Perspective

The West’s Sex Problem

I am perfectly aware that my position oscillates between two poles: on the one hand, a return to the norms of traditional, balanced societies, archaism; on the other, an appeal to the technoscientific future. This is why, for example, I wholeheartedly support positive eugenics, assisted pregnancy, and certain forms of abortion—and even genetic engineering. The positions I take will shock dogmatic masculists as well as feminists, obsessive anti-homosexualists as well as homophiles, puritans as well as pornophiles.

The following is the Introduction to Sex and Deviance, which was published in English by Arktos.

Sex is the foundation of nations, since it determines their reproduction. Sex is a central dimension in the analysis of societies.

Today, the status of sex throughout the West displays a deep mental and social pathology tantamount to a fundamental inversion of the most basic natural norms. We are no longer faced with a mere ‘ideology’ that orients and guides sex, as has always occurred in different forms through the ages and in different cultures, but always within the bounds of a certain naturalness; we are faced with a pathological transgression of these bounds. This disguises itself as a morality of progress, liberation, justice, and equality.

The best example of this is furnished by the status which homosexuality has assumed, being considered the equivalent to heterosexuality not merely at an ethical and anthropological level, but also at the level of the social bond. The same goes for race-mixing as a moral imperative, and the loss of any normative bio-anthropological standards in the West. We are witnessing a metapolitical development of the egalitarian cancer (of the sort Giorgio Locchi, as a good physician of ideas, has diagnosed so perfectly).

It is also interesting to observe that the more pornography intensifies, the fewer children people have. Virtual sex is replacing real sex. In the West, sex has disconnected itself from reproduction, and the sexualisation of society is proportional to its sterility and its infertility.

Sex, because it is connected to biological reproduction, provides a good case study of the health or sickness of human societies. These remarks, however, do not imply any condemnation of eroticism on my part—quite the contrary.

I shall formulate a critique of the continuing defence of race-mixing and immigration, two of the main themes of our official ideology. At the same time, I shall not hesitate to accuse invasive Islam of obscurantism and an oppression of women sui generis.

Bisexuals, homosexuals, transsexuals—all equal, except for paedophiles (a recent development to which I shall return later) and also except for heterosexuals, who are slightly less equal than the rest. The sexual morality of the West is abandoning itself to the most extreme egalitarianism and confusion, engaging in a fight against nature comparable to that of Don Quixote against the windmills. This fight was lost before it began and will end in a pitiless restoration of the natural balance. Imperat naturam nisi parendo.

Going too far in the direction of sexual confusion, homophilia, feminism, the systematic defence of race-mixing (in the name of ethnomasochism and the imperatives of the antiracist catechism), rising divorce rates, and ‘reconstituted families’, will probably end in a form of chaos which we are beginning to glimpse, and which is the antechamber of the barbarity to which we are headed. But barbarity is always presented by intellectuals, by means of a semantic inversion, as the progress of civilisation—this is the heart of nihilism.

I am perfectly aware that my position oscillates between two poles, as I have explained in my book Archeofuturism: on the one hand, a return to the norms of traditional, balanced societies, archaism; on the other, an appeal to the technoscientific future. This is why, for example, I wholeheartedly support positive eugenics, assisted pregnancy and certain forms of abortion—and even genetic engineering. The positions I take will shock dogmatic masculists as well as feminists, obsessive anti-homosexualists as well as homophiles, puritans as well as pornophiles.

As often happens, my position will shock all parties, including those who consider themselves on my side. As in all matters, I will attempt to define and take a stand on a third position. But of course, I am aware that I shall collide with the neo-totalitarian ideology that is gradually invading the European Union and restricts and censures free expression—in the name of the Good, of course, as always.

* * *

As with all other domains of human behaviour, there is no universal sexual and conjugal behaviour that is characteristic of the whole of humanity. Sex depends first of all on an ethnocultural base which is extremely variable according to civilisational areas. And within these latter, sex varies over time in accordance with the dominant ideologies and worldviews. As always in human ethology, we find both an innate foundation—tied to a hereditary ethnopsychology—and cultural, religious, and ideological superstructures. The two elements operate interactively.

The model of the ‘couple’, for instance, is not valid for all civilisations. Sexual prohibitions and the content of amorous sentiment are not absolutely the same across cultures and eras; neither is the definition of the family (patriarchal, matriarchal, tribal, dual, and so on).

However, invariants exist in all cultures, and have done so for millennia: the prohibition against incest, paedophilia, legal homosexual unions and interethnic unions in which the differences are too great, the educational and hierarchic submission of children to their parents, etc. Western civilisation at present, especially in Europe, by contravening these rules, is part of a strange pattern of deviance—etymologically, of ‘departure from the path’. This can only lead to disaster, which is, however, necessary so that a return to the straight road may take place. In sum, my position is that of a libertine.

* * *

In the animal and vegetable kingdoms, sexual reproduction is the foundation of the survival of species. Of course, other factors are involved, such as the ecological environment and epidemic pathologies. But in the end, as an ultima ratio, without the sufficient reproduction of a species—or, among men, of a nation, civilisation, or race—the lineage disappears. In phylogenesis as in all other matters, one must never underestimate the quantitative, for it is the (selective) basis of the qualitative.

In the case of the human species, and especially in its most evolved and civilised forms (as demonstrated by sociologists and ethologists, especially Arnold Gehlen and Konrad Lorenz) sex is no longer automatic, as it is among animals. It has become more complete, for man is a cultural, plastic animal; his sexuality has been partially disconnected from innate schemas and reproductive, purely biological behaviour. This is how socioeconomic, ideological, or affective imperatives (love, for example) have come to interfere in a complex way with purely genetic reproduction, especially among culturally superior people. According to the particular culture, religion, or era, cultural pressure causes sexual reproduction to depend on an infinite variety of norms; these may benefit the cause of reproduction or make it more fragile. Obviously, the innate imperative to reproduce with one’s like remains in the depths of the human paleocortex, as with animals. But it is filtered and deformed by the neocortex which stores cultural norms. It is no longer more than a hidden imperative, and as an instinct it has been rendered insufficient—hence the danger of a disconnect between the sexuality of reproduction and social sexuality, and between nature and culture.

To this must be added the risk posed by the individuation of man in comparison with animals. We are thus witnessing a paradox of a dialectical nature, something we shall discuss later on in this essay: the more creative and superior a culture is, the more sexual reproduction depends on fragile individual factors (freedom of desire, chosen libido, individual calculation), while in less highly-evolved cultures—this term is not intended to be pejorative, but descriptive—reproduction depends on both collective and more instinctual factors. Sexual individuation (‘love’) does not exist in such cultures. Hence, a superior culture will tend to reproduce itself less than an inferior one. This disequilibrium is compensated for by the enormous infant mortality of inferior cultures, due to their lack of medical knowledge. Is this a logical calculation on nature’s part? But this equilibrium is disturbed as soon as superior cultures bring others the means of decreasing their mortality, which has produced, for example, the demographic explosion of Africa, from north to south.

* * *

A second point: we shall deal here with sex in the broadest sense: from physiological behaviour, to ideology, to morals. This is why we will touch upon themes such as eroticism, sexual practices, marriage, demography, the role of women in society, homosexuality, racial mixing, and artificial reproduction through genetic engineering—all from the factual as well as ideological point of view, for all this is connected. Sex is the fundamental root of the life of human societies and civilisations, since it is sex upon which depends the number and quality of men, the form of the family (the kernel of any society), social hierarchy and, to a great extent, whole areas of ideologies and religions. Ideologies and religions, indeed, incorporate a particular conception of sex into the background of their motivations and imperatives. Many of the norms enunciated by Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on rest on a judgment concerning sexual behaviour.

* * *

A third point: as always, in this essay as in others, my approach will not be humanist and will not be attached to the anthropocentric tradition. In the process of phylogenesis, or the history of living things on this planet, Homo sapiens is a latecomer that has evolved with unprecedented rapidity, but may prove nothing more than a brilliant yet short-lived comet. For this reason, I wish to avoid any idealisation of ‘Man’, that is, any humanistic idolatry. Instead, I shall posit a perfectly inegalitarian superhumanist hypothesis inspired by the Nietzschean Giorgio Locchi, according to which a part of humanity—a small part—can perhaps supplement natural sexual reproduction with a technological (and thus cultural) sexual reproduction motivated by a particular will and oriented according to free choice. This does not mean replacing nature with culture, since culture is still included within nature; it is replacing natura naturans with natura naturata.

A final point: it is obvious that my central paradigm is not to consider humanity as a monolith, as being composed of identical parts. Neither from the individual point of view nor from the collective point of view of the various branches of humanity do I do this. Differences according to my paradigm (which some will consider a prejudice, but so much the worse for them) are not merely formal but essential, not merely accidental but intrinsic, not merely apparent but qualitative. Human beings are not equal to one another, neque forma neque valore (neither in form nor in value).

* * *

This book concerns the way in which practices and ideologies tied to sex in the broadest sense of the term have participated in, and are still participating in, a decline of the nations of European origin. As always, the theses I shall defend do not belong to any programmatic system of thought, nor do they obey a sort of dissident logic. For example, I shall support the idea of conjugal fidelity while also advocating institutionalised prostitution, and separate the notion of conjugal fidelity from that of sexual fidelity. I shall dispute not only feminist ideology, but also masculism. I shall defend the right of homosexuals to social equality and to being left alone, while disputing homosexual adoption and homophile ideology. I shall formulate a critique of the pornographic industry, but not from a puritan point of view: on the contrary, from an erotomanic point of view.

As to the question of the sexual aspect of mass immigration to (or colonisation of) Europe—which involves both demographic quantity and interbreeding—my positions will obviously not be that of the dominant ideology. Racial mixture, aggravated by population replacement and demographic decline among the natives, is a catastrophe (in the sense of radical upheaval employed by Primogine and René Thom) of which Europe’s elites have no conception. Or rather, they do know what awaits them, but refuse to see it when the evidence is right in front of their eyes. On this point, I shall make a critical analysis of the dominant neo-totalitarian or soft totalitarian ideology of the West (and in Western Europe in particular). This ideology unconditionally defends colonisation and the blending of nations, transforming the harm they have done into benefit (as Stalinism did for the Communist regime), and censors and persecutes all divergent opinions. Such persecution is always carried out in the name of the Good, whether in other totalitarian societies or in the meta-religions of the Rights of Man and Anti-Racism.

Homophobia is also included in the official list of capital sins, and the term refers not only to support for discrimination against homosexuals (which is a stupid position) but even to the mere statement that homosexuality is not equivalent to heterosexuality. In such matters, our society and the spirit of the times in which it participates have entered into a systematic ideological madness to which the French intelligentsia holds the key.

* * *

Finally, I shall mention the possibilities opened by genetic engineering in the areas of human reproduction and genetic modification. These pose perhaps the most fundamental, and therefore disquieting, philosophical question of all: that of the desexualisation of reproduction and of autocreation or auto-evolution. Paradoxically, current Western ideology is fighting against nature, and there will be a swing of the pendulum; but genetic technologies do not fight against nature: they go further than nature does and accelerate nature itself by attempting, in a risky manner, to substitute human choice for evolutionary chance. Imperat naturam nisi parendo. Sex is the best means found by nature for reproducing species. But some laboratories are working on other means. I wish to make clear that the positions I put forward, here as in my other writings and statements, do not involve any school of thought, group, association, or party.

Guillaume Faye
the authorGuillaume Faye
Guillaume Faye was born in 1949 and received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Institut d'etudes politiques de Paris. He was one of the principal organisers of the French New Right organisation GRECE (Groupement de recherche et d'etudes pour la civilisation europeenne) during the 1970s and '80s, and at the same time cultivated his career as a journalist, particularly in the news magazines Figaro and Paris-Match. In 1986 he left GRECE after he came to disagree with the direction of the group. For more than a decade, he worked as a broadcaster for the French radio station Skyrock, and on the program Telematin which aired on France 2 TV. He returned to the field of political philosophy in 1998 when a number of his new essays were collected and published in the volume Archeofuturism. Since then he has produced a series of books which have challenged and reinvigorated readers throughout the world.

11 Comments

  • I have always disliked the sexual revolution. It has led to increases in divorce and illegitimacy. Children who live to adulthood by both biological parents living together in matrimony tend to do better in life than children raised in other situations.

    Nevertheless, and as Guillaume Faye pointed out, chaste monogamy leads to a higher birth rate.

    The world faces three problems. The first is over population. The second is that unintelligent people tend to have more children who survive and reproduce than intelligent people. The third is the fact that computer technology increases the relationship between intelligence and income.

    The human species is producing a growing percentage of people for whom there is no economic use.

      • Theonly problem is people being asshole and trying to control people on something that doesn’t even effect them just because they are mentally disturbed control freaks

        • “doesn’t even effect them”… you mean like how it’s utterly destroyed our culture, our societies, our way of life, the possibility for happiness of average people due to filthy pride parades in the streets? If we shelter our children from your SICKNESS, then we are called bigots and threatened with loss of livelihood and even life itself. Piss off.

          • Hhahah you’re so dramatic. It hasn’t done any such thing. You are using the same points other idiots use and regurgitating them back out stop your fear mongering we see through it loser

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