"The 1950s intellectual meme became the 1960s lifestyle"

Daniel J. Flynn writes in A Conservative History of the American Left that "without the 1950s, there could not have been a 1960s." That seems obvious, but what he is writing about is the influence of 1950s intellectuals on the radicals of the 1960s. "Social science," which, of course, was anything but scientific, climbed to its highest reputation in the 1950s. Books like The Organization Man, The Affluent Society, and The Power Elite attacked American society. "Conservatives were to be diagnosed, rather than debated." That's still true today, isn't it?

In the 1950s a book entitled The Authoritarian Personality attacked people who believed in family, faith, freedom, and flag. Columbia University's C. Wright Mills wrote The Power Elite, which "put America on the couch and purported to discover its inner fascist" (even though it had been less than a decade since America helped put down Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo). David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd critiqued America for being too other-directed, not paying enough attention to their own feelings and aspirations.

Although Americans believed they had never had it so good, "social scientists" tried to convince them they had never had it so bad! William Whyte lectured Americans in The Organization Man that the high paying, secure, corporate jobs Americans generally desired, were not so desirable after all. Flynn writes, "Whyte observed that corporations stifled creativity, genius, and individuality, and rewarded sycophancy, obedience, and conformity. Whyte and others lamented the crushing bigness of corporations. The crushing bigness of the State escaped notice." Lewis Mumford sneered at the suburbs, where the Organization Man lived. Whyte even noted the worse phenomenon of all: "people from big, urban Democratic wards tend to become Republicans upon moving to the suburbs!"

President Dwight Eisenhower (who was loved by the American people) was ridiculed by the intellectual left, just like the way the left ridiculed Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Likewise, business executives were ridiculed: "If they read anything at all, they read mysteries, or books on management."

I remember an immensely popular book by Paul Goodman entitled, Growing Up Absurd. Goodman advocated more adolscent sex (maybe that's why I remember that book). Sigmund Freud said repression and neuroses were the price to pay for civilization and progress. One of Freud's star pupils, Wilhelm Reich, encouraged his patients to disrobe, touched them, then encouraged them to achieve orgasm in therapy. Herbert Marcuse wrote Eros and Civilization in 1955. It debunked work! Pleasure, unconstrained by civilization, should be pursued. The pleasure pursuit these authors wrote about, their readers acted out. The 1950s intellectual meme became a 1960s lifestyle.

Let's not forget Indiana University professor Alfred Kinsley. Kinsley wrote about the sexual peculiarities of his fellow Americans. He hid his own obscene perverse sexual practices. He manipulated data to show the abnormal as the normal. His "studies" claimed that most men had premarital and adulterous experiences, more than a third had explored gay sex, and a "not insignificant number took away the innocence of an animal. "He asserted that about one in two American women had premarital sex, one in four had sex outside of marriage, and one in eight had lesbian sex to the point of orgasm." Of course, the media dutifully reported all of this sensational b.s. All I can say is Kinsley's 1950s were not anything like the 1950s I experienced!