De-Sublimation Corrupts Human Conscience

by Friedrich Hansen (October 2025)

In contrast to the sublime and auditive paradigm ruling the Orient, the Occident—ever since the Renaissance—came to make do with the more indulgent visual paradigm that always was and remains to this day the mark of Hellenism. While the latter focused on Epicurean pride-shame-and-revenge culture, the former had already hundreds of years earlier settled for guilt-and forgiveness culture. Hellenism is famous for favouring science but depends in everyday life on double speak, mystification and cunning which is, more often than not, revealed by the gap between promise and deed. There exists probably no sharper contrast to Greek duplicity than Judaism which is why the opposition between Athens and Jerusalem has been foundational and decisive for the Western tradition until today. It is therefore no coincidence that with the rise of postmodern sexual identity politics the contrast between the Hellenist visual and the Jewish auditive paradigm is playing out on an entirely new plane.

Ever since the reuptake of materialism by Karl Marx, the return of visual dialectics was inevitable as was it’s descent first into anarchism in the 19^th century, followed by cultural primitivism in music and ultimately into decadence in painting. And the backlash to these artistic movements found its master in the rise of the artist by training Adolf Hitler with whom art became the nemesis of politics. Equally under the auspices of the gay attachment to the haptic paradigm, postmodern feminist culture centred, until today, on mere feelings. The postwar compromise was an arrangement around the visual-haptic paradigm in order to normalize (if not privilege) vain sexual pride over the millennial Western tradition of monotheist humility. The latter is and was foundational for the three East-Western denominations of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. But as was to be expected the Christian incarnation would turn out to be weakening the defence of the monotheist image ban.

It was Christ himself who made possible the cracking of sublime Victorianism through the invasion by rivalling impulses of feminist and gay exhibitionism in the decadent era of the fin de siecle. This removed the ethical barriers for all sorts of sexual indulgences which eventually swept away basic cultural inhibitions of Western civilisation delivering it to European fascism and Soviet totalitarianism. These emotions were the drivers of the Holocaust against the Jews. Without this preceding descent into the haptic paradigm, the people of the Hebrew Bible would probably have remained in very different circumstances. And there is certainly no denying the fact that, after WW II, the gender revolution on campus took over from racism the antisemitic against Israel. This means that sexual sublimation and the religious image ban remain in the hair cross of the emancipatory gender warriors.

It is no coincidence that Sexual identity politics emerged in the decadent period of the fin de siecle together with racial and national chauvinism. This not only contributed to the build up of belligerency culminating in WW I but also prompted the first wave of Jewish Aliya towards the Holy Land as described in Theodor Herzl’s books Alt-Neuland and Der Judenstaat, but also in XXX.

In other words, the outbreak of Western reckless de-sublimation and profanity which followed the collapse of Victorianism became manifest in feminism, gay pride but also in national chauvinism. And it is exactly this mix that we find in Hitler’s published literary polemics.

Famous leaders of the Victorian discourse like Florence Nightingale, Jane Austen and Mary Ann Evans (alias George Eliot) rejected feminism as groupthink hostile to individual emancipation. Inevitably the gender groupthink inflamed antisemitism and eventually triggered a wave of Jewish return to British mandated Palestine. Since then, Israel has become a reference point for sublime individualism; moral integrity as it fits to its state of the art guilt culture. And yet nobody should be surprised to see it under new attacks by the woke update of ancient Greek shame-and-revenge culture. This happens just one generation after the Nazis had put carnal instincts above the Western humanist tradition of moral rectitude. Meanwhile in the West, the political right and left fringes are united in indulging once again in scapegoating the Jews. Even after the antisemitic onslaught of October 7 by Palestinian terrorists that killed 1195 Israelis, it became fashionable in woke circles of the West to accuse the Jews of having brought this tragedy on themselves:

“An episode of the American podcast FreshAndFit has gone viral after disturbing antisemitic declarations from eight participants, who stated that “the Jews probably did something to the Germans that made them act in a certain way,” effectively blaming Jewish people in Germany for the Holocaust, along with various other antisemitic and conspiratorial remarks.”

There is no denying of the fact that the gender madness has accelerated the return of fierce antisemitism in the West. Today Jewish leaders have observed that Jews are safer in Moscow or Warshaw than they are in Paris, London or Berlin. Among the major effects of mainstreaming sexual identity groupthink is the swallowing up of the individual human conscience—after all, this is the pillar of the Christian mind that had dominated the West for most of its history. This counterfactual or anti-historical ideology is maintained by spreading sexualized groupthink based on gender fantasies. Identity politics encourages the sole rule of the cognitive self as opposed to the inner moral self or religion. The characteristics are the following:

1. The classical features of gender ideology are all attributable to the decadent turn of the emancipatory ideas of the French Revolution. This erosion of monotheist ethics and the family by the sexual revolution has meanwhile spread to extremely backward immigrant groups from Asia inside the UK. Asian immigrants have come to forming grooming gangs which are abusing British underage girls.
2. Another variety are the controversial “transwomen,” (transsexuals) men in women’s dress entering Women’s restrooms. Transwomen are mere crossdressers cast out of decent society recently by the newly elected Republican president Donald Trump in his second inaugural.
3. Before that, transwomen (both school age and adult) were even demanding to compete with women in sports. This is only the “top of the iceberg” in the wider context of dismantling the deeply ingrained human conscience, the bedrock of guilt culture and the Christian moral code residing in the human psyche.
4. With reference to Churchill’s remarks on the Nazis, this woke return of historic revisionism aims at reversing 5000 years of Occidental history. What made this possible is genderism which, like its sibling racism, keeps undermining the Christian foundations of humility that once was the hallmark of Occidental generosity.
5. The seeds of woke were laid out long ago by the Reformation. It was Martin Luther who established the independence of the individual conscience thus eradicating the biblical demands on personal humility towards the supreme being.
6. It was left to Sigmund Freud to double down on the Reformation by attaching to the independent conscience his sexist agenda and thus rationalizing our animal instincts. Thus in addition to Lutheran cancellation of humility, sexual shamelessness destroyed the foundation of piety.
7. Finally, the postwar period after WW II saw the postmodern rejection of “judgementalism” killed the moral sense and pushed what was left of the human conscience over the cliff just like the biblical scape goat once was. This enabled the sexual identity racket to succeed.
8. Instead, sexuality needs to be rolled back all over postmodern society in order to recover our moral sense or inner conscience, which remains the bedrock of the Western tradition drawn from Jerusalem.

If current European trends continue, the demise of the individual conscience is furthered by the Green environmental agenda, with the aim of creating a collectivist, reified inner self similar to the one in recently collapsed Eastern socialist lands or as in present socialist China. The common denominator of postmodern shame culture unites the Western Greens with the Chinese Communists. This has the potential to destroy the ethical and deeply personal framework of religious conscience. Campaigns towards the illusionary net-zero COs emissions will complete the transition towards zero-sum-thinking with no room for tolerance of diverse ideas. For absolute ideological frameworks like sexual identity politics and radical environmentalism leave little room for diverse ideas they don’t agree with.

Surely the secular deconstruction of the biblical conscience that is unique to the three monotheist creeds went on for over a century and prepared the ground for constraining freedom of speech by the Green and Pink gospels of today. The resulting woke brainwashing of the liberal Western mind is administered by the new elites of sexual identity politics who simply project their natural “bad conscience” on the unsuspecting majority population and impose on them proxy indulgences in the form of disenfranchizing and frugal environmental politics. Gender, like race ideologies, are instruments for diluting guilt feelings accumulated by an abusive and transgressive ruling elite which arrogates itself the right to offloading them on the majority disguised as environmental debt of the nation. The result is a transfer of infringements on civil liberties for all as they are enjoyed in everyday life.

While the Stalinist era of Eastern Europa addressed and restricted the expressions of inner or moral Adam II, the woke ideology addresses outer or cognitive Adam I in the West. Nazi racism had targeted the cognitive self in similar ways by hammered its adherents with fascist ideology of racial superiority and creating relief of inner tensions by projecting hatred on the Jews. Today the gender warriors are likewise trying to force upon the majority an ideology which serves their special interest as for instance with inculcation of gender ideology to children which infringes on their lifestyle choices. Hence we are seeing the rise of zero-sum thinking detectable by diminishing tolerance for “the other,” i.e. the morally struggling majority of society.

This effects of the Green externalisation or our inner conscience manipulates our moral sensibilities towards the artificial environmental agenda. For instance the green agenda empties the moral depth of personal relationships and weakens family coherence just as the communist agenda did. This depletion of religious morality and longterm biographical thinking undermines family coherence and generational continuity in favour of short term escapism and ruinous sexist lifestyles prone to fetishism, vanity and false pride. These postmodern abominations of the West are widely rejected if not abhorred by the rest of the world as decadent.

To sum it up: the ongoing collapse of our moral sensibilities since the turn of the 20^th century can be partly attributed to the emergence of sexual identity politics and its systematic erosion of the monotheist conscience without which our politics tend to become brutal and totalitarian. There is certainly a political link between the rise of the homosexual movement in the fin de siecle and the rise of Adolf Hitler who was gay well into the 1930ies. All this corresponds to secularism and the decadent turn to the single rule of cognitive Adam I, which began with feminism and the gay follow up. This travesty of conscience popped out as identity alone can explain why Left politicians so easily suspend judgement and inner conscience only to replace it with the Green agenda. All this works to the detriment of the heterosexual majority.

It is probably fair to say that the abandonment of sexual complementarity following the demise of the Victorian age is the single most formidable force that drove Europe into totalitarianism in the 20^th century: fascism as well as communism. The former emerged from cognitive Adam I in the claustrophobic and beleaguered centre of the continent: Germany. The country was ethnically utterly divers and politically as underdeveloped as it was overcrowded, the remnant of the once majestic Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and together with Italy a belated nation state, was originating in the 187ties. While the Soviet Union was a result of the proletarian revolution between 1905 and 1918, driven by secular and collectivist moral imperatives of inner Adam II it energized the vast stretches of Eurasia, also underdeveloped but much less densely populated than central and western Europe.

After World War II, the Green movement’s projective reification of human conscience emerged in the form of environmental protection, which represents an obvious deflection of bad conscience as a leftover from the Nazi regime and thereafter sustained by LGBT. De-Nazification of the mind was shortchanged by de-toxification of the environment—another case of displacement of moral guilt into visible shame. This resulted in a return of the fin de siecle mix of decadence with reactive naturalism which served the purpose of mitigating the bad conscience about excessive sexual identity politics. This was followed by the climate issue which likewise became to some extent a surrogate for guilt accumulated in the Holocaust. All this was promoted on top of the erosion of religion and human conscience as a result of gender ideology. Gender was framed along the lines of racism as a group ideology meant to push out Western individualism through the backdoor. As postwar Germany was unable to compete with Angloamerican consumerism, it needed the surrogate of Green naturalism even more.

It is quite similar to what happened with the racial discourse with the Nazis when racist and collectivist thought effectively eclipsed the human conscience necessary for the performance of the Nazi medical experiments. The Green naturalism serves as immanent surrogate for the vanishing of the transcendent background which is provided only by religions through the individualized auditive paradigm. It came about with the takeover of group think in the name of race and gender. Both are instruments of this worldly “Verdinglichung” or counter-enlightening visualisation. The latter promotes the confusion between things and creatures that was one of the more worthwhile concerns of Karl Marx. The irony being that Marx’ critical concept of work ethics would be replaced in the fin de siecle with reckless abandonment of family and sexual ethics which had until then protected women who usually bore most of the burden of creating offspring.

No doubt too that the gender revolution was originally intended to split and therefore weaken the socialist workers movement and, in its latest incarnation, also damaged women’s rights. During the 1920s, particularly in chaotic Weimar-Germany, the trade unions would be effectively marginalized by the postmodern sub-proletariat or gendered sans culottes (lit: without trousers). Thanks to the rapid rise of gay leaders like Hitler and Röhm in the Nazi party, the sans culottes advanced from the bottom of society to become brutal party hacks. Not only would they easily survive the war as “Etappenhengste,” they would also overtake those who survived the war returning from prisoner of war camps in Siberia many years later.

Of course the gender warriors had their fair share of imprisonment, executions and war dead like any other minority in the social-darwinist disorder which the Nazis created. But many of them survived and were able to fill the ranks of postwar Germany, which is why they cropped up in the public arena soon after the peace was settled. Beginning in the 50s, the gay movement recovered because it got under the skin of the morally naked bourgeoisie and attacked it from inside, by which time eventually Freud replaced Marx with equally catastrophic consequences. The unrestricted application of Freud to the German postwar dilemmata represents an outrageous case of guilt evasion and reification (German:“Verdinglichung”) which would soon give birth to the transsexual agenda which translates transgressive guilt into transsexual shame culture. It might appear that the trans racket is little more than the attempt to alleviate punishment in prison by emulating the weak female gender. This just confirms that we are still under the Renaissance bias according to which the Occident, after the failed crusades, shifted its gender preference from the medieval knight to the blameless madonna which is still seems to be driving the feminist agenda of gender injustice. The gendered campaign like its racist predecessor ignores that the biologist paradigm has been utterly exposed and discredited in the Holocaust. Meanwhile we have learned that the feminist or gender variety of regulation is equally distorting the competitive economy as racism did. This has been aptly recognised by President Donald Trump leading him to scrap all DEI regulations in the US with one blow.

By contrast, Europe still has not absorbed the fact that genderism is every bit as detrimental as racism. The profane miscarriage of the divinely ordained concept of human dignity and equality can be blamed on the lowering of its rationale form the auditive-transcendent to the visual-immanent realm evidenced by the visually driven agendas of race and gender. It is the religious image ban which was meant to protect us from such follies. Violating the image ban not only affects the divine privilege of Jewish choseness which often meant extreme suffering and hardship in the diaspora. For Jewish chosenness comes with the attachment to the sublime auditive paradigm demanding extra portions of sublimation and postponement of pleasure which is eventually rewarded with exceptional performance in terms of economic or scientific success. There is absolute nothing untoward to this explanation and no justification for antisemitism due to gentile envy. Jewish exceptional performance in all realms is well deserved and only to be explained by hard work and bitter frugality. One needs only to look at the extremely demanding performance made on the pious Jew in orthodox faith to understand Jewish exceptionalism. No other explanation is asked for.

To a much lesser degree, this could also be said of Victorianism in comparison to off the shelf continental Protestantism, as Gertrud Himmelfarb has demonstrated with her work about the Victorian virtues and vices. This is true with regards to the embrace of biologism, racism and nationalism in the 19^th century by the seriously lacking-behind German Reich. This is particularly true about the rise of biologism, which was little more than a transparently self-assuring and ultimately self-defeating posturing. Even beyond Germany, Western sciences desperately tried to emulate Jewish exceptionalism within the realm of culture and sciences. With little to show for in comparison with hard natural science, its weaker biological sibling came up with the short cuts of race and gender which allowed them to engender exaggerated claims and accomplishments. Thus the Jewish accomplishments in many fields were misrepresented by class bias or wrongly attributed not to competitiveness as a result of millennial persecution and segregation, but to tribalism. Yet  Jewish “chosenness” was at least as much a challenge as it was a gift. In my rendering, it can addressed as the result of all the mentioned factors but on top of them must range the intellectual dualism of oral and written Torah.

As a result of this and prompted by the dramatic rise of antisemitism that would be revealed by the Dreyfus affair in fin de siecle Europe, Jewish divine “chosenness” had been reversed from a blessing to a secular handicap or even an unexpected risk for survival. Therefore, to me, these political shocks of the decadent era awakened leading thinkers from their cognitively biased enlightenment slumber. Figures who quickly rose ahead of the new challenges, foremost Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, could read the “writing on the wall” sensing the new hostility. Both lead the way for a powerful Jewish response which resulted in a rapid succession of Zionist World Congresses, altogether eleven well-attended democratic gatherings between 1897 and 1921. The discussions among the best informed and well traveled or most alert Jews suggested that their fortunate days in Europe were coming to an end and Aliya was the thing to go for. Evidence for this is to be found in the writings and speeches of Theodor Herzl and his close friend May Nordau. Both together chaired many Zionist sessions exerting a major political influence before and after the turn of the 20^th century.

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Dr. Friedrich Hansen is a physician and writer. He has researched Islamic Enlightenment in Jerusalem and has networked on behalf of the Maimonides Prize. Previous journalistic and academic historical work in Germany, Britain and Australia. He is currently working in Germany and Australia.

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