The World War (1912-2022) is now 100 years old. The present wars in Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan, and the Uyghur genocide are just a small part of it. A subconscious need to finally get it over with might explain the sudden calls for nuclear Armageddon. However it is, after the 1st War-Phase (c.1912-23), a group of sociologists in Frankfurt Germany, called appropriately The Frankfurt School, determined that the western patriarchal family, with its strict hierarchical male-dominated structure, was to blame. We now define this as Toxic Masculinity. Their source was one of the original Marxists, Friedrich Engels, in his 1884 Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats (the origin of the family, private property and the state). Most people believe that Das Kapital, the source of Engels' ideas, was only economic theory. It was that, but also, as an absolutely necessary corollary, Marx demanded destruction of not only the family but the religious and national structures that support it.
The Frankfurt School dominates American education
Expelled from Germany in 1934, the Frankfurt School landed in America. Their course was the infiltration of American society through its institutions. This plan was originally configured by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist who was murdered by Mussolini's Blackshirts in 1937. Gramsci was a delightful fellow with a keen sense of humor who liked red wine. He understood that Communist Russia's experiment in socialism had failed miserably. He also correctly recognized the deep flaws in the western bourgeois social order that he was a part of. He saw that war would come again (it did), and proposed that the only way forward was to overthrow bourgeois society from within. He knew this would be a long process; one that he would never see culminated. For the Frankfurt School, their members got jobs in the American university system, promoted their friends and weeded out their enemies. With a play on words mimicking Mao Tse-tung, cultural Marxists Rudi Dutschke, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch named the process The Long March through the Institutions. Taking their cue from European Reds, American education stressed critical theory: the notion that America was all wrong and required re-evaluation and re-structuring. For American sociologists, the primary cause of all social ills, both presently and historically, was the American Family. It needed to be dismantled and destroyed in its present form.
Cultural Relativism
Franz Boas was a German who landed at Columbia University in New York well before the Frankfurt School got there. In the 1880s he was an intrepid Arctic cartographer at a time when Arctic exploration was littered with thousands of dead bodies. He lived among the Inuit for two years and came to appreciate their map-making skills. He saw that their culture was not inferior to his own but only different. He realized that people were the same no matter what their outward appearances were. He is now known as The Father of American Anthropology and his ideas eventually dominated American anthropology. They promoted the theory of the Blank Slate (Tabula rasa) and Cultural Relativism. This idea is that humans have no innate fixed identity or traits. Everyone is born as a blank slate. Human personality is fluid and solely determined by environment. Race, and today even sex and gender, have no reality and do not exist except as social constructions. This is now the single dominant theory in American anthropology and sociology. It is impossible to oppose it. People who try are ostracized and destroyed. In 1928 Margaret Mead was a young graduate student from Pennsylvania who studied with Boas. She set off to American Samoa to find out if his theories were correct. She did, for to find the contrary would have been an academic dead-end and career suicide. This was the most important field-trip in academic history, only surpassed by Darwin's. Her work in Samoa directly influenced the current dissolution of the American family and was the direct precursor to the American sexual revolution.
Margaret Mead visits Fantasy Island
The islands are way out there near New Zealand on the other side of the planet. She took a 6-week course in Samoan as part of her grant but was never fluent. She found the main island to be Americanized and the population Christianized for over 100 years. She hopped a boat and did her field-work on the small island of Ta'Ã » about 150 miles distant. Her objective was to study Samoan adolescent girls. If Boas' theories were correct, the trials of adolescence, so prevalent in western civilization, were not universal. Samoa became Mead's own private Idaho. She herself was sexually promiscuous at a time when this was not socially acceptable. She was unhappily married, had numerous affairs throughout her life including a bi-sexual one with Boas' assistant Ruth Benedict. Eventually she turned to Lesbianism. Ordinarily this shouldn't matter. The problem is that Mead projected her own sexual realities onto the subjects of her field-research. Her fantasies about what life and sexuality might or should be, became her subjects' reality on Samoa.
Teen Love
She said her research was conducted in Samoan but she lied. Much, and perhaps all her data, is fabricated. After interviewing her 25 young female subjects she came to the astonishing and remarkable conclusion that all Samoan girls practiced free-love before marriage with no social consequences. Just on the face of it, the proposition is rooted in the most abject folly and stupidity. Mead:
But the seventeen year old girl does not wish to marry - not yet. It is better to live as a girl with no responsibility, and a rich variety of experience. This is the best period of her life. She wants as many years of casual love-making as possible.
Mead never interviewed Samoan men and the one she did know well, a young man named Aviata, was the Samoan equivalent to American Gigolo. Somehow though, she came to the astounding conclusion that rape was unknown in Samoa:
Samoans are one of the most amiable, least contentious and most peaceful peoples in the world. In Samoa love between the sexes is a light and pleasant dance, and male sexuality is never defined as aggressiveness that must be curbed. The idea of forceful rape or of any sexual act to which both participants do not give freely is completely foreign to the Samoan mind.
It was all hearsay and fancy. What else could it be? Not fluent in Samoan, Mead spent just 5 months with the possibly 25 subjects of her study; some of whom later confessed that they were fibbing. She lived with an American family but took her subject's word for it that they all roamed about at night looking for sex and getting it no problem. One must wonder why she never went out with them at least once, but the question is never asked. In fact, none of her subjects ever got pregnant, nor were they ever pregnant, even though they all practiced, according to their own testimony, unabated gratuitous sex for years on end. Mead conducted no follow up and never returned to Samoa. In reality, and before colonization (1900), adultery of any kind was punished by death in Samoa. She could have easily known this but considered the Samoans "primitive" and felt that western academics like her enjoyed "immense superiority" over them. Early in her manuscript she writes "a trained student can master the fundamental structure of a primitive society in a few months." She couldn't and didn't. Young girls in Samoa were and are closely guarded by their parents and brothers, just as in every other culture throughout the world. Like in Western Europe before The War, unscrupulous Samoan men often kidnapped girls of higher social status and, upon ravishing them, could force a desirable marriage. Both then and now, rape in Samoa is actually more prevalent than in the USA, as is violent crime, especially adolescent crime. Samoans are just as messed up as we are.
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