In this post I will examine some of the ideas of Irving Kristol, a brilliant man whose work I would have easily dismissed as a pipeline from Trotsky to the Project For a New American Century - had I not read it.
There is good reason to review his writings, as they reveal much of the workings of our current regime.
Today we will look at his concept of “therapeutic education”, its origins, and how it became so established in politics and public messaging that it has vanished into omnipresence.
I guarantee that it features in one of the spiciest-titled essays you have ever read.
PART ONE -
Who is Irving Kristol and why does he matter?
Conflict as Therapy
From “Neocon” through Greece to “Liberal Intervention”
PART TWO -
The Culture of Conflict
“On the Political Stupidity of the Jews”
Why Everything is Therapy
KRISTOLISATION
Who is Irving Kristol? He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who settled, along with many others, in the New York of the 1890s1. Born in 1920, he went to college in 1936, entering the “New York Intellectual” circle which, though initially Trotskysist, produced the “neoconservatives”.
Kristol is styled as the “Godfather of Neoconservatism”. This is true in the sense that he is the father of current neocon William Kristol, whose cartoonish caricatures of thought bear no relation beyond blood to those of his father.
MUGGED BY REALITY
Together with bloated obscenity Robert Kagan, William Kristol founded2 the Project for a New American Century in 1997, steering the US into aggressive wars in pursuit of global domination by means of military force.
The shift in the meaning of “neoconservative” is marked by revisiting Irving Kristol’s definition of the term, recorded in his 2009 obituary:
“A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality”.
Today’s neocons have created a reality that liberally mugs everyone.
CONFLICT AS THERAPY
Bloated obscenity Robert Kagan runs one branch of the family business, which is Forever War. He is the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants.
His wife, former Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, shares his heritage and worldview. Her parents came from Belarus and Moldova, then both part of the Russian Empire.
This worldview is that of Jewish emigres from Eastern Europe, whose focus is determined by a permanent animus towards Russia as a result. Current US foreign policy is impossible to understand without this insight.
The neocons, though largely Jewish, are not especially interested in Israel these days. Nuland’s many contributions to the family business include the war in Ukraine and its current administration, shaped to destroy Russian power.
Frederick Kagan, Robert’s brother, was the architect of the “surge” in US troops in Iraq. His wife Kimberley founded the Institute for the Study of War3, providing propaganda-analysis for the mainstream news to report.
Robert Kagan has since 1997 pressed the idea that warfare and a martial ethos can renew the American spirit4. He called for the United States to declare universal war on September 11th, 2001, saying
“Congress, in fact, should immediately declare war.
It does not have to name a country.”
Many countries have been named since.
PATRIOT GAMES
Kagan has always been careful to infuse Forever War with a renewal American patriotism. He appealed to the worship of World War Two to promote conflict without borders as an American duty - suggesting those who questioned his vision were cowards.
Over the past few years there has been a nostalgic celebration of "The Greatest Generation" -- the generation that fought for America and for humanity in the Second World War.
There's no need for nostalgia now. That challenge is before us again. The question today is whether this generation of Americans is made of the same stuff.
He consistently promotes the notion that war is a sort of therapy for America, which can restore it to glory. Critics of “forever wars” are intolerant, he said in 2021.
Antony Blinken, the current US Secretary of State, cites “Bob Kagan” as his respected mentor.
Since 2019, the Kaganites have had it all their way. A loss of prestige accompanied the disaster of their project in Iraq, with Glenn Greenwald asking in 2007
“Why would any rational person listen to Robert Kagan?”
Kagan’s eventual riposte was extraordinary.
Writing in 2021, he said in “A Superpower, Like it or Not: Why America Must Accept their Global Role” he said that the “low cost” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had failed due to a lack of “commitment”.
Andrew Bacevich of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft took a different view
Our actual predicament derives from the less than honest claim that history obliges the United States to pursue a policy of militarized hegemony until the end of time. Alternatives do exist.
The cost of Kagan’s declaration of war without limits is immense, estimated at almost nine trillion dollars since 2001. With around five million deaths and casualties, it has destroyed America at home and abroad.
If you would like to know more about the Classical concepts weaponised by the likes of Robert Kagan, you can find out here:
Under the neocon banner of renewal, the United States has lost every war it has fought5. Its wars have devastated US prestige and power. At home, enormous efforts in censorship accelerate to contain and marginalise dissent. The neocon project has united states against the USA.
What sort of therapy is this?
PART TWO
CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Irving Kristol wrote one of the most important essays of the 20th century which answers this and many other questions concerning our questionable state of affairs.
“On the Political Stupidity of the Jews” is his memorably titled paper from 1999.
It is prescient and looks both forward and back, detailing the beginnings of a cult-like approach to politics, policy and propaganda which has shaped the world we inhabit today. He began with this.
Whether in America or in their own sovereign country, Jews still have no idea what statecraft is
Irving Kristol fought in Europe in World War Two, and was a proper soldier, being in the infantry. He notes that
At the end of World War II, the major American Jewish organizations, preparing to fight a possible upsurge in anti-Semitism (which never came), discovered a category of contemporary psychology called “conflict resolution,” which they believed to be ideally suited to the problem they were facing.
In fact, its great virtue was that it was ideally suited to their ideological predisposition
He said that this sought to recast human relations as a question which could be answered by a “therapeutic approach”.
According to this branch of social science, ethnic, racial or religious conflicts are the result of bias, prejudice, misunderstanding or ignorance.
Kristol argued that this is the model on which US - and now Western - liberal ideology is patterned.
The vision of politics derived from this kind of social science can fairly be described as “therapeutic,” as it assumes that ethnic, religious or racial conflicts can be resolved by educational therapy that will uproot the psychological causes of the conflict.
He lived before a time when observation carried the risk of ostracism.
But ultimately it is just one more variant of the universal humanism which was the unofficial religion of the Enlightenment—to which Jews, lacking a realistic political tradition, were especially susceptible, and still are.
His analysis explains why Robert Kagan reaches for the Greeks to justify his death cult dreams.
With the exception of a few quotations from the Prophets, there is nothing in the Jewish tradition that prepares Jews to think politically about foreign policy.
Further, it explains Kagan’s own enthusiasm for the defence of liberal democracy through aggression.
This was signalled in his 2014 rejection of the label “neoconservative” in favour of “liberal interventionism”, as the faction migrated to the Democrats under Hillary Clinton. Irving Kristol wrote,
It is not surprising, therefore, that Europe’s Jews were so vulnerable to the universalist utopianism that characterized the Enlightenment, whose essence is the attempt to make do with abstract theories of universal rights and international laws, in precisely those areas in which a people most desperately needs the practical experience of statesmanship and the political wisdom which at great length grows out of it.
Still on foreign policy, Kristol senior moved to the question of Israel, and its relation to US power.
This political utopianism has left the Jews intellectually disarmed as they attempt to deal with the intractable foreign policy problems of an independent Jewish state, and charging down a blind alley in their search for constitutional arrangements that serve the Jewish interest in both the United States and Israel.
Yet Irving Kristol’s idea is so elephantine it can be overlooked. The impact of “conflict resolution” has been to restructure all means of information as a form of rehabilitation to a disaster.
The problem is not them, it’s you. You just need help to understand why.
WHY EVERYTHING IS THERAPY
Education in school, consumer propaganda whether corporate or political, and the many iterations of “critical theory” are all products of the therapeutic approach.
The “conflict” being resolved here is that between the utopian ideology of those who identify as liberal, and your perception of the reality it creates.
It is a method which suggest that the very suspicion that something is not right indicates disorder in the observer, not in the world.
THE RIGHT TO EXTINCTION
Of course, Liberal utopianism is an engine of chaos, and the damage it has done to sanity generally and nations in particular is obvious. Its rights-based psychological warfare has seen birth rates plummet, with all regions outside Africa projected to fall beneath replacement rates by 2040. By the century’s end, the right to extinction will rule the world.
Feminism has sold women on consumerism and careers, at the cost of womanhood - itself a problem created in order to be solved by retail therapy and liberation.
Race rights are another means of dissolving social cohesion into insoluble antagonism. The therapeutic approach has resulted in an inverse apartheid, leaving white people in a state of internal exile.
Estranged from their slandered heritage, and neighboured to strangers in their former homes, their rights are forfeit to the victim culture which is necessary to explain away their relative historical success.
The therapeutic approach says that noticing differences in nature, responding to the reflex aversion to practices involving faecal matter and the sexual treatment of children, and scepticism around the merits of permanent war are all the result of some malady to be made good with the right words.
It is a method which tells you that sanity is madness. This is the message of the medium of mass communication. You and your instincts are mistaken. You have the wrong idea. It’s OK. Here’s ten ways you can learn to feel better - and think less. If that does not work, you can take medication to feel less.
The opiate epidemic in the United States was accelerated by the large scale prescription of powerful drugs such as Oxycontin and Vicodin.
“You can’t get addicted if you’re in pain” - this was the advice said to have been given to US doctors in medical school6, preceding a national crisis of addiction.
“Deaths of despair” in the US have been noted to pair with the decline in Christian belief, along with the breakdown of traditional social bonds and mores.
Partnered with this, of course, is the explosion in the prescription of “anti-depressants”, which simply alter brain chemistry to make people feel less. The resulting “flattening of affect”, as the cancelled state is called, is indistinguishable from many forms of categorised mental disorder.
CRAFTING DEPENDENCE
The therapeutic approach is itself an addiction, and prescribes other habits of self indulgence to compensate for the surrender of your mind, body and soul to the politics of suicide.
It is not ignorance, of course, but knowledge which is at the root of these conflicts with utopia.
The fact-value gap is not the only one that can never be closed7. The IQ gap too is resilient to therapy, to injections of cash and to experiments in regime change.
Therapeutic education in principle objects to reality. It is a means of avoiding the obvious. Its establishment as the gold standard of schooling, public policy and international relations has bankrupted the system. It has no solutions but more therapy.
When did any therapist advertise a cure?
The therapeutic model is appealing. It markets self care alongside the promise of magic spells to make all the bad thoughts go away forever. It is the medicine for the sickness unto death that it has itself created, by making impossible any practical solutions to the insane ideology it exists to serve.
What it does in fact is neutralise independence, by fostering dependence on itself. In its promise to make sense of the senseless, it helps people to cope with the mess it has made, which explains why propaganda functions so well as a form of therapy.
Online likes produce offline rewards, as the dependent brain literally grows accustomed to the ringing of the notification bell8.
There is a reason the downvote button is uncommon. It is because the designation of discernment as disorder can generate some unpleasant side effects. You are not permitted to give this reality the one-star reviews it merits.
That’s my job.
“Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era”, J. David Hoeveler. University of Wisconsin Press, 1991 (Chapter 4).
“The PNAC (1997–2006) and the Post-Cold War ‘Neoconservative Moment’”, Pierre Bourgois, Politique Américaine (n° 31, November 2018, p. 173-198). PDF in English here.
The ISW has another outlet, titled “Understanding War”. This is where many of the headlines about Ukraine and Iran come from, by way of Western-backed regional intelligence services.
Kagan’s 2008 book cites Aristotle and sees Kagan speak of the restoration of the American soul through his prism of liberal-militarism. A review of his The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), says
Kagan argues that the Enlightenment faith in progress and a deterministic assumption that global economic integration would soften nations’ manners ignore the Greek understanding of “thumos” in the human soul, a spiritedness and ferocity in defense of clan, tribe, city, state.
I wrote in detail about the origins of the thymotic impulse in Classical Greece here, and show how debased it had become in Kagan’s cartoonish attempt to recast his filthy ambitions as those of some latter day Achilleus. For his Looney Tunes reboot of the wisdom of the ancients he is known as a respected scholar.
The Pacific War was a US victory, and thought the Russians took the brunt of it, the European theatre of WW2 delivered Western Europe and British imperial influence into American hands. Korea was not a win, nor was Vietnam.
It is difficult to argue that the adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria ended well for US power. I think Ukraine a loss too, and one whose ramifications for the current world order are existential.
John Davidson’s recently released documentary “Epidemic of Fraud” shows, at the 50 minute mark, US doctors making this claim. You can see it free here, and read my review of it here. It details the endemic corruption in US health provision, reaching beyond the covid crisis to document large scale financial and scientific malpractice.
The fact-value gap is the distance between what is, and what there ought to be. The therapeutic message is that feeling is believing, and is preferable to evidence based reasoning - which is likely to lead to thoughts which violate the terms and conditions of the unreality-based community.
🔔🤤
The use of human reason is likely to “violate the terms and conditions of the unreality based community”: classic.