Sexual Repression, Cultural Illusions, and the Death and Resurrection of America

A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies. And we are dying now. (Chris Hedges)

The question we must now face is will we remain dead or will we be resurrected?

What kind of society are we turning into where 90% of 8-16 years old have viewed porn online and 80% of 15-17 years have had multiple exposures to hardcore porn? In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell wrote:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.

Wilhelm Reich, who was at one time a leading disciple of Freud, argued that sexual repression was the cornerstone of totalitarianism. Reich believed that in order to liberate people politically it is necessary to liberate them sexually first.

In his book Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges writes about gonzo pornstar Ariana Jollee giving an interview for the DVD 65 Guy Cream Pie:

"I'll be banging fifty guys - fifty, fifty, fifty! Maybe more even. That'd be cool. So I'm like really excited."

She laughs and plays with her hair. "And it just so happens that all these guys are going to be coming IN me." She looks coyly at the camera. "In the ass and pussy," she grins, wrinkling her nose. "See I like it in the ass the best. I wanna find the biggest pervert and get him to suck all fifty loads out and spit it in my mouth." She reaches up and fiddles with her bangs. "That'd be so good. That'd be fucking hot. It'd be disgusting." She giggles. "I get off on that." She runs her fingers through her hair, fanning it out behind her.

Are watching such films sexually liberating or is it actually a form of sexual repression, especially for teenage boys and girls?

And Jesus answered and said to them, “Truly I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, 'Be taken up and cast into the sea,' it will happen. “And all things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.” (Matthew 21:21-22)

According to the Gospels, if we just have faith then we can accomplish amazing tasks. But what does it mean to have faith? In The Case for God, Karen Armstrong writes:

Yet did not Jesus constantly insist that his followers acknowledge his divine status—almost as a condition of discipleship? In the gospels we continually hear him berating his disciples for their lack of “faith” and praising the “faith” of gentiles, who seem to understand him better than his fellow Jews. Those who beg him for healing are required to have “faith” before he can work a miracle, and some pray: “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.” We do not find this preoccupation with “belief” in other major traditions. Why did Jesus set such store by it? The simple answer is that he did not. The word translated as “faith” in the New Testament is the Greek pistis (verbal form: pisteuo), which means “trust; loyalty; engagement; commitment.” He wanted disciples who would engage with his mission, give all they had to the poor, feed the hungry, refuse to be hampered by family ties, abandon their pride, lay aside their self-importance and sense of entitlement, live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and trust in God who was their father. They must spread the good news of the Kingdom to everyone in Israel—even the prostitutes and tax collectors—and live compassionate lives, not confining their benevolence to the respectable and conventionally virtuous. Such pistis could move mountains and unleash unsuspected human potential.

In Greek mythology, Pistis is the spirit of trust, honesty and good faith. She was one of the good spirits that escaped Pandora's box and fled back to heaven abandoning mankind. In Latin, pistis becomes fides, the basis of the English word fidelity. Pistis was a well-developed concept before and during the time of Jesus.

One of our most known cultural narratives about the power of faith is the Civil Rights movement and in particular the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 where the nation first meets Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and another cultural icon Rosa Parks. The popular history of this event is that Dr. King organized and led the boycott after the upstanding citizen Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat on the bus.

Very few people realize that Dr. King had very little to do with the initial organizing of the boycott. He really did not become involved until after the boycott had already started. He was made the leader of boycott because he was not from Montgomery, his father was a very famous minister and he could always go back to Atlanta if the boycott did not work out.

In addition, very few people know that Rosa Parks had been raised on the Black nationalist philosophy of Marcus Garvey by her maternal grandfather Sylvester Edwards. Edwards, who often passed for White, was a former slave who's parents were the plantation owner and his slave mistress. Parks had also been very active in raising money for the legal defense of Scottsboro Boys. The Scottsboro Boys were nine young African-American men falsely accused of raping two White woman in 1931. In 1944, Ms. Parks investigated the rape by seven White men of Recy Taylor and then help to organize a campaign to defend Taylor. This is basically the same group that came together in 1955 to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In 1944, Martin Luther King, Jr. was still in high school in Atlanta.

In At The Dark End of the Street, Danielle McGuire, wrote about the rape of Recy Talyor:

“Get them rags off,” he barked, pointing the shotgun at her, “or I'll kill you and leave you down here in the woods.”

Sobbing, Taylor pulled off her clothes.

“Please,” she cried, “let me go home to my husband and my baby.”

Lovett spread an old hunting coat on the ground, told his friends to strip down to their socks and undershirts, and ordered Taylor to lie down. Lovett passed his rifle to a friend and took off his pants. Hovering over the young mother, he snarled, “Act just like you do with your husband or I'll cut your damn throat.”

Lovett was the first of six men to rape Taylor that night. When they finished, someone helped her get dressed, tied a handkerchief over her eyes, and shoved her back into the car. Back on the highway, the men stopped and ordered Taylor out of the car. “Don't move until we get away from here,” one of them yelled. Taylor heard the car disappear into the night. She pulled off the blindfold, got her bearings, and began the long walk home.

Is it possible that the same type of mentality that allowed White men to rape Black woman with impunity during Jim Crow is being developed in today's youth who regularly watch hardcore pornography?

For those who think that the election of Barack Obama is a reason to put the days of Jim Crow behind us haven't read Michele Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness:

There are more African Americans under correctional control today —in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.... If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste —not not class, caste— permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

From President Obama to Sarah Palin, our politicians are constantly invoking America’s superiority and exceptionalism or exhorting us to be Number 1. Yet from health care to education to environmental performance, we’re more often found at the bottom of the list of developed countries.

To our great shame, America now has:

• The highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;

• The greatest inequality of incomes;

• The lowest government spending as a percentage of GDP on social programs for the disadvantaged;

• The lowest number of paid holiday, annual and maternity leaves;

• The lowest score on the UN’s index of “material well-being of children”;

• The worst score on the UN’s gender inequality index;

• The lowest social mobility;

• The highest public and private expenditure on health care as a portion of GDP, 
yet accompanied by the highest:

  • Infant mortality rate

  • Prevalence of mental health problems

  • Obesity rate

  • Portion of people going without health care due to cost

  • Low birth weight children per capita (except for Japan)

  • Consumption of anti-depressants per capita

• The shortest life expectancy at birth (except for Denmark and Portugal);

• The highest carbon dioxide emissions and water consumption per capita;

• The lowest score on the World Economic Forum’s Environmental Performance 
Index (except for Belgium), and the largest Ecological Footprint per capita 
(except for Belgium and Denmark);

• The highest rate of failing to ratify international agreements;

• The lowest spending on international development and humanitarian 
assistance as a percentage of GDP;

• The highest military spending as a portion of GDP;

• The largest international arms sales;

• The most negative balance of payments (except New Zealand, Spain and 
Portugal);

• The lowest scores for student performance in math (except for Portugal and Italy) (and far down from the top in both science and reading);

• The highest high school drop out rate (except for Spain);

(Source: We're Number One by James Gustave Speth)

We all remember the President Obama's “crazy” former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Of course that Negro must be crazy for saying things like “God Damn America!” "the chickens have come home to roost" and “fighting for peace is like raping for virginity.” Alexander Cockburn wrote about Rev. Wright:

Wright came bounding back... with an unflinching interview with Bill Moyers on TV and a rip-roaring sermon in the National Press Club in Washington. He’s clearly the most powerful public orator in America since Martin Luther King, and as radical as MLK in his toughest moments.... In the press club Wright felt the wind at his back and gave the folks his basic sermon. It’s the way he is and 95 per cent of it makes total sense and is a breath of fresh air, as Wright ushers the Real America onto the stage, as opposed to the political candidates’ flattering fictions.

If 95 per cent of what Wright had to say makes total sense then why did Obama condemn his statements?

Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems.

Could it be as Edward Herman and David Peterson wrote in “Jeremiah Wright in the Propaganda System?”

In short, the charges levied by Wright against the United States are of a kind that nobody is free to express within the circles of American Power. If one wants to move within these circles, and to climb the many ladders to power and privilege they offer, one must remain silent about its flattering fictions or watch these ladders pulled away. A perfectly accurate assessment of 9/11, Wright’s “chickens coming home to roost” is received as an inestimably greater offense than are the “at least 935 false statements” by George Bush and seven of his regime’s top officials “in the two years following September 11, 2001,” as part of their “concerted effort” militarily to seize Iraq, and to replace the former regime with one of their own making — despite the devastating consequences of these lies.

Was Wright demonized simply because he was critical of the flattering fictions that are told to the American people by government and corporate power? Is President Obama simply as Chris Hedges writes just another corporate product not much different than Coke or Pepsi?

Obama is a brand. He functions as a brand. In the same way that advertisers like Calvin Klein or Benetton a few years age brought in people of color, HIV positive models to give their products a kind of risqué style and even progressive politics. That's in essence what Obama has been for the corporate state. And it worked quite effectively until a year later people realized that the old engines of corporate power remain virtually untouched. And the suffering that was being visited upon citizens was continuing to accelerate. That's what a brand does. You confuse a brand with an experience. You confuse how you are made to feel with knowledge. You confuse propaganda with ideology. It's not accidental that Advertising Age gave the Obama campaign the marketing award of the year. Beating out Nike, Zappos and Apple. Take it from the professionals. Brand Obama is a marketer’s dream. President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertisers want because of how they can make you feel.

Yet can we simply blame the “evil” corporations for the problems we currently face or is the problem must deeper as Douglas Rushkoff writes in Life Inc.:

As corporations gain ever more control over our economy, government, and culture, it is only natural for us to blame them for the helplessness we now feel over the direction of our personal and collective destinies. But is is both too easy and utterly futile to point the finger of blame at corporations or the robber barons at their helms... these entities are not solely responsible for the predicament in which we have found ourselves.

Rather, it is corporatism itself: a logic we have internalized into our very being, a lens through which we view the world around us, an ethos with which we justify our behaviors. Making matters worse, we accept its dominance over us as preexisting—as a given circumstance of the human condition. It just is.

But it isn't.

Can we find salvation in the church? Or is it as Gregory Boyd writes in The Myth of a Christian Religion those Americans who profess faith in Christ aren't any different than those who do not:

This slowly opened my eyes to the radical contradiction between the lifestyle Jesus calls his followers to embrace, on the one hand, and the typical American lifestyle, on the other. Yet it struck me that the Church in America largely shares—even celebrates—the typical American lifestyle. Research confirms that the values of American who profess faith in Christ are largely indistinguishable from the values of those Americans who do not.

There have been a great deal of comparisons between Jesus and Obama, but is the most accurate comparison as, Rushkoff writes, is that like Obama, Jesus has been turned into a brand:

[W]hat we think of as “spirituality” today is not at all a departure from the narcissistic culture of consumption, but its truest expression.... Megachurches are megacorporations, whose functioning and rhetoric both foster the culture and politics of the free market. Christian branding turns a religion based in charity and community into a personal relationship with Jesus—a narcissistic faith mirroring the marketing framework on which it is now based.

What place does faith and religion have in modern secular world? Joseph Campbell, whose work help to inspire George Lucas to create Star Wars, addressed this question in The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

The universal triumph of the secular state has thrown all religious organizations into a definitely secondary, and finally ineffectual, position that religious pantomime is hardly more today than a sanctimonious exercise for Sunday morning, whereas business ethics and patriotism stand for the remainder of the week. Such a monkey-holiness is not what the functioning world requires; rather, a transmutation of the whole social order is necessary, so that through every detail and act of secular life the vitalizing image of the universal god-man who is actually immanent and effective in all of us may be somehow made known to consciousness.

This kind of “transmutation of the whole social order” requires contemplation, questioning, knowledge and wisdom. The Bible puts a great deal of emphasis on obtaining knowledge and wisdom:

For wisdom is protection just as money is protection, But the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the lives of its possessors. (Ecclesiastes 7:12)

My mouth will speak wisdom, And the meditation of my heart will be understanding. (Psalm 49:3)

The mind of the prudent acquires knowledge, And the ear of the wise seeks knowledge. (Proverbs 18:15)

For this very reason, you must make every effort to supplement your faith with moral character, your moral character with knowledge, your knowledge with self-control, your self-control with endurance, your endurance with godliness, your godliness with brotherly kindness, and your brotherly kindness with love. (2 Peter 1:5-7)

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. (Hosea 4:6)

Yet, Institutional Christianity often seems fearful of inquiry, fearful of freedom, fearful of knowledge—indeed, fearful of anything except its own repetitious dogma and propaganda. Historically, the Church has been willing to criticize, marginalize, and even expel its most creative thinkers to maintain power and the status quo.

Many use religion as a defense against evil, but as Chris Hedges writes in a review of Bart Ehrman's book God's Problem:

Evil is not a problem. Evil is a mystery. Ehrman cannot reconcile a belief in God with this mystery and the cold reality of the morally neutral universe we inhabit. He wonders how God could allow the Holocaust to happen and children to starve to death. He wants a God that will make it better. And when God won't or can't or isn't interested, he walks away in a huff. This petulant stance would please Sigmund Freud, who insisted religion was a form of infantile regression, but it is another example of our cultural narcissism and childishness. Ehrman has become, after leaving the faith, a self-avowed agnostic. But he remains trapped within the simpleminded belief that religious faith, to have legitimacy, means there has to be something logical and ultimately just about human existence.

There is strong desire on the part of many in the human species to believe that human suffering and deprivation is ultimately meaningful, that it has a purpose, that our lives make sense. Human cultures have long sought to placate the demands of an all-powerful God, or gods, in return for protection from the vicissitudes of fortune. This is the engine that drives the Christian right. This powerful human desire, however, should not be confused with the reality of the transcendent. God answered Moses' request for revelation with the words: "i am who i am." This phrase is probably more accurately translated "i will be what i will be." God is not a being. God is an experience. God is a verb, not a noun. God comes to us in the profound flashes of insight that cut through the darkness, in the hope that permits human beings to cope with inevitable pain, despair, and suffering. God comes in the healing solidarity of love and self-sacrifice. But God and the vagaries of human existence, including suffering, are beyond our capacity to explain or understand.

The question is not whether God exists. It is whether we contemplate or are utterly indifferent to the transcendent forces that cannot be measured or quantified, those forces that lie beyond the reach of rational deduction. We all encounter these forces. They are love, beauty, alienation, loneliness, suffering, good, evil, and the reality of death. These unquantifiable forces in human life are the domain of art and religion. All cultures have struggled to give words, through religion and artistic expression, to these mysteries and moments of transcendence. God—and different cultures have given God many names and many attributes—is that which works upon us and through us to find meaning and relevance in a morally neutral universe.

Religion is our finite, flawed, and imperfect expression of the infinite. The experience of transcendence, the struggle to acknowledge the infinite, need not even be attributed to an external being called God. The belief in a personal God can, in fact, be antireligious. Religion is about the human need for the sacred. God is, as Thomas Aquinas writes, the power that allows us to be ourselves. God is a search, a way to frame the questions. God is a call to reverence.