Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control

by E. Michael Jones

Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices." - St. Augustine, City of God Writing at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, St. Augustine both revolutionized and brought to a close antiquity's idea of freedom. A man was not a slave by nature or by law, as Aristotle claimed. His freedom was a function of his moral state. A man had as many masters as he had vices. This insight would provide the basis for the most sophisticated form of social control known to man.
Fourteen hundred years later, a decadent French aristocrat turned that tradition on its head when he wrote that "the freest of people are they who are most friendly to murder." Like St. Augustine, the Marquis de Sade would agree that freedom was a function of morals. Unlike St. Augustine, Sade proposed a revolution in sexual morals to accompany the political revolution then taking place in France. Libido Dominandi - the term is taken from Book I of Augustine's City of God - is the definitive history of that sexual revolution, from 1773 to the present.

Unlike the standard version of the sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy. Aldous Huxley wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that "as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase." This book is about the converse of that statement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used to engineer a system of covert political and social control. Over the course of the two-hundred-year span covered by this book, the development of technologies of communication, reproduction, and psychic control - including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and plain old blackmail - allowed the Enlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustine's insight on its head and create masters out of men's vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of how that happened.

Genres: History, Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology, Sexuality, Religion

950 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 1999

About the author

Catholic writer, former professor at Saint Mary's College in Indiana and the current editor of Culture Wars magazine.

E. Micheal Jones is controversial for his criticism against judaism.

Reviews

[Mayim de Vries · Rating 5 out of 5]

This, without any doubt, is one of the most important and insightful books I have EVER read.

Please note that what follows is a very unorthodox, politically incorrect to the extreme, and personal reflection. Read at your own risk. You are free to disagree, but do not try to correct any misconceptions you might possibly detect and respect my right to hold a different opinion.

If you want to understand the key method of control that has been used against the populations of the West since the Enlightenment, you need to read this book.

We have today a horribly corrupted notion of freedom, one that is endorsed to the greatest extent by our cultural guardians, politicians and those who stand behind them, pulling the strings. They see freedom as the ability to attempt to gratify every urge, slake every thirst and consummate every passion we, humans, are prey to. That is held up as a community good; indeed, something worth fighting and dying for.

I used the word "prey" on purpose, because that's what practitioners of this form of freedom ultimately are, once you wipe away the righteous post-Enlightenment rhetoric. They're not driven to commit these acts because that's what freedom is; they're compelled to do them because - like any form of personal compulsion - they're addicted to the short-term happiness they derive from it.

The main thesis of Libido Dominandi is that your passions are, to those in power, like the reins on a horse, or a leash around a dog's neck. It is the means by which you are controlled. It is the leverage by which you are kept compliant. You are, to use the ancient terminology, in thrall to your sins. Enslaved. They are your masters; you answer their sweet call whenever you can, and all the while you think you're in charge. In short, the male sexual drive was weaponised. "If you would be free men," wrote St. Augustine of Hippo, "be moral. You only have as many masters as you have vices."

Over nearly 700 brilliant pages Jones argues and shows evidence how meaningless sexualised lifestyle forms the slave collar around the necks, especially around the necks of the youth. Young people are, by their very nature, dangerous. A toxic mix of hormones, energy, idealism and ambition, they have been the greatest agents of societal change in human history. The great wars in history were fought primarily by young men, and the next generation of warriors were raised by their young wives. Alexander the Great was 19 when he invaded the greatest empire in the world at that time. He scorned the peace offers by an emperor twice his age and eventually beat him, his generals and his massive armies into the mountains of the Hindu Kush.

Young people are terrifying to those in power. In traditional societies it wasn't such a concern, because the youth were anxious to become elders themselves, and their elders weren't afraid of them. Modern rulers are, argues Jones. They aren't your pater familias, linked to you by bonds of kinship and ancient duty. They're professional caretakers who get into power for a short time, rack up huge debts by bribing voters and padding their donors' nests, as well as their own. Then they retire to a huge pension which, again, young people will need to eventually pay for, and hope that they are never, ever held accountable. They have an agenda.

That's where the controls and distractions come in. The rulers of our countries know human nature very well, and are adept at exploiting its weaknesses. If you know what drives a man... and you are in a position to make sure he gets it, that man is in your power. He is dependent upon you.

If you live in the West, it should strike you swiftly that sex and sexuality is everywhere. Grindr posters on the bus stop walls. A guy cruising tinder on his phone next to you. Victoria secret shops. Practically all advertising, music, film and television. We are being quite literally bombarded by it all day, every day. We are, quite literally, being kept in a reduced version of the Matrix. Startled by glitzy distractions and petty pleasures as your labour, your strength and potential are sucked from you. Then, when the older generation has died, we will be left with the tattered remnants of balkanised, soulless societies, trillions of dollars in debt and on the verge of civil war.

It didn’t happen overnight. To know all the hows and whys and what fors read Libido Dominandi. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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Disclaimer: I am not against sex; in fact the very puritan (or gnostic if you prefer) approach to all things flesh is entirely alien to me. My understanding of sexuality has been shaped by an incomparable Fabrice Hadjadj in La Profondeur des sexes: Pour une mystique de la chair and above all by Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (not for the faint-hearted!).

[Gonzo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Libido Dominandi is the first draft of a great work. As it is, it is a failure, suffering from shoddy writing, poor research, and a wandering and inconsistent thesis. What should be an erudite and compelling polemic against the the sexual revolution—Western culture’s death knell—is an inconsistent and often unreadable mess.

A bird’s-eye view of Jones’s thesis—that our inability to control our sexual drive has been used for the purpose of political suppression—is beyond reproach. Of course, Catholic leaders have been saying the same thing for years. Leo XIII’s Humanum Genus operates as a rough outline of the book, beginning with Augustine’s distinctions between the City of Man and the City of God, and going on to condemn freemasonry. Who know if Jones himself was actually aware of his debt?

Regardless, Jones is not exactly marking new ground here. For this book to be worthwhile, it must function as a polemic which inspires the vanguard, and provides grist for later scholars. Dr. Jones’s work does neither. I was hoping for a traditionalist version of Das Kapital, but instead got a book that was barely worth finishing, let alone carrying into the trenches.

First and foremost, his writing is very, very poor. The overall structure of the book—jumping from year to year, place to place, vignette to vignette—makes it hard to follow intellectual rather than a thematic elements. Given the fact that the book’s thesis is nebulous and has a tendency to change as Jones goes along (more on that below), reading the book is a major slog.

A inquiring reader can jump to any given page to witness Jones’s lame writing. More shocking is his plain sloppiness and failure to edit himself. Just one of many many examples: On page 88, the author quotes Abbe Barruel, ending with “for men may be turned into any thing by him who knows how to take advantage of their ruling passion.” ONE PARAGRAPH LATER Jones uses the SAME EXACT QUOTE, except he finishes with the word “passions”—not “passion.” In other words, Jones repeats the exact same argument by using the same quote in succeeding paragraphs—and cannot even get the quoted material right! To call this a first draft is too kind—it is a first draft seemingly written the night before it was due! This is simply unforgivable.

What about the research? A good bibliography may still be helpful even if the prose is abhorrent. But the bibliography of this 600-page behemoth is surprisingly spare, and utilizes discouragingly few primary sources. And from the get-go, I couldn’t help notice two noticeable absences from Jones’s bibliography: Camille Paglia and Pitrim Sorokin.

Paglia is an atheist and a feminist, but like Aldous Huxley before her, she understands conservatism better than most conservatives. Paglia knows the power of sex, and her Sexual Personae, for all its flaws, is one of the most compelling studies of sex ever created, and in Jones’s case could provide an undergirding to the larger theoretical construct. That Jones does not avail himself of Paglia’s work is a sign of weakness; it is here that Jones’s literary inadequacies overlap with his inadequate scholarship.

Let’s start here: Jones has habit of noting tacit connections between his characters rather than connecting the intellectual undercurrents which united them. This method moves along more like a conspiracy theory or a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game than scholarship. For example, in the early chapters, Jones repeatedly tries to unite the Marquis de Sade, William Godwin, Abbe Barruel. It really does not work; Jones is forced to use lame narrative devices such as speculating what Mary Wollstonecraft must have been thinking while she trudged through the blood-drenched Paris streets; speculations over how affected Percy and Mary Shelley were by Sade; huge leaps of faith over the effect the good priest Barruel had on later sex perverts. With regards to the English liberals, it is clear that Jones simply does not respect their work enough to learn it and refute it—Paglia's work would serve him well here. More than this, the idea that later sex-mongers were inspired by the Jesuit reactionary Barruel’s is largely speculation; even if it were true, who cares? There are countless secret societies; the question is why the secret societies promoting sexual perversion ended up so popular. Instead of adequately defining the relevant intellectual undercurrents, Jones is reliant on his vignettes and weak editorializing.

It is Sade who Jones tries to shoehorn in most often. He suggests that the de-mastication of the Princess de Lamballe at the hands of an angry mob was in part due to the dissemination of Sade’s work. Bunk!—would Jones suggest that the sodomizing of Col. Qaddafi at the hands of Muslims was influenced by Eva Ensler? Even in his day, Sade was a literary and intellectual mediocrity. Chesterton makes the point that Nietzcheans have existed all throughout history; the only difference between those Nietzscheans and Nietzsche himself is that only moderns were so foolish as to take the man seriously. The same with Sade. He was a talentless buffoon with a rapport to the dark undercurrents of human nature; nothing he says is particularly interesting, but for the fact that Sade was able to get away with saying it was. And yet the Marquis de Sade, who for all his inadequacy as a thinker and writer, is, as Ms. Paglia says, one of the most influential figures of the past 200 years. To understand why this particular pervert was able to gain a following is a worthwhile task. Trying to understand the pervert himself is not. And anyway, the ideas proposed by Sade—that the populace must promote sexual license in order to remain revolutionary—was not actually tried until the 20th Century—but more on that below.

Paglia is interested in the intellectual undercurrents behind the sexual revolution in a way Jones is not. Even if Paglia’s assessments are wrong, she at least attempts to give a unifying idea—an overarching story rather than a bunch of vignettes. Freud once suggested his method of psychoanalysis was used to exploit his clients (Jones, in his weak style, uses the same quote countless times); when discussing Margaret Sanger, he states that her opinions about birth control resemble the statement by Freud. This is nothing but a weak literary comparison between two people whose thoughts were greatly different. What could be the jumping-off point to a sociologically-complex theory is merely lame editorializing, pattern spotting, and name dropping.

Perhaps Paglia’s absence is a bugaboo of mine. Worse is Dr. Jones’s elision of Sorokin’s work. Sorokin, a reactionary a sociologist at Harvard, charted the decay of sexual morality in the West and elsewhere and accurately described the relationship between decaying sexual morality and the decay of society as a whole. His work is all but forgotten now—Mary Eberstadt is responsible for making me aware of his books—but it’s hard to think of another academic who could provide so much grist to Jones’s intellectual mill.

But upon closer reflection, it becomes clear why Sorokin is not given a prominent role in this work—much of Sorokin’s analysis is so similar to Jones’s, and so much better documented and argued, that Jones can’t help suffer by comparison. For example, Sorokin actually delves into the state of marriage laws at the beginning of the French Revolution and elsewhere. From the perspective of a scholar, Jones’s elision of this topic is unforgivable. Marriage laws provide an excellent barometer of a society’s opinions about sex and the family. But again, Jones’s scant bibliography leaves his general theory with nothing but interconnected anecdotes as support.

Bad writing, poor scholarship. But how does Jones’s thesis as a whole stand up? Not all that well. Jones, in his salutary hatred for the Enlightenment, cannot draw a distinction between the Behaviorist who was truly a product of Enlightenment ideology, and Sadism, which was not.

Take the Bolshevik Revolution, the Enlightenment’s crowning achievement. In the early 20s, the Bolsheviks used sexual liberation as a cudgel against the ruling elite, and the Soviets liberalized marriage laws, decriminalized homosexuality, and in general made the nation a hotbed of sexual decadence (Jones dedicates a whole chapter to this). But as Sorokin notes (as does Jones—a credit to his honesty though not his ability to follow through with a thought), by the time Stalin came to power, sexual liberation had been condemned by the ruling Communists, with sexual immorality being seen as harmful to the nascent socialist state. In other words, insofar as sexuality had played a role in the initial overthrow of the Romanovs, the powers of sex had been curtailed by the time the Communists were solidifying their power. Most good Marxists will claim that Stalin’s plans were a betrayal of the Old Master’s conception of socialism, and that by the time of Stalin’s reforms in the 20s and 30s, the “revolution” was over. But this is self-serving; Lenin and the NEP were far more conservative, insofar that it slowed the progress of state ownership to the benefit of wealthy landowners and peasants, than Stalin’s massive land redistribution and industrialization. The revolution (tainted or not) continued into the 20s and 30s. But in readopting marriage norms and recriminalizing the perverse, by the time of Stalin’s purges, the sexual revolution in the USSR had ended.

Stalin’s return to sexual conservatism saved the Soviet Union. Witness its experience in the 30s and 40s—no nation has ever been subjected to such incessant turmoil, upheaval, and slaughter. And yet the population and economic statistics in the 50s and 60s were healthy. Why was this? Because Soviet women took it upon themselves to bear and raise children. For all the drastic changes which occurred following the revolution, the women never lost sight of their sexual significance to their families and—yes—to the state. It was this commitment to sexual normalcy that saved the Soviet Union. Amazingly, it was not until the imposition of capitalism that Russian birthrates plummeted to suicidal levels.

That was Russia, but the same story played out in revolutionary France. The libertine atmosphere of the early Revolution died out quickly. By the time Robespierre rose to power, sexual liberation was not a philosophy of the ruling government. English liberals may still have held onto pipe dreams of open marriages and orgies, but the revolutionary government certainly did not. Robespierre inveighed against atheists and wantons as fervently than a pope; go to nearly any of his speeches and try to find that does not put great emphasis on public virtue. Nowhere are Sade’s perversions evident in the Terror government or its successors; truly, even the liberal madmen who composed the French government were sane enough to lock up Sade. Virtue, not sexual vice, was what the revolutionary leaders wanted from their subjects.

Was the Russian revolution an outgrowth of the French Revolution and Enlightenment? Assuredly so. But the unifying thread was a belief in the prefectability of man. Sexual liberation was used as a tool of the revolution, but not as a tool of the government. Jones seems to suggest that liberal/Enlightenment government innately desires to use its subjects sexual desires as part of its ruling philosophy. But the facts just don’t back this up. Jones’s thinking in this regard is fatally muddled.

To put it simply, Jones is not able to draw a distinction between Malthus, who studied the sexual habits of a population in order to better the material prosperity of its members, and Sade, the anarchist. Malthus is a man of the Enlightenment; Sade is a character from human prehistory. The behaviorists and eugenicists were sex rationalists like Sanger, Watson, and the Rockefellers may have had their sexual failures (Jones doles out stories of these rather too readily), but Freud, Reich, and Kinsey were clearly of another breed—modern Sadists. These two programs are not the same. The Eugenicists and birth controllers had serious, broad political programs in line with the liberal state; the Sadists did not.

Sadism is not a ruling philosophy. It is innately revolutionary, but has no power to govern. Part of its attraction to the New Left is in this revolutionary character. The lament of the leftists—the true leftist, who has revolution in his blood even when he has nothing to revolt against—is that beautiful insurgencies must inevitably become ruling parties. Thus the Trotskyite calls for “eternal revolution,” desiring to keep the springs of leftism flowing. This is impossible, of course; the closest a ruling regime ever came to this was in Mao’s disastrous Cultural Revolution. Regardless, the Trotskyite knew that the key retaining Bolshevism from turning into Stalinism was this “eternal revolution.” Sade's position comes close to this: that “the revolutionary state must promote sexual license if it is to remain revolutionary and retain its hold on power.” (p. 57). Of course, this is contradictory—a state that is revolutionary is one that is by definition not holding onto its power. Sadism is the fruit of a madman; but to put Sadists in power is a death wish.

This is the fascinating question: How did the rationalistic sexual regime of the first sexual revolutionaries transform into the wholly Sadist regime regnant in all levels of American culture? How has the Sadist impulse, which is eternally anarchic and revolutionary, come to be tolerated by the ruling class?

Jones gives us little towards answering this question. Unable to differentiate the sexual rationalists from the Sadists, he gives us little as to why we are mired in our current state of insanity. Indira Gandhi and the Chinese Communists promoted birth control; this doesn’t mean they promoted homosexuality and other ghastly perversions. Yes, they treated their citizens like rabbits, but from a Benthamite perspective, they could make an honest claim that they were benefiting the welfare of their citizenry. The means may have been oppressive, but the ends were rational and utilitarian. Malthus and Sanger would approve of everything but the skin pigments.

Compare this to modern Western Europe and North America. The “heights” of sexual gratification are wholly separated from the generative act—masturbation, anal sex, oral sex, and the like—and so births fall far below replacement rates. Unsexed demons are granted the civil right to expose themselves next to children, sexually deviant men given the right to undress amongst women, and the devious sodomite is allowed to corrupt every institution and poison every tradition: Sodomites in the Church rape children; sodomites in the County Attorney’s office prosecute the Church—change the institution, repeat.

The American ruling class is not subject to the worst depredations of this increasing perversion—the proliferation of prostitutes and surrogate parenthood among the lower classes shows how the sexual slavery of the poor will proceed—and yet the ruling class sends its children to schools that teach the same filth. The elder-day Rockefellers forced their sexual oppression on the sons of the poor; the modern-day Rockefellers are content to turn their sons into daughters and their daughters into whores. It is not as if the lower classes were ruled by a Behaviorist ruling class anymore; Sadism runs all the way through.

One cannot understand the modern world without having a theory of suicide. Why are we slowly and intractably killing ourselves—letting our children be mutilated, our women defiled, every institution corrupted? Malcolm Muggeridge called this the “great liberal death wish;” no closed conspiracy of Illuminati or Jew, but an open adoption of self-hatred. The poison of the Enlightenment regimented and etiolated all man’s pleasures of life, from religion to art to childrearing; enslaved him to the state. The materialist is beggared in trying to describe the effects of these changes; the spiritual wounds are captured best in our rising suicide rates; more than this in our television and pornography consumption. Of course, the Enlightenment could not help but ruin sex as well. The unitive component of sex is destroyed by latex—man is so fragile compared to women, who require the complete corruption of their reproductive organs! Sex is no longer perilous. And the one death-defying (le petit morte,), heroic act decent men could perform with regularity has been turned to a rote messiness, closer to a bowel movement than a transcendental act.

This is another contradictory truth Jones cannot grasp: The problem of the modern sexual regime is that people do not enjoy sex enough! The regime imposes great suppression on its subjects; men and women are only allowed to enjoy sex so much. It would actually be an improvement if men were allowed to follow their libidos away from latex; if they were allowed to guide their fat, masculine girlfriends away from the pill. In the West, there is no oppressive regime as in China, no forced sterilizations as in India—but of course, this would require turning those girlfriends into wives… And meanwhile Western women despise the elements of their womanhood not conducive to male pleasure. They shave their pubic hair, mutilate their pudenda, despise the effects of childbirth, and contort their maternal impulses towards serving the state—witness the army of elementary teachers, social workers, youth ministers, medical caretakers: motherhood grafted onto the technostate. If women were to assert the rights they have had since Eve, our regime would break down. Why don’t they?

Libido Dominandi should be a much better work. My anticipation of it was great; I yearned for a manifesto to stand like a beacon among the ocean of dross and squalor of the modern day. What I got was a poorly written, poorly researched, poorly argued, overpriced, oversized disappointment. Some of the stories are valuable—from the number of footnotes, Reich’s work seems more essential than Jones’s—yet the book as a whole is not worth the effort. E Michael Jones is a crank; I knew him from his scurrilous and cruel assault on Michael Voris, but also his compelling radio interviews; I hoped the mettle of his work would outweigh his unpleasantness. Nope. There are nuggets hidden in these 600 pages which are useful in combating the modern regime of sexual anarchy, but I wanted a cannon.

[Adam Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel compelled to point out that this book would have benefited from a firm editorial hand. It can be rambling, sometimes disorganized, often repetitive, and several of the twisting meandering yarns of thought that weave the chapters together could stand to be drawn straighter and tighter.

Having said that, this book's thesis -- that sexuality (and particularly sexual appetites and permissiveness) is increasingly becoming a tool of cultural and political domination -- is too important to be ignored.

It is difficult to see a positive way forward, and the book paints our prospects as decidedly bleak. What is needed is not a simple correction or adjustment of policy; man does not need techniques, but resolute character shaped by the moral law. The book presumes that it is the role of the state to cultivate virtue, or at the very least to repress agencies which drive the worst kinds of vice, but that prospect worries me just as deeply as our current moral anarchism. (My concern can be summed up thusly: "whose definition of virtue will the state champion?" Naturally I would like for it to be my own, but so would many others, including precisely the kinds of wicked men who are leading us down our current primrose path.)

Consider, for example, the book's supposition that pornography is highly addictive. By analogy to other aspects of current US law, it seems that it should therefore be regulated; see, e.g., how the law treats alcohol (age limits), tobacco (age limits plus compulsory anti-advertising), and narcotics (prohibition). But such a proposition puts our current power brokers in a bind; pornography has already been not only loosed upon the masses but mainstreamed, making masturbation a national sport and sucking the political wind from the sails of any effort to cram that cat back into the bag. The result is a state which may claim as many of the people's liberties as it wishes, so long as it is not seen by them as taking away any of their precious vices. Huxley's Orgy Porgy suddenly seems much more prescient than Orwell's Big Brother.

Absent from the book is a notion of repentance, and I think this is the key to unlocking the bind of sexual-political domination. Throughout, it is asserted as fait accompli that once sexual corruption has gotten its hooks into someone, that person is then and must perpetually remain a slave to the whims of whomever is able to manipulate those passions (by being seen as their guarantor, linking them with some other political end, capitalizing upon them through commerce, etc). But what would happen if, as a rule, we took to confessing our sexual sins instead of trying to hide them? Not mere private confession (in which dark secrets remain in our closets) and not mere exhibitionism (that would just be more public pornography) but earnest, public confession that we have sinned against God and man, that we recognize it as sin, that we make no excuses for it, and that we do not wish for others coming after us to bear the terrible weight of the same sins of which we are guilty? In the default human mode of secrecy and shame, people are unable to turn against their sexual masters for fear of being "outed" (e.g. by Masters, who took sexual histories from politicians and wealthy men who then promptly decided to fund his work) or of being called "hypocrites" (usually by others so enmeshed in fornication, adultery, and lust that the accusation is itself hypocritical), but does this power not disappear as soon as those same people are willing to replace secrecy and shame with a truly Christian lifestyle of confession and repentance?

[Doug · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read the first 300 or so pages of this massive tome earlier this year before I gave up on it.

Perhaps if I ever find myself locked in a dungeon somewhere, or alone in a monastery for ten years, I’ll get around to finishing it.

But I’ll share my thoughts on what I read below, though be forewarned, I’m not going to hold back in my opinions of it.

First, E. Michael Jones is a good author. While this book could have done with a heavy edit to trim it down, Jones is able to write in an engaging way that pulls you in. I have no issues with Jones as a writer. And some of his details and tidbits on figures such as the Marquis De Sade are pretty fascinating.

But as far as the ideas propagated in this work - I find most of them laughable.

If you believe that a secret cabal of “elites” is controlling the world’s populations, and if you believe that our current world is more corrupt than centuries past, maybe you’d love this book.

In short, this book provides ample fodder for right wing conspiracists. And, like all conspiracists, Jones picks and chooses aspects of history to fit neatly into his narrative that secret elites are controlling us through sex.

Browsing through positive reviews of this book, I find many readers praising Jones for revealing evidence that our current, modern world is more “corrupt” and “debauched” than years past.

I find this notion so utterly insane and ridiculous, frankly.

As history clearly shows, inequality and the corruption of power has been going on since time immemorial.

So it blows my mind that people can believe that somehow the times we are living in now, are worse and more “morally corrupt” than previous times.

Really? Worse than life under Emperor Commodus or Nero?

Worse than life under Genghis Khan?

Maybe if you’ve fallen into the abyss that is modern right-wing conspiracies, you would believe so. I don’t know.

[Hagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most comprehensive and enlightening book I've read on the shaping of modern views on sexuality. Because of the length and heft of this book, it's inevitable that I didn't agree with certain parts of his interpretation of history. But E. Michael Jones is consistent in his argumentation and logic, so I can't fault him for a lot. This should be on everyone's reading lists if they haven't read it already. It is a great revelation to know how intimate aspects of our identity are fashioned so intricately in domination.

[CasaJB · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book (in my case experienced as an audiobook read and slightly augmented by the venerable Alex Linder, who has many audio books up in the Audio Books forum of vnnforum dot com) is downright amazing. It's like E! Behind the Music, except instead of being written by )oos and their minions, it is written about )oos and their minions. You learn lots of amazing, horrible, depraved, deceptive, manipulative (and so forth) things about many people you've heard of, or should have. In just one chapter, if I recall correctly, you learn that Bettie Page stabbed one or more people... like in their front yard or something...and ended up in a mental hospital, perhaps permanently; Linda Lovelace's name was actually Linda Boreman, and she was manipulated by basically a professional emotional/sexual conman, and he whored her out and even forced her to get screwed by a dog and maybe other animals; and something else I can't remember in that chapter.

If nothing else, the last chapter is absolutely incredible in how it lays out how the powerful sell sexual liberation to the demos as something good, but it really disempowers and enslaves them, making them vulnerable because when the moral order is removed (which they are also less able to defend after becoming complicit in crimes there-against), all that's left to protect them is wealth and power, which the demos by definition doesn't possess. I give this book 14 out of 14 stars. Would heilen.

[Jason Farley · Rating 4 out of 5]

sheeeeeeeesh. California is making better sense since I started this one. Sometimes his catholicism creeps in and taints his analyses slightly, but it is still quite helpful, and you could probably actually defend your family from political control by throwing it if you needed to, because it is really heavy.

[Robert Jacoby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has much to offer, but with a careful eye

"A man," Augustine had written, "has as many masters as he has vices." This is a tagline for Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control by E. Michael Jones, and he keeps returning to this theme throughout this massive work.

This book has something to offer, but with a careful eye. Jones tackles an enormous topic and comes out mostly sideways. He's neither a good scholar nor a good writer. Still, the text is readable and enjoyable, if not a bit like racing through a museum with a curator who's calling your attention to all the things plastered all over the walls and ceilings. But it's what kept me reading to the end.

Jones is part historian, part biographer. He's wide ranging in his approach because he loops in any event or any person he believes to be connected to his current discussion. He unearths minutia that doesn't seem to readily fit the context of his larger issue. He can literally jump back and forth 200 hundred years within a sentence or two. What I'm saying is that reading the book can be a bit dizzying. Sure, each chapter is headed with a city and sequential date, but that often doesn't matter. For example, Part II Chapter 7 is titled "Baltimore, 1916," and the chapter begins: "In the 1930 edition of his famous book..." Wut? You just told me were in 1916. And by the end of each chapter you're sometimes years or even *decades* ahead of where you started. It can be a bit confusing until you get used to it.

Then there's the name dropping, or I should say: lack of tight scholarship. Jones quite often assumes you know who or what he's talking about when he mentions a new name or term or event. I found myself many times re-reading paragraphs above the text where I was in order to see where this name appeared before. But that's just how he writes. He'll often quote other writers writing about events or other people and simply write something like this: "Hitler, according to Igra, was a homosexual prostitute in Vienna." (p. 198) Hitler was gay? Wut? Huh? Imagine your shock if you've never read anything about this in any other book. And who is Igra? Check the notes. Nothing. Check the bibliography. Nothing. Check the index. One instance. On page 198. Google his name. Samuel Igra is the author of a book titled Germany's National Vice. Okay. So this happens a lot. Jones drops names and events without any context. (He's not as bad of a writer as, say, Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, though, which I couldn't get through.) Other books and authors are mentioned in passing, not fully explained, and then left behind. (One of note is The Clam-Pate Orgy; google it; I'm old enough to remember when this book came out. Another is the Moynihan Report of the 1960s. Again, if I had not known of both of these before reading Jones' book, I would have been left staring at the page wondering what and why they were in his book.) And some names you'd think he'd use are never mentioned or lightly passed over (The Frankfurt School, Jews and Hollywood, Operation Mockingbird, Hugh Hefner and Gloria Steinem being CIA assets, among others).

Jones drops a variety of Latin phrases left and right, too, ad nauseam (heh); have your laptop or mobile handy as you read to provide translations. Several times he provides a title of a movie or pamphlet or book in the original language (for example, French or German), without an English translation. Not helpful. I had to search many terms and after a while simply gave up. One was the German word Kulturbolschewismus (Cultural Bolshevism). Now, if you don't know this term you will miss a lot of the deeper meaning of Jones' text. So be prepared to do a bit of your own digging as you're reading the book.

In many cases Jones assumes much from his reader, too. He doesn't go into much detail at all about the decadence and excesses of Germany's Weimar Republic. (And "decadence" and "excess" don't really do the period justice. Look this stuff up for yourself.)

He needed a good editor, desperately. Typographical and grammatical errors abound.

I can't recall Jones using any passages from the Bible to support his thesis, which is a real shame, because it would have illuminated one of the many axes he's grinding here, which is: some people enjoy the evil they do. "The light has come into the world, and people who do evil things are judged guilty because they love the dark more than the light" (John 3:19). It's even more of a shame when he gets so entangled in his Catholicism that he's blinded to the basic tenets of Christianity. His misreading of the concept of the priesthood of all believers is particularly troubling (p. 499). I was also disappointed in what Jones *didn't* discuss: real pornography and its affect on the human mind. He literally skips over the 1950s founding of Playboy and the 1960s, too, and dabbles in it when he gets to the Meese Commission on Pornography.

But there is good stuff. Much of it.

You'll read about such disparate men and events as Augustine, Plato, the Marquis de Sade, the French Revolution, the Illuminati, Nietzsche, Freud, Jews, Christianity, the Bolshevik Revolution, communism, the Armory Show, Margaret Sanger and the early eugenicists, Kulaks, Bernays (father of modern advertising), Madison Avenue, race relations, white flight, contraception, Planned Parenthood, Thomas Merton, Jack Kerouac, Kinsey (his open marriage, his bisexuality, his self harm issues--an attempt to circumcise himself and his urethral sounding fetish; liberation is fine, but yikes!), Norman Mailer and his essay "The White Negro", Skull and Bones, Aleister Crowley, encounter groups, MK Ultra (the list is nearly endless), and Jones wends and winds and ties them all together. Sometimes not so neatly. But it's always interesting, and he drops gems throughout. Such as:

"Liberalism, by the inner dynamic of its logic, was forced to become an instrument of social control in order to avoid the chaos which it created by its own erosion of tradition and morals. Democratic man could not be left to his own devices; chaos would result. The logic is clear. If there is no God, there can be no religion; if there was no religion, there can be no morals; if there are no morals, there can be no self-control; if there is no self-control, there can be no social order; if there is no social order, there can be nothing but the chaos of competing desire." (p. 187)

"It [feminism] entailed the systematic re-engineering of the morals of women as a way of moving them out of the home and into the workforce, thereby lowering wages and weakening the power of organized labor and the working-class family." (p. 255)

"The state can tolerate only those mores compatible with its system of values... The classical state must foster virtue; the revolutionary state must foster vice." (p. 260-1)

"Those who look at the Betty Page photos fifty years later wonder what the big deal was all about without realizing that the big deal lies in the very fact that the viewer can no longer feel the passion the photos were intended to incite. Pornography is something based on transgression, and the boundaries of 1950 have been so often and so thoroughly transgressed, that no one can see that they were once boundaries." (p. 367)

Written 20 years ago, Jones seems prescient across the culture to what we see today: child drag queen shows (10-year-old drag kid Desmond is Amazing on Good Morning America), Drag Queen Story Hour at your local library, children under 10 transitioning genders and having gender reassignment surgery, suburban moms skyrocketing 50 Shades of Gray to national bestseller lists, off-the-charts STD rates, Sugar Baby/Sugar Daddy websites, NEXIUM sex cult, Epstein Island horror show (dentist chair, baby toys; google actively censors this, so use duck duck go), young women being more promiscuous than men (General Social Survey), children's creepy clothing lines Caroline Bosmans, the UK trying to ban porn for under 18s, cannibalism in our TV shows and movies, and on and on.

How did we get here? A wise man told us 2,000 years ago: A little leaven leavens the whole bunch.

I liked it
3/5 Goodreads
4/5 Amazon

PS: If Libido Dominandi is your type of book, other readings and viewings you might enjoy (and which will help your reading and understanding of it) include Staring into Chaos (nonfiction history), The Kulaks Must be Liquidated as a Class (article, National Review), Bob Fosse's Cabaret (article, The Unz Review), and Century of the Self (documentary).

[Aarón · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've long held a suspicion that yoga pants were a form of brainwashing used to keep men in thrall to the established order, and after reading Libido Dominandi by E. Michael Jones, I feel my conspiratorial views are vindicated. Here we learn all about the various sexual revolutions put forth by influential men and their useful idiots--predominately horny BoBo hipsters--from the Enlightenment onward. Jones' theory is that "free love" is merely another form of bondage, albeit one that keeps the population happily oppressed and unable to feel their chains.

Jones mentions St. Augustine, who in City of God, opines that a man has as many masters as he has vices. Those "liberated" people sate their desires, identify with them and, ultimately, with those masters who provide them. Interestingly, the Enlightenment promoted the concept of liberty to the detriment of religion, which weakened traditional morality, which led to a vacuum which necessitated the enforcement of a more Draconian form of control to the detriment of this concept of liberty. Throughout the book, virulent anti-marriage and polyamorist blowhards crawl sheepishly out from under the wreckage of their experimental years.

The book is quite sprawling and reads like a series of blog entries. It is poorly structured, bouncing between historical eras and making labyrinthine digressions. In all honestly, it's more than I ever wanted to know about the subject, but remains interesting throughout.

Buddhist monks believe the urge to sexual release is more powerful than that of self-preservation. Is it any wonder that this power could be harnessed for control? The message throughout seems to be not a sermonizing distaste for anything spicier than missionary with a sequestering tarp seperating the conjoinants, but rather a world where tradition was not seen as repressive; when couples were encouraged to marry and have children and not have their brains gnawed at by the kuru of doubt and disatisfation. The illogic of the unquestioned modern view towards sex becomes clear in Jones' words that, "If morality is a form of repression, then reason is repressive, and if reason is repressive, then man can become free only by becoming irrational, but once he becomes irrational, the only thing that drives him to act is his appetites, his impulses, and his passions."

[A.J. Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very informative book. After reading it, I realize I was victimized long ago by a diabolical plot. Sadly, this diabolical plot is continuing to victimize people without their knowing it, and with the victims believing they are being liberated when, in fact, they are being enslaved to their passions, and to their political masters.

“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.” ~ St. Augustine

“Those who relinquish reason are controlled by their passions, which are exploited financially and politically by those who control the flow of transgressive imagery. The people who profit financially and politically from promoting the imagery contribute to the election of those who will protect it politically, and so a form of political control evolves from a system of financial exploitation.” ~ E. Michael Jones

A good interview with the author can be found here: AUDIO - Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation as Political Slavery - http://youtu.be/FwhFLdSqqv0

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jones never says in five-hundred words what can be said in ten-thousand, which wouldn't be a problem if his thinking was a bit more concise. And it isn't that his paleo-conservative/Jesuit-honed ideas are so off-putting (at least Buchanan and Gottfried are capable of cogent thought); it's that his long-winded discursions many times lead to dead ends, or go on so long that Jones seems to lose the thread. He can be a deep thinker when he's focused, but this book is more padded than exhaustive.

The thesis Jones presents (that there is an inverse rather than positive correlation between sexual liberation and political oppression) has been put forward before (by Huxley) and later (by Devlin and Faye) much more cogently. Skip this one, unless you plan on becoming a hermit or serving a very long prison sentence, and you need something to do when not attempting to build a Westminster Abbey model with toothpicks and glue.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

The usual sick banter of a sexually repressed mind. The woman is a whore and can generate bouts of madness. Oh! I thought that was god and his servant Satan. Whatever.

[Klaybis Asllani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control" by E. Michael Jones is a thought-provoking exploration of the intricate relationship between sexuality and political power. Jones delves into the idea that the liberation of sexual norms has been strategically employed as a means of societal control. Drawing from historical and cultural examples, he argues that the manipulation of human desires and impulses, particularly through sexual liberation, has been used to assert dominance and influence political outcomes.

The most memorably example was that during the second intifada, amid IDF forces' control of Palestinian territories during a 2002 operation, pornography was broadcast on Palestinian TV channels, signaling a shift in power and defiance against Arafat's influence. More importantly, this shows how pornography in its relation and use for political power and demoralizing psyops.

[Aurelie · Rating 1 out of 5]

z serii przeczytałam 10 stron ale gowno i muszę zaznaczyć żeby zapamiętać żeby do tego nie wracac, co za zbiór propagandowych teorii o iluminatach????

[Yunus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quotes: we are not talking about sexual vice when we use the term sexual revolution, as much as the rationalization of sexual vice, followed by the financial exploitation of sexual vice, followed by the political mobilization of the same thing as a form of control.

Since sexual “liberation” has social chaos as one of its inevitable sequelae, sexual liberation begets almost from the moment of its inception the need for social control.

Those who succumb to sexual addiction but refuse to go along will be outed. Those who refuse to go along but do not have sexual skeletons in their closets will be patronized and ignored. Those who go along with the ideology of sexual liberation, however, can do what they damn well please sexually because in going along they are under the sexual control of the controllers anyway.

The regime first promotes sexual addiction in the name of liberation, then exploits it as a form of control. It then uses it to destroy anyone of sufficient prominence who refuses to go along.

Man tends to identify his passions as his own. In defending them he defends his “freedom,” which he usually sees as the unfettered ability to fulfill his desires, without, for the most part, understanding how easy it is to manipulate those passions from without.

The Illuminati were a cross between the Jesuits and the Freemasons, in which all of the controls placed on spiritual direction by the Church were lifted and the goal was not to get souls into heaven but to create a paradise on earth.

Sexual liberation, as the foregoing 200-year trajectory indicates, always tends to masturbation by way of rationalization.

This and other passages indicate that sexual liberation is a system in which behavior dictates reason, and once reason is no longer the light according to which man acts, force takes its place, and force - pace Ms. Gray and other feminists - means the sexual exploitation of women.

the inner logic of sexual liberation is always might makes right. The truth is the opinion of the powerful. The good is the desires of the powerful. Sexual liberation is, therefore, of its essence a form of control. In its nascent and crudest form, it is male control of women. Since women according to this view are essentially appliances who get neutered to prevent unwanted offspring from diminishing sexual pleasure, sexual liberation is also essentially masturbatory.

What appears on the surface to be brave Prometheans liberating themselves from the chains of superstition turns out on closer examination to be a masturbatory fantasy, which sooner or later was going to be exploited as a form of control.

According to this psychology, the only evil is repression, and any measure which combats repression is legitimate.

The best Sade could do was turn the traditional view on its head, which is the essence of all revolution both political and sexual.

The moral man is in a state of peace; because he is not in motion, he is, therefore, impossible to direct and control from the outside.

Once gratification of passion becomes the definition of “liberty,” then “liberty” becomes synonymous with bondage because he who controls the passion controls the man.

This is the essence of the Enlightenment regime; not to prohibit, but to enable, to encourage motion or restlessness, and direct the flow of that activity by manipulating desire. This is the political genius behind a regime that is based on advertising and pornography and opinion polls and the other instruments which control “liberated” man.

By convincing undesirable groups that they should limit their numbers rather than seek higher wages, these groups were deprived of demographic leverage, and political protest was defused by evermore besotting applications of sexual pleasure.

Queen Mab is the quintessential Enlightenment poem. All the poet has to do to achieve heaven on earth is defy priestly authority, keep his soul pure from “the polluting woe/ Of tyranny,” which involves learning to “prefer/ Hell’s freedom to the servitude of heaven.” Once the aspiring revolutionary gets that part right. Science will do the rest, which is to say, it will eliminate disease and strife, especially the strife between reason and passion, which is a creation of dogmatic priests anyway.

Given their economic premises, certain sexual conclusions were unavoidable. If, for example, marriage was in its very essence asocial and based on the domination of women as property, then the only real criterion of genuine social liberation was the extent to which women could emancipate themselves from marriage. But what did that mean? Fourier is clear on the matter. Emancipation from marriage means the integration of women into the production process, which means, of course, getting a job in a factory. Once again liberation upon closer inspection showed itself as a form of control.

Psychotherapy was a way of managing guilt, as Jung understood first hand, and both Freud and Jung knew that wealthy patients were, in the name of psychotherapy, willing to pay large sums of money to be absolved of guilt while at the same time allowed to hold onto the vices which caused the guilt in the first place.

Once the Church is seen as the enemy and the moral order a form of repression, there are no controls on the controller. The controller can do with his adept whatever he wants.

Freud first discovered the dominant passion of his client through therapy; then, he urged the patient to gratify that passion, absolving him of all guilt in his role as “father confessor”; then, when the patient had succumbed to the temptation and was in most need of absolution, Freud exploited the situation by trying to extort a financial contribution from the patient. The procedure was pure Illuminism.

the alliance between the left and the wealthy which contraception forged has proved enduring indeed.

In the absence of repentance, the most common way to assuage guilt feelings is by transmuting vice into a political cause.

The Marxists were more susceptible than most in this respect because their lives were based on the emergence of a future state in which all contention would cease. In many ways, this use of the future to justify sins in the present is the main reason they were Marxists.

Sexual morality in the socialist mode was a projection of the sexual practices of the men who authored socialist theory. It was also a function of the guilt they felt for acting on those sexual imperatives.

Man’s desire to be unhappy on his own terms rather than happy on God’s is the essence of Satan’s rebellion.

In order to re-engineer man, the “invisible governors” had to create a world populated by “mass man,” rootless individuals cut off from ethnic and religious affiliation who relied not on religion or tradition or the moral codes they propagated, but rather on the opinion of what seemed to be everyone else as propagated by the mass media.

a world in which no wife could inflict guilt on an errant husband. This promise of moral legitimacy was enough to convert the cause of Bolshevism into a holy crusade for sexually troubled pilgrims throughout the West.

either masturbation destroys your prayer life, or prayer destroys your ability to enjoy masturbation. The two forms of activity are psychically mutually exclusive.

In defending his passions, the victim thinks he is defending his very self when in fact he is defending the interests of those who give him the permission to gratify them.

Sexual immorality led to social activism as it's palliative.

The libertine, if he persists in his sexual self-indulgence becomes, as the above passage indicates, a sexual predator, preying on members of the opposite sex.

Now the new methods of mass-media persuasion as refined by Watson and Bemays and a whole host of Rockefeller-funded experts in “communications theory” would persuade the unwitting to do to themselves voluntarily what Hitler had tried to foist on them by force.

The goal of secularization was the reduction of all of life’s imperatives to “opinions,” which is to say not the expression of moral absolutes or divine law.

Modernity means sexual liberation. Sexual liberation creates guilt. The only way to deal with guilt among those who refuse to repent is the palliation that comes from social activism.

The guilt which accrued from carrying out the agenda of the Left, which invariably involved some form of sexual liberation, was anesthetized by involvement in fighting for the Negro’s “freedoms,” which invariably meant some form of eugenic sterilization to weaken black demographics and the political power which accrued from it.

Lyon wrote a book in which he attempted to document the effect of encounter on his spiritual life: I have grown to the place where I now have what might be called “a religion of the self.” I believe that most of the answers are within myself and that learning to tap the love and beauty and strength within myself is really a worshipping of the inner self. In essence, I believe in God. God is within each of us . We are all God.... I now meditate to the god within my own inner self, and each time I meditate, I discover new resources of boundless love and beauty within myself. Shortly after becoming God, Lyon, who was a federal education official at the time and the author of Learning to Feel, Feeling to Learn: Humanistic Education for the Whole Man, was arrested for sexual offences.

Using masturbation (or any other form of sexual vice) as “liberation from repression” is like using suicide as the antidote to murder.

the configuration of the self which has emerged since the end of World War II is “empty in part because of the loss of family, community and tradition. It is a self that seeks the experience of being continually filled up by consuming goods, calories, experiences, politicians, romantic partners, and empathic therapists in an attempt to combat the growing alienation and fragmentation of its era.”

The film industry was now able to use nudity to draw people into its theaters, and the government could now use the contraceptive as a solution to social problems. The first led to the exponential growth of the pornography industry, which redefined the universe of sexual expectations in a way that would prove devastating to women; the second eventuated in the destruction of the concept of the family wage and the emigration of women from the home into the workforce, where over a thirty-year period the male as provider would be replaced by both husband and wife earning what the husband alone earned before.

The man who becomes addicted to his vice learns to love his vice while simultaneously hating himself.

Since they have failed so spectacularly at the project of self-control, they assume that no one can succeed.

the lusts of the powerful were more important than the lives of weak. Monica Lewinsky was just a twenty-four-year-old late-term fetus thrown onto the garbage heap of sexual convenience, as the feminists looked the other way once again, because her case did not fit into their agenda.

The general anarchy which sexual liberation brings about is a function of power. In the absence of morals, the rich will get away with murder because their desires are more powerful, and power in this context becomes the only measure of right and wrong. Either might makes right, or we are all bound by the terms of a moral order which is not of our making. There is no third alternative.

[Zeppo · Rating 5 out of 5]

'And what does freedom look like? It looks a lot like rootless consumerism.'

In one of the many examples in Michael E. Jones' book he gives a case study of a woman who has chosen to 'abandon the moral order in sexual matters' who winds up deeply unhappy and depressed as a result. How many times have I told myself that somehow a committed relationship is holding me back only to pick an alternative of me essentially isolated?

Yet in my case it wasn't exactly consumerism I was indulging in but my own artistic ambitions and a strange conviction that once settled/tied down with a woman I'd become too comfortable and thus never push myself in the necessary way to write books or make music or whatever my fancy may be. Of course I rarely did those things anyway due to mental instability. I had the unstable temperament of an artist without the discipline or talent. Maybe having the foundations of a relationship would help me more than I knew.

'Marx said the sign of a truly oppressed person is when they don't know they're oppressed'

Another case study - 'Unable to find comfort in either religion or the rejection of religion, Campbell tried to drown her anguish in alcohol, but all the alcohol succeeded in doing was give her the 'sensation that I had lost control over my own life's direction.'

Over and over in this book a pattern is repeated of individuals choosing a path of 'freedom' in sexual matters only to end up dissolute and despairing. What if this urge to be 'free' is not natural at all? What if it's the result of social conditioning in such an insidious form that thoughts from without and hostile to our interests appear to be our own innermost wishes. How are we to discern what is us and what is not? We've been invaded by advertising, pornography, literature - media in all forms - and become attached to our bodily longings despite the fact that indulging in them brings very little peace of mind. Quite the opposite.

'Do those who capitulate to their desires control them, or are they controlled by them?'

'The only way one finds fulfillment in life is by sharing it with someone else, by in effect, giving that life over to someone else and having the other person do the same thing. The mutual giving is the essence of sexuality. Masturbation is the most basic violation of that truth. Using masturbation (or any other form of sexual vice) as 'liberation from repression' is like using suicide as the antidote to murder. No one else can kill you because you killed yourself. In triumphing over repression, you have defeated yourself by enslaving yourself in the name of liberation.'

This passage comes after a long take down of the whole idea of 'repression' being a psychobabble term ultimately leading individuals into sin. Making people think the idea of not expressing themselves sexually and indulging in carnal pleasures of the flesh is some sort of psychological illness is gas lighting (to use another modern favourite term).

Jones continues on a passage about sexual disease, 'the diseases were in retrospect the least horrific of the sequalae flowing from the 'liberation from repression' that was the sexual revolution. The real source of horror was the release of the appetite from rational control and what that did to otherwise normal human beings. In seeking 'liberation from repression' the culture discovered that the punishment fit the crime in an uncanny way, in fact, the punishment was the crime. Liberation was slavery at best; more often than not, it was death too.'

Liberation is slavery- that's key to remember. There is no freedom in doing what you want whenever you feel it just more restlessness of the mind. On some level deep down we know this but we repeatedly get tricked back into sin aka slavery again.

'Excessive passion...is fundamentally a form of insanity, a destruction of the rational minds' control over the body, a suspension of reason's power that allows the soul to be overwhelmed by the chaos of the natural appetites and emotions'

'the self which has emerged since the end of WW2 is 'empty in part because of the loss of family, community and tradition. It is a self that seeks the experience of being continually filled up by consuming goods, calories, experiences, politicians, romantic partners, and empathic therapists in an attempt to combat the growing alienation and fragmentation of its era.'

That's modern life. Just keep consuming. Another game, movies, click bait article of podcast. Another trip or sexual conquest. It is frivolity and trivial and has created a generation of man-children - a category which I have to unfortunately include myself in.

'As always, the instrument of control is passion: 'man under the guise of being liberated and excited by the possibility of maximizing individual pleasure, disregards the stakes and consequences of sexuality.' By taking control of pleasure at its source in sexuality, the neo-illuminists simultaneously take control of human life, which has the same source, and as an added bonus, the controllers also dominate the human conscience, by manipulating its guilt as a way of defending the action that enslaved the person in the first place.'

Jones makes a wider point on this note by bringing up the cases of psychologists who (often adulterers themselves) will take hundreds or thousands of patient dollars to help absolve them of their sexual guilt. Words can lie and we can try to wrestle a liberal mindset over our conscience but that nagging voice (morality) just doesn't shut up. That's why the indulger in sin never wins. The truth can possibly be ignored for a time but it can never be escaped fully without the punishment of either insanity or guilt.

Why are people never content to just look at pornography? 'The answer transcends the categories even of good psychologists because it has to do with the nature of sexuality itself, which is intrinsically other-directed. If it is not directed toward a spouse and put at the service of life, it will be directed toward people who have been turned into objects, and then it will head toward death.'

It's easy to be thoughtless with pornography and think it's 'normal' and 'harmless' because everyone else does it or because it's simply so easily available. But that doesn't mean it's OK. One thing the book doesn't go into too much as how even within a relationship you can overtly sexualise the other person and be consumed by passion. There also is no mention of the legions of married men who have families who turn to masturbation and pornography as a kind of cope for feeling frustrated. What's the solution for them? The book doesn't help with that. The focus is more on people who leave a marriage in order to 'find themselves' which almost always means sexually liberate themselves only to wind up sad and alone. To play devil's advocate, I'm sure there are also some people who see the errors of their ways and then course correct back to committed relationships again.

'masturbation creates a world of docile consumers whose pleasures lead to ever-increasing addiction and isolation, which is to say, a simultaneous and and ever-increasing dependence on pornography and the fantasies it generates. In the name of liberation, the consumer of pornography becomes progressively more isolated from all other human contact, including those with the opposite sex which normally lead to marriage and offspring and ultimately the creation of communities which enables the citizen a measure of independence and support. All of that is abolished by the sexualization of culture which pornography and masturbation promotes. In this sense, masturbation and pornography are clearly forms of social control. In a world where sex leads to neither marriage nor kinship, it can only lead to isolation, addiction and death.'

To think that running around bedding women is some sort of achievement to be admired in the 'red pill community' not realising really they too are falling victims to liberalism. And the argument is always made 'well in the process of getting women into bed these men learnt game and fashion and worked out so isn't it a good thing?' I don't know, is it a good thing if a member of a luciferian cult spent some time in the gym and learning rhetoric in an effort to overthrow societal institutions? What kind of rhetoric is this? The aim should be something high not just some lowly animal behaviour defended because in the process of getting there some self-improvement takes place.

'Morality is reason in the practical order. Anything which undermines morality undermines reason, and without reason man is no better than the animals which, Malthus discovered, procreate themselves into extinction unless checked by nature.'

A key thing to think about when indulging in porn or masturbation or escorts. There is no end to it. It is never gotten out of your system. So easy to think 'one more...' but that is just pouring gasoline instead of water over the flames of lust.

'Society,' Edmund Burke had written 200 years before the American senate reached its verdict, cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.'

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

In short: Fantastic book, poorly edited ranty writing.

I would give it five stars for the well researched content and information, but unfortunately EMJ isn't the best of writers and needs an editor badly. This book is 668 pages long and could've probably been done in 500.

It starts off with the founding of the Illuminati in the 18th century, proceeds chronologically, jumping from one event to the next, and ends with the 1990s. The chapters are not connected in any way, they just list different people in different historic circumstances and countries and how they contributed to sexual "liberation", which is nothing else than the oligarch's tool for political control (this is the book's major thesis).

Dr. Jones took the historian's (or one could even argue journalist's) approach to listing these events, structuring his magnum opus chronologically instead of thematically, which can be good or bad, depending on how one looks at it. It can be helpful, for when I want to look up something which I have read earlier about the French revolution for example, because I can easily find the chapter via the date. But if I would want to (for example) demonstrate how modern psychologists contributed to that, I'd have to flip through many different chapters, because there is not one chapter on psychologists, but one chapter on Freud, one on Jung, one on some other American and German ones, etc.

With an editor and better writing skills, this book could've been done in less pages with more cohesive chapters and argumentation and less ranty repetitiveness. Therefore I give it three stars ("liked it"), because I still liked it. The content inside is golden, therefore it trumps the lack of editing and I would still recommend everyone to read it.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable read, the actually reading experience is five stars for me EMJ is a wealth of knowledge and is excellent at treating history like its journalism and giving us a lively story with all the juicy details.

However, there are some significant negatives to this book. The first is that those in the reviews who have complained about the editing are right to a degree. There is a couple of misspellings in the book, and some quotes that are used twice, though some who say the book could be much shorter are wrong as the thesis could be explained in a page, but the examples and historical narrative are what makes the book engaging.

The major reason this is not a 5 star review is because I don't think that this book appeals to a large array of people. The fact that the thesis is never dealt with directly and explicitly, but through 3 narratives that are each over one hundred pages, leads to believe that someone who is skeptical or hostile to the thesis might read a hundred pages before the question "How does sexual liberation lead to political control?" is answered in any satisfactory way. This leads me to believe that the book likely only appeals to people like me, who already agree with the thesis or are at least skeptical of sexual liberation.

Overall It was a very enjoyable and educational read and I do suggest to anyone to buy the book and read it, its worth the price. No modern author is slaughtering the sacred cows of the modern west as skillfully and in depth as EMJ.

[Radu · Rating 5 out of 5]

According to the author, this was the book that prevented gay marriage from taking over Poland... which I don't think is true, but I thought I'd mention it as it does make for an interesting selling point.

The essential treatise of the book can be surmised in several quotes taken from Saint Augustine and repeated at several points during the book; "Lust darkens the mind," and "Man has as many masters as he has vices."

From the early socialist/libertine thinkers of the 18th century, notable figures of the French Revolution, the anarchists and feminists that participated in the October Revolution of 1917, the psychoanalysist movement started by Sigmund Freud, Weimar Germany's sexual revolutionaries (Wilhelm Reich, Magnus Hirschfeld, etc), Albert Kinsey's "experiments" on human sexuality, etc.

Every chapter paints an illustration that sexual liberation is indeed a form of political control where government and private corporations use a combination of propaganda techniques substitute the natural sexual passions of the youth that otherwise urge them in the direction of married family life and redirect them into a downward spiral of perpetual consumption and dependence.

Unexpectedly humorous boomer moments from the author, words fail to describe how lifechanging this book can be. I'd highly recommend this to anyone with a curious mind.

[Wilfredo R. Dotti · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely brilliant and insightful book, full of little-known stories that contain a lot of information about the different key modelers of modernity, helping a lot to understand in a profound way how our times have become so morally corrupt. Starting from the beginning of the French Revolution, through the emergence of psychoanalysis as a control mechanism, paving the way for current scandals. The author is politically incorrect when pointing out the fact that the elites promote sexual liberation as a method of political domination, making it clear that those who promote sexual liberation, promote suffering and submission to all those who end up being victims of exploitation.

This book is excellent, and in my opinion it should be part of the education system.

[Miguel Márquez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book confirmed my reticence to pursue a career in psychotherapy. The fact that psychoanalysis was not conceived with the purpose of helping people, but as a tool to control and exploit them, confirmed a hunch I have had for several years now. Ever since I started to familiarize myself with Freud's theories I was under the impression that something was "off" about them.

This book is a must-read for anyone who believes that freedom and loose morals are a good thing. In fact, this so-called freedom regarding sex and relationships has led to a lot of suffering and continues to do so. But I guess that's OK for therapists, since that suffering can be exploited for financial gain.

[Powderburns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Illuminati, Masons, murder, betrayal, ps-ops, Hoover, assassinations, perverts, porn, suicide. This book gives you the Enigma machine to break out of the matrix, and the chance to live a good life. Thank you Dr Jones.

Now, to wake up the rest of the prisoners without sounding unhinged and waking the guards.

[Todd Fernandez · Rating 3 out of 5]

The guy put a lot of work into this book, but you get the feeling early on that the author is forcing history into his particular framework, and only gets worse.

[Davi Veras · Rating 5 out of 5]

Um dos melhores livros que jamais li.

[Cyrus Nelsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Those who control the passions control the man. A must read for everyone.

[Isabel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book I’ve ever read. The compilation of information is just astounding and it opened my eyes a lot!
Definitely would read other books of this author.

[Edouard V · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best book you can read to understand how our world is dominated by sexual content and how it got there...
It also explain how sex is used to control our world!!!

[Thomas Huddleston · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The general anarchy which sexual liberation brings about is a function of power. In the absence of morals, the rich will get away with murder because their desires are more powerful, and power in this context becomes the only measure of right and wrong. Either might makes right, or we are all bound by the terms of a moral order which is not of our making. There is no third alternative" (Jones, 1999, pg. 604). Jones' argument throughout Libido Dominadi is clear and consistent, sexual liberation is a form of political control. As a new comer to the topic of sexual liberation, and a continuing learner of Catholic moral teachings, Libido Dominandi is shocking, revealing, and thorough if not cumbersome in some areas. Tracing the sexual liberation movement from the French Revolution to the presidency of Bill Clinton, Dr. Jones provides the reader with countless stories of literary authors, political actors, and social activist who brought about the moral decadence in Western Civilization that are felt increasingly each day. You do not have to be an expert to see the extent sexual liberation has consumed our culture. TV ads, movies, shows, literature, and language all have become and continue to be more sexual, oftentimes without the active and passive audiences knowledge, an odious controller Dr. Jones unveils with an extensive history on the subject.

Some have criticized Dr. Jones' work as ranting, repetitive, poor citations, and a lack of proper historical method in research and writing. It should be remembered that Dr. Jones training is in Literature, not History, therefore his writing and method do not follow the historical method per se. Nevertheless, his writing is well cited, and yes repetitive, but in a way that reinforces the main argument of each chapter and indeed the entire book. My only complaint is the length of paragraphs and wordiness in certain chapters. Although the information is valid and informative, it can become difficult to follow the argument.

If you are looking for a book that provides an historical account of how the present Western culture has become saturated with sex, this is the book for you. If you are a Catholic, Christian, or just a person wanting to understand the use of sexual liberation as political control, this is the book for you. It has been said that discipline is the path to freedom. That lack of control over our passions lead to irrational thoughts that manifest in irrational behaviors. C.S. Lewis wrote in detail on the necessity for ordering the mind, heart, and belly of a man to live a truly free life in The Abolition of Man. I think as we continue into this new decade, the issues from a lack of control from our passions will increase exponentially. As St. Augustine said, and Dr. Jones quotes throughout Libido Dominandi, man has as many masters as he has vices. The right orienting of man to the moral order will bring about true freedom and peace, something only a government or entertainment fantasy can only promise but fail to deliver.

[Robin Schmahl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Libido Dominandi is a deeply flawed work. While I will not delve into the book’s specific arguments, as others have already done so in detail here, it is worth noting that its actual premise is both intriguing and ambitious. The author aims to provide a critical examination of the ideological foundations of the sexual revolution and the subsequent rise of laissez-faire attitudes toward sexuality in mainstream culture. This perspective holds considerable potential for a rigorous and thought-provoking analysis. (hence two and not just one star)

However, despite the book’s ambitious scope, its historical claims are exaggerated, imprecise, and often appear to be guided more by the author’s personal opinions than by substantive research. While its broader social and philosophical arguments may merit some attention, the book’s treatment of historical events lacks the rigor necessary for any serious engagement.

The most significant flaw of Libido Dominandi, however, lies in its lack of proper editing and structural coherence. The writing is disorganized, often devolving into polemical rants rather than presenting a well-structured argument. The book lacks a clear line of reasoning, making it difficult for the reader to follow its central thesis. This issue is compounded by the absolutely useless chapter titles that provide little insight into the book’s structure and themes, while offering no stylistic value as well. Furthermore, the introduction is almost comically bad — it does not offer a coherent overview of the book’s argument, nor does it engage the reader in any meaningful way. Instead, it reads as a disjointed, confused, and emotionally charged monologue rather than a well-crafted introduction to the subject matter.

Given these shortcomings, I cannot recommend Libido Dominandi. The effort required to navigate its convoluted prose and disorganized structure far outweighs any intellectual value it might provide. For those interested in the philosophical and social critique of contemporary sexual ethics, a more cogent and insightful alternative is J. Budziszewski’s On the Meaning of Sex. While it does not attempt the historical analysis that Libido Dominandi claims to offer, it is nonetheless a far more coherent and intellectually rigorous exploration of the topic.

[Ali Razvi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sex is the most powerful force, for good and evil, for productivity and enslavement, for meaningful union in marriage and psychological turmoil in fornication. This books details how the elites of society have pandered to the base desires of men and women in order to control them for political, economic and spiritual gain. From Adam Weishaupt of the pre-French Revolution era, to modern times, Jones explains this common thread: that sin is slavery, and sexual sin is the epitome of slavery. Knowing this, many key figures have learned that to control men and women, to demolish religion and family, is not to espouse complex, rational argumentation, but instead to change behavior. Once people behave against the moral order, arguments will no longer be necessary. "You cannot masturbate and pray", and the same holds true for society. Either a culture will worship God and the truth, or they will dissipate into lies and promiscuity. The latter is much easier, and those who understand this use this fact for their advantage, while at the same time telling the exploited that their slavery is actually freedom. Those dominated by the "lust of domination" use sexual lust as their means of control.