Last week, I had the honor of moderating a Rising Tide Foundation event featuring my good friend Irene Eckert, who delivered an incredibly important presentation on the cultural warfare operations deployed by the CIA and MI6 after WWII which had one mission in mind: Destroy the classical cultural Weimar traditions of Germany with a focus on the spirit of Friedrich Schiller.
The main weapon against Schiller’s aesthetical insight into the unification of Truth, Beauty and political freedom was located in a CIA-run organization called ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’ (CCF) set up by a coterie of powerful misanthropic anti-humanists in 1949.
The logic behind the CCF’s promotion of a cult of ugliness both in Germany and across the Trans Atlantic community posited that classical culture is intrinsically totalitarian and fascist. If this is proposition be true (not that challenging it was ever permitted), then the battle against totalitarianism which characterized the Cold War must involve the promotion of a type of ‘liberal/democratic’ paradigm of art and literature that was anti-classical (and thus “anti-authoritarian”). This would be expressed in a cult of post-modernism, nihilism, a-tonalism (in music) and total relativism liberated of the dual tyranny truth and beauty.
Of course the paradox then became: IF random paint splatterings of a Jackson Pollock had equal claim to beauty as a Rembrandt, or if the nihilistic rants of a Nietsche were treated as equivalent to the prose of Schiller or Humboldt, then what value does truth have at all? If everything is considered true, then nothing is true.
With the loss of classical standards of truth, beauty and goodness in all aspects of culture, western society increasingly found itself detached from the deeper universality of collective traditions and values that had shaped our world.
Without access to these deeper values, the individuals growing up within the baby boomer matrix found themselves increasingly susceptible to new values such as “never trusting anyone over 30”, “turning on to LSD”, and making your own reality which characterized the post-1968 paradigm shift.
This new counter culture had the effect of atomizing each member of society while rendering each atomized unit increasingly malleable to group-think, hedonistic values and momentary impulses without regard for the deeper waves of the past or future that transcended each individual life. After all, without a developed sense of beauty in the soul, how could one judge an ugly idea?
So if you want to know how and why so many seemingly ‘nice’ well meaning people capitulated to ugly ideas again and again and again throughout the Cold War and into our current crisis-ridden age, then start by taking out your note book and listening to the following lecture by Irene.
Supplementary reading:
Read Irene’s accompanying essay “Schiller vs the Congress for Cultural Freedom”
Watch Irene’s previous RTF lecture ‘Identifying False Post-WWII Narratives’
Read Schiller’s works in the RTF Library of Alexandria
Why Must Aesthetics Govern a Society Worthy of Political Freedom? Ask the CIA
Amazing. I spent all my years in university, while studying a business degree, wondering what happened to all the philosophers who cared about beauty and truth and freedom. I took a poetry class and found Emily Dickinson among others who were considered crazy for caring about truth and beauty. My university may or may not have had courses studying Schiller, but I highly doubt it. I will look him up and all the other references. This is what I wish I had studied. Thank you Irene and Matthew.
On Irene's presentation: Drosten was not the inventor of the PCR test, it was Kary Mullis. Just a point.