Where promiscuity and sexual selfishness becomes socially acceptable, it is increasingly hard to form any type of faithful marriage and family nucleus based on a partnership of trust, fidelity, loyalty, and patience.
Western hedonism and its focus on selfish pleasure as the goal of life, demonstrates its greatest flaw in its failure to recognize that compassion for others is a fundamental component of civil solidarity and genuine happiness.
Without compassion, empathy, humility and self-discipline, the stability in society will crumble. If man is no longer bound by the social contract or responsibilities towards society, individualism may develop and drift into a dangerous type of hedonism, where the sole goal is to serve the self and its passions.
This writes Hanne Nabintu Herland, historian of religions, bestselling author and founder of The Herland Report news site and TV channel on YouTube.
Hedonism’s greatest flaw: As the Eastern Orthodox monk, Elder Paisios of Mount Athos, put it:
It is not freedom when we say to people that everything is permitted. That is slavery. Freedom is good when the person can use it appropriately. Otherwise, it is a disaster. To improve one must have difficulties. Let’s take an example. Look at the child. We limit his freedom from the beginning. When he is first conceived, the poor thing is limited in his mother’s womb and remains there nine whole months.
Later he is born, and immediately they swaddle him in a blanket, they tie him up, as soon as he begins to grow they set a railing, etc. All of this is necessary for him to grow. It appears to take away freedom, but without these protective measures, the child will die in the first moment.
Hedonism’s greatest flaw: Philosopher Friedrich Hayek criticizes the current extreme form of Western relativism in The Constitution of Liberty. He points out that to be a liberal, in John Locke’s original sense, meant fighting for personal freedoms and performing one’s duties and obligations to the community.
Freedom is not the right to be selfish. Egoism is rather a path to bondage and a form of slavery in which the individual – in his loneliness – slowly enters a state of depression.
The German sociologist Ulrich Beck uses the term “the second modernity,” in which he seeks to describe the loss of true freedom – which is found when a person abstains from selfishness and tends not only to his own needs but the needs of others.
He uses the modern family as an example. The family has traditionally been considered to be a vital entity and cultural cornerstone that creates stability in society. It consists of parents and children who care for one another and share the burdens of life. Children grow up with family dinners and conversation, being taught politeness, order, and respect for the elderly, learning communication skills and kindness, how to deal with problems and so on.
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Hedonism’s greatest flaw: The traditional family entity has been smashed by the radical neo-Marxist revolt against classical, Western values the past decades. It has produced sky-rocketing divorce rates, the normalization of infidelity, social acceptance for perversions and the sexual revolution in which egocentric hedonism is the forefront value. In the total social chaos here produced, a culture of loneliness, depression and suicide is now engulfing the West.
Beck calls the modern family a “zombie-category” that is almost losing its meaning completely. What is a family nowadays? Your children, my children, the new role of the divorcee, the remarried and new grandparents, new grandparents, new partners and steadily new lovers, and their children from previous marriages.
Every other year, or often sooner, new break-ups and it starts again: new step-children, new in-laws.
The renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s term “liquid modernity” attempts to address this sense of cultural uncertainty, confusion, and disintegration. In Liquid Modernity, he describes the hallmarks of modernity: the constant, unstoppable, obsessive search for new developments, an overwhelmingly insatiable desire for creative destruction – the destruction of all that which does not function optimally in order to produce reforms that give us better products, improved structures, smarter societies – all this is done with the hope of producing wealth and progress.
Bauman’s point is that we have moved away from the solidity of “hardware” modernity of industrialization, to a liquid, software-based modernity based on feelings and subjectivity. This profound change is dramatically affecting all aspects of the Western human condition. Arguably, for the horrifyingly worse.
To be modern is becoming equivalent to constantly being on the move, an eternal hunt for that which you do not have.
Another sociologist, Robert Bellah, talks in Toward the Recovery of Wholeness about “the empty self” in a time where love is considered to be something negative because it threatens individualism.
We live in a fragmented cultural state where the constant ideal is to pass status quo, which, according to Max Weber, makes it impossible to be content in the present.
The dream of success chronically concerns the non-experienced future. To be modern means the constant quest to become better than the person you are at the moment – as Nietzsche maybe would have put it, the hunt to transform from being a fallible human to becoming the “übermensche,” the superhuman.
Bauman’s critical view on the market Capitalist society is inevitable. He painfully concludes that we have left the goal of working towards a just society where solidarity and empathy interlink individuals, and we have embraced an extreme individualistic culture of entitlement, solely focusing on human rights.
The individual is no longer bound to the social contract of responsibilities towards others but leaves it all to the state.
Hedonism’s greatest flaw: The ideological, neo-Marxist attack on conservative traditional values has been quite systematic and has led to massive societal change in the West, causing a deep rift within the culture itself. The symptoms of a society in deep upheaval are too many to ignore.
Sociologist Peter Berger asserts that modern liberal society creates a kind of homeless, an existence without access to the joys that lie in knowing one’s own spirituality. He calls Western relativism and lack of morality a recipe for cultural self-annihilation. Where cultural stability disappears, the foundation for the individual’s spiritual health is also threatened, as the culture is weakened. In The Social Reality, Berger points out that man dreads existential loneliness, he fears being ostracized and isolated from society and yearns for a meaningful existence. This drives him towards maintaining social relationships with others.
Western hedonism greatest flaw rests on its failure to recognize that compassion for others is a fundamental component of civil solidarity and genuine happiness, without which the stability in society will crumble.
