Steyn vs Freud... Who Would've Thunk It?

When Macleans magazine published an excerpt from America Alone entitled "The Future Belongs to Islam", it eventually led to the magazine being subject to a human rights complaint.

Various Canadian Muslim groups objected to the excerpt, and feared it would stir up public hostility against Muslims. There may have been fair reason to worry about this (although the Human Rights complaint itself was clearly frivolous).

But part three of the Century of the Self presents a theme that puts an interesting twist on the Steyn thesis: as a spin-off off an ancient showdown between psychiatric quacks.

The quacks in case are Anna Freud -- the daughter of Sigmund Fruend, who considered the human sex drive to be dangerous -- and Whilhem Reich, who considered a healthy sex life to be the definitive factor of human mental health.

A decidated life-long virgin, Freud was considered to be something of a prude. When Reich's theories came to her attention, Freud took it upon herself to destroy her career.

Reich believed that human sexuality wasn't merely the key to human flourishing in terms of demographics alone. He also believed that orgasm was central to human mental health. By modern standards, it stands out as a lunatic idea, but it's implications for Steyn's argument are intriguing, to say the least.

In the excerpt, Steyn argues a very basic and intuitive thesis: the Muslim world is reproducing at a far faster rate than the western world. In terms of sheer numbers alone, this could put the Islamic world in the position of being able to overwhelm and envelope the rest.

This is certainly a terrifying prospect for many of Steyn's most fervent admirers, who fear Muslims.

Western and Muslim attitudes toward sex are remarkably different. Through innovations in birth control, the western world has embraced sex for pleasure like at no other time in human history, perhaps exempting the height of Roman decadence. The increasing cultural focus on sex becomes most apparent through an examination of pop culture.

Meanwhile, the (at least stereotypical) Muslim attitude toward sex is considered far less enthusiastic.

As individuals, the western world has far more sex than the Muslim world and produces far fewer children. Some may say that birth control is to blame for this state of affairs and while they would be correct, any proposal to eliminate birth control is unequivocally not the answer.

If one were to judge the comparative mental illness of the western and Muslim worlds based on Reich's theory, one may be drawn toward the issue of suicide bombers. It takes a particularly fervent individual to commit to killing themselves as a means of attacking their enemies -- some could consider this to be a symptom of some sort of mental illness.

The irony is astounding: the Muslim world has less casual sex, but more children (whom some would, rightly or wrongly, consider to be candidates for future suicide bombings). If Reich's theories had any merit at all, it would be ironic that the innovations that have allowed the western world to enjoy the mental health benefits of casual sex have also led to a state of affairs in which they've put the western world at a disadvantage.

This is, of course, assuming that one grants credence to Wilhelm Reich's theories (one should not), and that one agrees with Mark Steyn (one may not).

The Quest for Total Control

In part two of The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis outlines how the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud were applied in an effort to try to prevent a mass movement like the one present in Nazi Germany from ever emerging in the United States.

Ironically, the progenitors of these efforts wound up seeking precisely the kind of total control that the Nazi Party had sought in Germany.

Sigmund Freud believed that psychoanalysis could, at best, help people understand the internal forces within their own minds. His daughter Anna Freud, however, had different ideas entirely: she believed that people could learn to control these internal forces.

Of course, if an individual could learn how to control these forces, it isn't unthinkable that other people could learn how to control them on the individual'a behalf.

This at least partially seemed to be the impetus behind the National Mental Health Strategy introduced by Harry Truman's government in the post-war years. It mixed a demonstrable actual need -- the need to find ways to effectively treat the post-traumatic stress disorder, known then as shell shock, that many American veterans had returned from the war with -- with the desire to manipulate peole for economic or political gain.

The focus of these efforts was on identifying psychological barriers to certain acts, and removing them.

Political authorities turned the techniques of psychoanalysis toward creating a stable American society -- toward building a common identity that would lead toward constructive collective action.

But this is exactly what the Nazi Party had sought to do in Germany. They recognized a German society that had become unstable under the dual strains of the Great Depression and post-World War One political instability, and sought to establish Nazism as the means by which stability would be restored to Germany.

In some regards, they succeeded. The irrational behaviour of the German masses under Nazism were directed toward rationed -- if not rational -- ends.

To this end, the efforts of Anna Freud and her contemporaries were potentially self-defeating.

The Rationality of Irrationality

In part one of Adam Curtis' The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis investigates how the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud were exploited in by Edward Burnays -- a nephew of Freud's -- to develop marketing techniques that exploited people's emotions to make them believe that emotionally-driven decisions were being made rationally.

What Burnays kick-started has over decades grown into marketing techniques whereby products are no longer sold, but rather the idea of a lifestyle.

As Benjamin Barber points out, sometimes the lifestyles being marketed are at odds with the products themselves. During the average sports telecast, for example, one will encounter ads for sporting goods such as Nike and Reebok. The idea is that one will buy the idea that by buying these goods they'll be able to emulate their sporting heroes.

During the same telecast, however, one will also encounter ads for fastfood restaurants and alcohol. This lifestyle message is at direct odds with those offered by the producers of sporting goods.

After all, few professional athletes are frequent visitors to McDonald's restaurants. Those who over-indulge in Budweiser and Smirnoff vodka will certainly not enjoy long-term success.

The fast food and alcohol advertisements are much more in tune with the lifestyle choices of the average sports spectator. As Barber notes, the lifestyle promoted through these telecasts is not one of actually playing hockey, football or basketball, but rather of being a spectator.

A lifestyle of watching, not one of doing.

Without the work of people like Edward Burnays, such things would never have been possible.