The Devil's Pleasure Palace Read Online Free Page B

alongside his legendary comrades, breaking the stalemate with the invention of the Trojan Horse (Act Two, Part One); he then must endure a decade of wandering and many dangers (Act Two, Part Two). He finally manages to return home to Ithaca and oust the suitors who, like locusts, have descended on his wife and property in his absence (Act Three). It is a rare tale that does not follow this intuitive narrative structure.
    What the West has experienced since the end of the Second World War has been the erection of a modern Devil’s Pleasure Palace, a Potemkin village built on promises of “social justice” and equality for all, on visions of a world at last divorced from toil and sweat, where every man and woman is guaranteed a living, a world without hunger or want or cold or fear or racism or sexism (or any of the many other “isms” the Left isforever inventing—Linnaeus had nothing on the Left in the taxonomy department).
    A world, in other words, that sounds very much like Heaven. It is the world promised us by Critical Theory and by the principal figures of the Frankfurt School: the music critic Theodor Adorno; the sex theorist Wilhelm Reich (whose theories and writings I shall examine in detail); as well as founding fathers Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács.
    Instead, as empirical evidence proclaims, this world has become Hell. The world sought by the Frankfurt School and its Critical Theory disciples is all an illusion, just as surely as the Teufels Lustschloss was. The corpses of the untold millions who have died in the attempts of the literally Unholy Left to found the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth, divorced from God, surely testify. Our pleasure palaces are many and varied, ranging from the creature comforts of modern civilization and its nearly endless opportunities for self-abnegating entertainment to our gleeful, olly-olly-oxen-free abjuration of formal religion, and to our false sense of enduring cultural security, which was only partly dented by the events of September 11, 2001. And yet our pleasure palaces can and will fall, as have those of all civilizations before ours. And unlike in Schubert’s opera, this time there is no guaranteed happy ending.
    Something wicked this way has come, and we are in the fight of our lives. How, or even whether, we choose to fight it is not the subject of this book. The subject is why we must.

CHAPTER ONE
    WHOSE PARADISE?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  And fast by hanging in a golden Chain
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  This pendant world, in bigness as a Star
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Accursed, and in a cursed hour he hies.
    â€” Paradise Lost, Book Two
    R age is the salient characteristic of Satan and of the satanic in men. There are others, including guile, deceit, and temptation. But at the heart of Satan’s mission is an overwhelming animus against God and the godly. In the second book of Milton’s epic poem, Satan has a conference with his fellow demons, determined to loose the bonds of Hell, where he has been chained, and carry the fight to the Principal Enemy (the name, let us recall, that the Communist Soviets gave to the capitalist United States during the Cold War) in the only battlefield that remains open to him: Earth.
    Miraculously, God lets him do it. Passing the twin guardians of Hell’s gate—Satan’s offspring, Sin and Death—he launches himself upward “like a pyramid of fire.” Directed by Chaos, Lucifer traverses the void, leaving in his wake a bridge from Hell to Earth, to provide a pathway for the demons who will surely follow upon its completion.
    Since this poetic moment—itself derived from the oldest Western foundational narrative of