Written by Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson

Two years ago, I wrote about the pending global population implosion. Demographers predict that 90 countries will lose population between now and the year 2100. Shrinking populations have portentous implications, including major shifts in geopolitical power and the possible financial collapse of welfare states.

The United States’ population is part of this global trend. In a truly stunning article in The New York Post, journalist Suzy Weiss reported, “Last year, the number of deaths exceeded that of births in 25 states—up from five the year before. The marriage rate is also at an all-time low, at 6.5 marriages per 1,000 people. Millennials are the first generation where a majority are unmarried (about 56%).”

The story gets grimmer: An increasing number of 20-something American women are reportedly undergoing voluntary sterilization. There is a growing anti-natalist movement in America. Once again, the vital question is: Why?

I will offer three explanations that overlap somewhat with what I wrote two years ago: ideological indoctrination, stunted psychological growth, and alienation from God. (Please note: I am not stating that every person, female or male, who chooses to remain childless is doing so for these reasons. What I am saying is that there are sweeping sociological currents in play.)

Ideology

The opening paragraph of Ms. Weiss’ article told of a young woman from a conservative background who went to college and had a “political awakening … toward progressivism.” A key component of progressivism is environmentalism. According to one professor interviewed for the article, many 20-somethings have come to conclude that “humans are the problem” and “a mistake.” This anti-human animus is one of the major tenets of environmentalism I was subjected to myself as an undergraduate a half-century ago. Then, the “green bible” was Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and its related activist group ZPG (Zero Population Growth). The message then was that there would be mass die-offs of humans as the world’s population swelled. As it turned out, a more populated world became a less poor and less polluted world.

Today’s youth are petrified (needlessly so, see here and here) about global warming. One poll cited by Weiss: “39% of Gen Zers are hesitant to procreate for fear of the climate apocalypse.” The blame for this epidemic of baseless fear lies with the media, an out-of-touch global political elite, and especially with our public school system. The indoctrination of children into environmentalist alarmism under the cynical, self-serving supervision of the EPA is professional malpractice and inhumane. Unfortunately for the women getting sterilized today, by the time they realize today’s scary predictions are as baseless as Ehrlich’s decades ago, it will be impossible for them to have children should they so desire.

Psychology 

Recently, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) posted an article about John B. Calhoun “mouse utopia” experiments in the 1960s. Briefly, mice were provided with utopian (ideal) conditions—the ultimate in cradle-to-grave security. Eventually, the pampered mice became antisocial. They shunned sex and procreation, and consequently died out. Calhoun concluded from his experiments that “When all sense of necessity is stripped from the life of an individual, life ceases to have purpose. The individual dies in spirit.”

I have commented before about the paradox of prosperity—that the wealthier capitalism has made human societies, the more individuals despise capitalism. Today, the wealthier and easier that life becomes compared to what our ancestors experienced, the more reactions there are like Isabel’s. She states, “I think it’s morally wrong to bring a child into the world. No matter how good someone has it, they will suffer.” In other words, since the perfect life is unattainable, today’s better life becomes a tragedy to be avoided.

Spiritual alienation

Pagan greens disparage human life as a “cancer,” “plague,” “vermin,” “disease,” etc., and openly long for humans to decrease. They reject the Christian belief that life is a gift from God and that we humans should “be fruitful and multiply.” “I don’t want to work my life away,” says Isabel, an avowed anti-natalist. Like the mice in Calhoun’s experiments, when creature comforts abound and life is without challenges to survival, it seems that the zest for life atrophies, and along with it, the desire to procreate and share the joys of life with children. If this attitude becomes dominant—if more and more people view children as a burden instead of a gift, and life as a dreary nuisance rather than a splendid opportunity to enjoy God’s creation—our population will indeed implode. If taken to an extreme, societal suicide becomes a possibility.

We may not be at the point of an existential crisis yet. But it is ominous that an increasing number of young people no longer include child-bearing in their concept of what constitutes a fulfilled life. God help us.

Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is a retired adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with the Institute for Faith and Freedom at Grove City College.

Understanding that future generations are the key to building political power and lasting change, socialists and totalitarians of all varieties have gravitated toward government-controlled education since before the system was even founded.

The communist “Frankfurt School” was no exception in its affinity for “educating” the youth.

Almost 100 years ago, a group of socialist and communist “thinkers” led by Marxist law professor Carl Grünberg established the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. From there, they would move to the United States. And from their new home in New York City, the subversive ideas they espoused would eventually infect the entire planet like a deadly cancer—mostly through the education system.

A Cultural Revolution

The group actually had its genesis in Moscow before officially being founded in 1923. By the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks—as Antonio Gramsci would later conclude from his Italian prison cell—realized a change in tactics was needed. The much-anticipated violent revolution of the proletariat predicted by Karl Marx to bring about communism, it turned out, would be much more difficult in Western Europe and the United States than previously anticipated. In fact, it wouldn’t be possible at all without first breaking down the cultural barriers to collectivism, they reasoned.

As such, the Communist Internationale and mass-murdering Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin’s minion Karl Radek arranged a meeting at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. Among the participants, according to historical records, were Soviet secret police boss Felix Djerzhinski, Hungarian Bolshevik “cultural commissar” Gyorgy Lukacs, and Communist Internationale (Comintern) bigwig Willi Muenzenberg.

At the Moscow meeting, the conspirators decided that what was needed was a more gradual “cultural revolution,” or what eventually came to be known as “cultural Marxism,” in the West and beyond. To advance that program, the subversives agreed on a sinister but brilliant plan. This would involve the destruction of traditional religion and the Christian culture it produced, the collapse of sexual morality and the deliberate undermining of the family, and a wrecking ball to infiltrate and demolish the existing institutions.

Some of these men had experience. For instance, Lukacs, who served as “minister of education and culture” in the Bolshevik Hungarian regime of Bela Kun, had introduced all manner of perversion and grotesque “sex education” in public schools, starting in elementary school. It was part of a campaign to destroy “bourgeois” Christian morality and sexual ethics among the youth. The objective was to eventually de-Christianize Hungary, thereby facilitating a total communist restructuring of the human mind and all of society.

Moving to America

A key tool of these conspirators in Moscow would come to be known as the Frankfurt School. From the Institute in Frankfurt, and later in New York, these cultural revolutionaries would promote feminism, communism, atheism, mass migration, globalism, humanism, multiculturalism, nihilism, hedonism, environmentalism, and all sorts of other “isms” that tended to undermine individual liberty, traditional culture, and morality. Rampant morality-free sexuality and Freudian pseudo-psychology were central to the agenda.

To anyone who has studied America’s public education system today, which spends far more time peddling these “isms” to captive children than providing actual education, the stench of the Frankfurt School’s machinations is unmistakable. In fact, the whole system reeks.

Despite some differences, the group maintained close ties with the Soviet Union. Ironically, though, analysts have long argued that the work of the institute peddling Nietzsche and others helped lay the foundation for the National Socialist takeover of Germany. As the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler gradually parted ways with the more internationally minded socialist tyranny of the butchers in Moscow, the civilization destroyers at the ISR fled to the United States.

There, with crucial assistance from socialist and humanist “education reformer” John Dewey and his disciples, these characters attached themselves to Columbia University’s important Teachers College in 1934. Dewey had been a leading “philosopher” and “educator” at Columbia, retiring just a few years before the Frankfurt School influx was in full swing. Others settled at Berkeley, Princeton, and Brandeis.

With Rockefeller money, Dewey would play a key role in helping the Frankfurt School’s operatives put down roots in America. More on the role of the major foundations in subverting American education will be detailed in an upcoming piece of this series.

The importation of Frankfurt School luminaries was a match made in totalitarian heaven, as Dewey and his disciples had much in common with the cultural Marxist social revolutionaries.

As previously recounted in this series on education, for instance, Dewey was a devoted fan of the Soviet model. In fact, he wrote glowing reports about the supposed successes of Soviet communism in the “New Republic” magazine. Dewey was especially infatuated with the indoctrination centers masquerading as schools—and particularly how they were instilling a “collectivistic mentality” in the children. Dewey’s collectivist, anti-Christian “religious humanism” also appealed to the Frankfurt operatives.

Once the institute’s minions set up shop at Columbia and other prestigious U.S. academic institutions, the Frankfurt School’s rhetoric had to change, at least superficially, as Americans were still ardently devoted to God, country, family, and individual liberty. And so, instead of speaking openly of Marxism and communism, Frankfurt School subversives spoke of “dialectical materialism.” Instead of attacking the family, they attacked “patriarchy.” But the agenda remained the same.

Fighting ‘Fascism’

Almost as soon as they arrived, they began plotting the destruction of America’s traditional values, religion, and form of government under the guise of fighting “fascism.”

Indeed, the luminaries of the Frankfurt School, who represented a wide variety of disciplines, used “education” as a crucial tool for advancing their totalitarian, civilization-destroying philosophies. But they infected much more than just the education system, with their sick ideas spreading out like a poison throughout the intellectual veins of America: the social sciences, entertainment, politics, and beyond.

One of the ways in which Frankfurt School operatives and academics advanced their desired social changes via education was through so-called critical theory. In his 1937 work “Traditional and Critical Theory,” ISR Director Max Horkheimer argued that critical theory—a neo-Marxist tool used to demonize the market system, Christianity, and Western civilization—was aimed at bringing about social change and exposing the alleged oppression of people by capitalism.

Another useful tool for undermining freedom and traditional society was the 1950 work by key Frankfurt School theorists known as “The Authoritarian Personality.” These social “researchers” claimed to discover that the traditional American male and father was actually “authoritarian” because, among other reasons, he held traditional values. Thus, the “patriarchy” and the traditional family—among the most important barriers to tyranny—came under relentless attack as a precursor to “fascism.” Public schools were viewed as tools to combat this alleged problem, and they did so vigorously.

Influence

To understand just how central Teachers College (infected by Frankfurt School and Dewey ideas) would become to the public education in the United States, consider that, by 1950, estimates suggest that a third of principals and superintendents of large school districts were being trained there. Many of these left the college with radical ideas about reality, government, society, family, and economy that came straight from Dewey and the Frankfurt School.

Of course, the damage to America from anti-God, anti-freedom German “intellectuals” began even before the Frankfurt School migrated to Columbia. In fact, Dewey was trained by G. Stanley Hall, who was among the many Americans to study under professor Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig University.

Among other notable highlights, Wundt pioneered the idea of the human being as a soulless animal. Essentially, he viewed people as biological stimulus-response mechanisms that could, and should, be trained in a manner similar to circus animals. This Darwinian, materialist view of the human being reigns supreme today in the education system but has been catastrophic.

Fringe left-wing extremists who support the Frankfurt School’s anti-American agenda have dishonestly attempted to paint criticism of the relevant institutions, academics, and their ideas as “anti-Semitic.” But in reality, the dangerous ideas pose a major threat to Judaism, too, and so countless patriotic and liberty-minded Jews have also joined the fight against the Frankfurt School’s poison.

The threat of these subversives and their cultural Marxism has been recognized at the highest levels of the U.S. government, even recently. Former National Security Council Director of Policy and Planning Richard Higgins, for instance, blasted it in his now-notorious 2017 “Higgins Memo” to President Donald Trump about the ongoing war against the administration and the United States.

The wars against Trump and America “cannot be separated from the cultural Marxist narratives that drive them,” warned Higgins, saying cultural Marxism was most directly tied to the Frankfurt School. “The Frankfurt strategy deconstructs societies through attacks on culture by imposing a dialectic that forces unresolvable contradictions under the rubric of critical theory,” he warned. Higgins then quotes Herbert Marcuse, a leading Frankfurt thinker, on how to crush the political and cultural right through persecution and phony “tolerance.”

To this day, reflecting the ISR influx of the early 1930s, Teachers College remains a leading purveyor of socialist poison masquerading as “education.” Its recently released book list includes titles by Bill Ayers, the communist terrorist whose terror group Weather Underground, working with communist Cuban intelligence, bombed the State Department, the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, police stations, and more. The Teachers College Press fall selection also includes endless nonsense on “social justice,” racialism, multiculturalism, and other “isms” with roots in Marxism and Frankfurt School strategies.

With society and civilization becoming increasingly unstable as the final vestiges of traditional education are destroyed, the Frankfurt School and its American allies such as Dewey would be pleased with their handiwork. After all, cultural Marxists including Gramsci and ISR thinkers believed that once the old order was destroyed via a “long march” through society’s institutions, Marxism could eventually triumph. On the education front, they now appear largely victorious.

But their overall victory is hardly assured. What comes next depends on whether Americans can be roused from their slumber in time to restore civilization. As the socialists and totalitarians understood well, education will be the key either way.

This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

Written by Chet Richard

I am a Conservationist.  I am not an Environmentalist.  What?  Aren’t the two the same thing?  No, they are not.  In fact the two movements are diametrically opposed.

John Muir was a Conservationist, not an Environmentalist.  He saw the wilderness as a “primary source for understanding God: The Book of Nature.”  Muir did not worship Nature, as modern environmentalists do.  Muir worshiped God, the Judeo-Christian God.  So, here is the difference:  Conservation derives from the Hebrew Bible.  Mankind is to be Stewards of the Land.  We are charged to husband God’s creation.

Environmentalists, for the most part, believe that the Earth’s biosphere is God.  And, that human beings are destructive parasites, eating away at the life of their deity. In effect, most environmentalists are atheists searching for something larger than themselves to worship.  But environmentalists see themselves as not being the riff-raff parasites that the rest of mankind are.  Environmentalists believe they are the elect, the knowing, the superior beings, the priests, the Gnostics.

This notion that people are parasites really got started in the 1960’s.  A couple of highly promoted bad actors started this environmental heresy.  The first was Rachel Carson with her hysterical polemic about DDT and its purported harm to birds and other wild life.  Her ideas proved to be, at best, problematic, but millions of people have died as a consequence of the resulting international banning of DDT.  The second, and even more dangerous, problem child was Paul Ehrlich.  This curmudgeon has even greater responsibility by amplifying environmental hysteria.  Ehrlich should have known better.  After all, he is a biology professional.  But his mistakes suggest that he may not be all that professionally gifted.

Ehrlich predicted the death of the oceans due to insecticides and other chemicals washing into the sea.  He did not account, as he ought to have, for the rapid evolution of plankton to adapt to these foreign substances.  (The smaller the organism the faster its evolution – witness antibiotic resistance.)  It was a bonehead mistake that no competent evolutionary biologist should make.  More famously, Ehrlich predicted mass famine and hundreds of millions of deaths within a few years because of the so-called “population bomb.”  He completely ignored the 1960’s technological “Green Revolution” which today has China and India exporting food.  And, he completely missed the natural reduction in birth rates, and the consequent leveling of population, as the standard of living of Third World countries increased.  Again, that process was something that population experts already knew and understood.

And then came James Lovelock with his “Gaia Hypothesis.”  This is the notion that the biosphere is an environment-regulating ensemble of living organisms.  In the large, the biosphere, together with its non-organic matrix, could be considered an organism, itself.  The idea is interesting.  Indeed, it has proven to be scientifically fruitful.

But other people latched onto the biosphere and made Gaia a god.  And, with it, made environmentalism a religion.  A religion, which Lovelock himself rejects as misinformed – if not dangerous.  Lovelock went through his hysteric period in the early years of the ecology mania, but he has since moderated his outlook now that his predictions of imminent environmental doom have proved unfounded.

Why do people do it?  Why do they fall into these overblown quasi-religious enthusiasms?  I speculate that there are three complementary reasons:  Ignorance, Insecurity and Hubris.

Ignorance:  Back in the ‘60’s I was a graduate student in physics at one of the University of California campuses.  One day I had the opportunity to sit and chat, at length, with one of our leading ecologists.  Naturally, I was curious about some aspects of the so-called ecology movement that Rachel Carson had engendered.  Much to my surprise, in response I received a long rant about this movement.  This eminent scientist was scathing in his comments — particularly about the sheer ignorance of the movement’s devoted followers.  “Not one of them,” he said, “has even heard of a logistic equation, much less predator-prey relationships.”  He concluded that harangue by dismissing the movement as nothing but political manipulation of less than astute people.  Nothing much has changed since then.  The true believers still believe without understanding.  Environmentalism is a religion after all.

Insecurity:  Most everyone is insecure about something – about many things, perhaps.  Long established religions have traditionally provided a framework for ordering one’s life and for reducing this natural sense of insecurity.  As we have discovered, there is something about the post World War Two world that has, at least in the West, broken these traditional religious frameworks.  Something happened during the war to cause people to no longer trust religious authority.  Perhaps it was the sheer evil that was manifest and undeniable during those years of horror.  The Cold War amplified that developing sense of insecurity.  People started looking for something new to believe in – something that, once again, would provide spiritual tranquility.

The environmental movement seemed to provide the needed solace.  Emotional peace may be given through participation in something larger than oneself.  But, I note that few of the true believers, being mostly city dwellers, have any real experience of the wilderness.

For those who have experienced it, the gift of wild nature can induce spiritual grace.  John Muir felt it.  I have felt it.  I have felt it in many lonely places around the world.  I have been changed by it.  I have felt this spiritual tranquility on remote white water rivers, on mountain glaciers, while hiking across Muir’s Sierras, when diving to narcosis depths of the sea, while surfing imposing waves.  But Nature didn’t care what I was experiencing, what I was feeling.  Nature is utterly indifferent.  Nature is dangerous.  A momentary lapse in the wilderness and Nature will likely kill you.  There is no empathy in Nature.  No intelligence.  No awareness.  Nature is not a caring god.  Nature is not even a god.  Nature just is.  Gaia just is.  My companions on these many excursions were savvy, alert, and extremely cautious.  Despite some very close calls, we survived.  That said, we always sacrificed to the River God before putting in!

Hubris:  In the early years of Christianity there were Gnostics.  These were Christians who claimed special knowledge about Jesus and what he really taught.  Gnosticism eventually was suppressed.  Its followers were rejected from the Christian community, in part because of their smug, arrogant, airs of intellectual superiority.  While Christian Gnosticism may have died out, the type of people who adopt Gnostic superciliousness remain all too common.  In the first half of the twentieth century Marxism was their fashion, and still remains so with a Globalist twist.  In the second half, the Gnostics adopted Environmentalism.  Doing so made them into superior beings, don’t you know.

Unfortunately, Gnostics are easy marks for the con.  A skilled confidence man knows that the best way to hook a victim is through the victim’s vanity.  The environmental movement is a con.  Its leadership preys on the ignorance, insecurity, and hubris of its followers.

The environmental con takes many forms.  In recent decades man-caused global warming is the con game.  That scare was deliberately manufactured in the 1980’s.  Its purpose was, and is, to cripple the U.S. economy, foremost, and the economy of Western Europe secondarily.  This program has had considerable success.  Many have bought into the con and the economy is hurting.  In particular, some who have knowingly promoted the con are politicians who seek to accumulate power and wealth.  Using the scare tactic of climate runaway, stupendous resources have been wasted on misguided attempts to reduce carbon dioxide:  solar power, wind power, alcohol fuels, suppression of coal, gas, oil and nuclear energy production.  Millions of jobs have been lost through unneeded environmental regulations.  Fortunately, Nature did not cooperate with the conmen and politicians.  The world did not heat up, as predicted.  Belief in global warming is rapidly diminishing, as it should.

But there is always another con, and each new con means further loss of freedom.  For half a century the environmental movement has been the primary tool of those leaders who wish to suppress individual freedom and individual initiative.  The erosion has been slow, but it has been steady.  Most adults, today, have never experienced the freedom that I, and others of my cohort, once enjoyed.  Not having that experience they simply don’t know what they are missing.  Consequently, they are easily preyed upon by those who would impose further restrictions – for the benefit of mankind, of course.  It’s a con:  Trade your freedom for a better environment. Trade your freedom for a sense of security.  Trade your freedom for a belief that you are doing good by protecting the environment.  Trade your freedom for a sense of moral superiority.  Trade your freedom and then live in poverty.  That’s all right, say the Gnostics, people are parasites, they get what they deserve.

Poverty:  There is the source of real irony.  True care for the environment, true care for nature, is a rich man’s game.  Only the prosperous have the resources to protect the natural world.  Only those living in comfort believe that it matters.  Only those with wealth – the middle class and more – can be stewards of the land.  Impoverish America and the land will be despoiled.

Poor people care little for Nature.  Poor people struggle just to live. They don’t have time for environmental diversions.  The environmentalist con takes away freedom and replaces it with diminished prosperity.  Carried far enough, political environmentalism ultimately will drive people into impoverished serfdom and, with the greatest irony of all, it will wreck the environment.

This article was originally posted at AmericanThinker.com