Liberalism — darkness cloaked in modernity

Liberalism and Feminism have led to the breakdown of the family and to pornography and homosexuality in the West. Sooner or later we in the East will be having to deal with these excruciating issues, though keeping our heads buried in the sand may seem to be the convenient choice right now!

For people in the West who actually live the idea, it’s not really easy to define Liberalism or even Feminism. There are so many sub-ideas under the umbrella of Liberalism that clash with each other and tend to merge with opposing ideas of realism or constructivism — it’s impossible not to get confused! Likewise for Feminism.

At the core, Liberalism was an Enlightenment idea, emerging in the late 18^th Century, an idea against narrow prejudice and bigotry, slowly accumulating the ideas of freedom, equality, property rights, and later culminating into the ideas of free market and individualism.

Interestingly, Feminism emerged at the exact same time and has evolved through merging with different liberal ideas, specifically applying them to women, like the right to vote, own property, enter the workplace, protection from sexual assault, sexual harassment and domestic violence. The 2^nd wave brought liberal (political/legal integration, equal opportunity), socialist (anti-patriarchy) and radical (lesbianism) feminism. But the 1990’s 3^rd wave was again against sexual harassment at workplace, and the 2010’s 4^th wave was again in opposition to street and workplace harassment, campus sexual assault and rape culture. Today, you might hear feminists arguing over Liberation Feminism (liberation from the expectations, men, kitchen) and Equality Feminism (men and women have same work, same goals, yet they also have differences).

The problem can be sensed here; every activist, every thinker that emerged in the coming decades reassessed and corrected the main idea according to the circumstances he/she experienced. In the end, feminism has come out to be a slew of conflicting ideas and has practically delivered no real liberation, and no equality. The fact is that the human species is a social one, we are born into relationships and learn to perform within social structures. These structures are based on the twine of the genders, in the separations of generations, in socio-economics and beliefs. All these diversities allow the setting of different settings that group us as equals in many ways and as unequal in many others. A man can be father, son, grandfather at the same time; he can be a friend, an employee, an employer, a seller, a buyer, a brother and a husband all on the same day. All relationships, all actions, all commerce are intertwined; the subjective and the objective persons are tied together in sublime but essential knots.

Now, bring in religion and God into the equation. The Enlightenment era preceding Liberalism was basically a war against self-conflicting dogmatic beliefs based on the scripture for the simple reason that the Bible had been altered, successively through the centuries, and human intervention in God’s words had disfeatured it and had snatched away its sacredness and divinity. This abhorrence against not-logically-defensible beliefs led to the pursuit of reason, evidence, natural law, liberty, progress, secularism and true happiness.

The West wanted to liberate itself from falsehood and retrogressive orthodoxy, but in this riddance, it forsook the Ultimate Creator, Designer, Fashioner, Balancer — God! Man altered God’s words and did all heinous acts in the name of God, and God was blamed for all of it! And once the Creator was out of the equation, the balance was lost, the right sense of fashion was lost, and the very design came into question! Liberty changed from liberation from human slavery, idol-worship, superstitions, apocrypha, and all sorts of moral regressions — to reverting to these very ills. Everything that true religion from the One-God had repeatedly come to save humanity from, was now to be espoused as progress and vogue.

Rather, Liberalism tended to liberate humanity away from the subjective freedom of the soul, and bounded it, as slave, to material-only values. It liberated humanity from love of God and jailed it in the confines of its own physical body. If there is no God, then why is there a father or any hierarchy? If there is no God, then who is stopping us from evolving relentlessly, what is forcing us to restrain from our self-labeled sins and immoralities? What is stopping us from self-satisfaction and happiness in even the places that we used to label as the darkest?

‘Individualism’ was born out of that dark place. It was the breaking away of man from all kinds of restrain, making it its own judge, its own god. Liberal Democracy backed the capitalist model, an effort to convert the whole humanity into a nonstop huge consumerism machine syphoning all wealth into the coffers of the capitalists. With both these ideas in place and the woman liberated from the confines of the family, there was no stopping of free sex, prostitution and pornography. And with all the right things out of place, and constant fogginess over crucial identities and definitions, there was a question upon ‘are there really two sexes?’, are there really men and women, boys and girls? Hence came the alphabets soup — LGBT — which of course have been ever increasing, last checked it was LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA.

So, is the West happy with all these freedoms, with breaking away from God, with distorted identities, and self-consuming individualism? The truth is that so many sane people in the West are talking about how prostitution and pornography are brutally exploiting women, and destroying identity, self-esteem, and the true happiness and satisfaction of both men and women. Voices are increasingly dismissing homosexuality and gender dysphoria as a farce.

In conservative societies such as ours, Liberalism is generally taken for westernisation, for forsaking certain religion-based ideas as needless orthodoxy, and for opening to the ideas of free-thought, gender equality and progress. Many of us tend to take a lenient view of modern ideas, as if they may be docile openings towards human progress, and we tend to remain oblivious to the onslaught they are bringing upon our cherished values and beliefs.

We tend to not open our eyes to the reality of the ‘online’ assault that we have willfully allowed to be waged upon ourselves and our children alike — an onslaught that is estranging us from ourselves and from our surroundings, as it pulls us towards the sunken darks of individualism, self-pleasure and materialism.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 29^th, 2023.

Like Business on Facebook, follow @TribuneBiz on Twitter to stay informed and join in the conversation.