It was Aldous Huxley who, very early, saw sexual decadence combining commercial interests with political manipulation in the emerging media. And he knew what that would mean for a culture.

“Aldous Huxley in his 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World depicts a culture in which pleasure is compulsory and engineered to eliminate intellectual challenge and to produce docile citizens. However, the culture that is intended to be repulsive is secured by a wide variety of “fun” that is often, from a readerly perspective, pointedly engaging. That is, there are moments in the novel in which the reader is brought face to face with “fun” that escapes Huxley’s withering critique.”

— [Laura Frost, “Huxley’s Feelies: Engineered Pleasure in Brave New World,” in The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents (Columbia Press University, 2013), 132.

Huxley wrote, “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive or political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and school teachers… 

“The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”  — Brave New World Together

We Know how far this has gone. Open sexual display is obviously no longer restricted to combat zones, whore houses and underground books and cinema. Today it is Western Culture itself. But do even the most traditional pastors address the subject at Mass and teach ways to avoid these abominations? Rarely. Most of them, it seems, prefer to wait until passions are enflamed and actual sins are committed, and then they’ll deal with it in the Confessional. That cannot be right.

And we’re all in this poisonous soup together. A Protestant Evangelical Assessment follows.

B. F. Skinner too on Pleasure as Political Control

“Now that we know how positive reinforcement works, and why negative doesn’t, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled…nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement—there’s no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.” (B.F. Skinner, Walden Two)

The Strategy of Desire by Ernest Dichter is another early classic in using Freudian technique to harness concupiscence and desire for marketing purposes. The bottom line is that everybody in the West has long known that “sex sells”; and political forces on both the political Left and the Right in the name of a false “liberty” increasingly allow (and in so doing promote) it.

After Roe v. Wade especially, the political corporatocracy stepped on the gas in taking advantage of a burgeoning visual media culture to achieve their ends of merging political power and profits.