The "Great" Adventure of the Herdist

Some thoughts of Erik von Kunnelt-Leddihn on how sex becomes the final attempt of the herdist to escape his loneliness and loss of identity in the herd.

One should, in that connection, certainly not forget the "greatest" adventure of the herdist, his banal excursions into the animalistic aspects of sex. Here he hopes to drown the despair over his loneliness in the herd. The Romantic may be alone, but he is never lonely, and that because of his knowledge of the presence of God. (Certainly, also, there is more loneliness in an apartment house or in a crammed subway than in a village with widely dispersed cottages.) Yet the restriction of adventure to the sexual sphere is the reason why our urban culture and civilization is so terribly oversexed. The great thirst does not go for "women" or "men" but for sex alone, sex for sex' sake. It is not the attraction of the other sex, but sex as a drug and escape. It thus stands in the same category as the movies. Modern man, having abandoned the supernatural, here seeks for perhaps a last consolation, in order not to be completely overpowered by machine and monotony.

It should not be denied that the ugliness and the deadly routine of traditionless urban civilizations engendered often a nostalgic thirst in man for beauty and romance, and this may be the reason for the enormous power of Eros in the technicized world. In the shadow of soul-murdering offices and workshops, of desolate railway yards and "main streets," [strip malls] without character and expression, love becomes the only emotional experience and woman the only living memory of nature and a paradise lost.The greatest love is the love of God and the lasting "marital" love between the sexes overbridging the immense psychological abyss between man and woman is not unrelated to the love of God; it is basically the love for one of His children. The very delight in the otherness of the beloved person is a tacit, loving recognition of God's all-embracing greatness. True love between man and woman accepts the mysterious variety of God's creation whose harmony even original sin did not entirely destroy.

The intrinsic immorality of perverted love lies in its being fundamentally egocentric. It is the rejection of the grandeur and the mysterious diversity of this God-made world; it is love of one's own person in the same sex and therefore nothing else but sexualized egoism.