians eclipse the 'conspiracy-theory' rebuttals that used to try to drown them out.

Enough to be hopeful about - though I do worry that the innocent and vulnerable are most at risk from nefarious ideologies: how many merely awkward and confused teens have submitted to horrific bodily mutilation in the name of this absurdity ? The doctors have a lot to answer for.

PS - on the subject of 'brown' paedophiles abusing white girls, Yes, we know it happened and that it was covered up & downplayed deliberately, but all right-thinking muslims condemn these acts as much as everyone else.
There is both a racism and a desire to encourage racism in the act of covering it up that we should be aware of. Remember the crooked mirrors that those/that ultimately behind these contrivances employ - distortion upon distortion reflected upon each other ad infinitum.