Mark Keenan
To understand how the Western world lost its confidence — how we became a civilization confused about morality, sex, and even reality — we must look back to one of modernity’s most influential and corrosive figures: Sigmund Freud.
Freud’s psychological doctrines reshaped how the West views desire, virtue, and identity. His ideas helped lay the groundwork for the Sexual Revolution and the new gender politics that now dominate our schools, media, and institutions. The result is a culture hyper-sexualized, guilt-ridden, and detached from the moral roots that once sustained Western civilization.
Freud: Prophet of Desire
Freud presented himself as a scientist but operated more like a prophet of the flesh. He built an entire theory of human nature upon his own obsessions — most notoriously the “Oedipus complex,” claiming, with no proof whatsoever, that all men secretly desire their mothers and resent their fathers.
For centuries, Western civilization taught that human beings are moral creatures capable of self-control, that virtue — not pleasure — is the mark of maturity. Freud turned this on its head. He recast restraint as sickness and indulgence as health. Lust was no longer a temptation to be resisted, but a psychological need to be fulfilled.
Critic Frederick Crews summarized Freud’s legacy bluntly: “The entire system of psychoanalysis rests on nothing more substantial than Freud’s word that it is true.” Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar called it “a stupendous intellectual confidence trick.”
Historians have documented Freud’s cocaine addiction and his self-diagnosed neuroses. His own granddaughter, Dr. Sophie Freud, dismissed his theories as “narcissistic indulgence.” Psychiatrist Edward R. Pinckney called psychoanalysis “the biggest hoax ever played on humanity.” Modern scholars have shown that Freud’s central claims were invented interpretations, never verified by real evidence.
The Moral Inversion of the West
Freud’s influence went far beyond psychology. His ideas filtered into education, the arts, and politics. Behaviors once guided against by conscience and moral choice — infidelity, promiscuity, debauchery — were reframed as “lifestyle preferences.” As Dr. Tim LaHaye observed, Freud helped shift the West from moral judgment to moral neutrality. This shift set the stage for the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and the gender revolution of our own time.
Once you accept Freud’s premise that sexual expression is central to health, it becomes easy to claim that any restraint is repressive and any boundary oppressive. Today’s gender ideology is simply Freud’s obsession carried to its logical extreme: the belief that identity itself is defined by desire.
Even Freud’s contemporaries noticed his hostility toward Christianity. Where original Christianity — and indeed many ancient cultures — taught mastery of the self through devotion to God, Freudianism taught that freedom means surrender to every indulgence, no matter how misguided. In that reversal, the moral backbone of Western civilization began to dissolve.
The Cult of Liberation
Freud’s followers claimed that sexual release is essential for health — a myth that fueled modern hedonism. Yet the great thinkers — from Pythagoras and Plato to Newton and Tesla — taught the opposite. The great saints and sages across cultures — from Saint Francis to Srila Prabhupada — saw mastery of desire as the highest test of wisdom and taught that discipline refines the soul and strengthens the mind.
Freud dismissed all this as repression. But look around. The societies that embraced his creed now suffer record levels of loneliness, addiction, broken families, and despair. What Freud dismissed as “repression” was in truth restraint — the self-control and respect for God’s laws that form the foundation of a just and enduring civilization.
From Psychoanalysis to Gender Politics
Freud’s intellectual descendants extended his logic. If all desire is natural, then all distinctions — male and female, sacred and profane — must be artificial. Today’s “gender-affirming” movement takes that to its final absurdity: the claim that biology itself is a social construct. Where Freud dethroned morality, gender ideology dethrones reality.
In the post-Freudian West, and especially under the new gender politics, traditional masculinity and virtue have been recast as social diseases, leaving countless men alienated in the civilizations their fathers built. In the book The War on Men, I reveal how modern ideology has stripped men of purpose, recast virtue as weakness, and left a generation unsure of what it means to be a man.
Allied with the dogma of feminism, society itself was re-engineered. Each ideological “reform” expanded government, weakening men and the traditional family unit while centralizing power. Strong, self-reliant men are difficult to control; dependent, broken men are not.
Across the West, men are under pressure like never before. From family courts and false accusations to media hostility and collapsing cultural values, a silent war on men has become undeniable — and millions are paying the price.
Where once patriarchy meant duty, protection, and order, it is now smeared as oppression — yet the absence of that structure has produced a generation adrift, confused about manhood, family, and purpose.
Both Freud’s psychology and the new gender politics deny the existence of a higher order to which human beings are accountable. Both reduce the soul to the libido. And both have produced generations unmoored from truth, tradition, and meaning.
The Result is a Civilization in Moral Freefall
Freud’s worldview taught that the highest good is pleasure and the highest sin is guilt. Yet guilt is the conscience’s alarm bell — the sign that our actions matter. A society that silences that bell soon loses the ability to distinguish right from wrong.
The result is a culture that replaces enduring strength and happiness with appetite and meaningless gratification. The consequences are everywhere: collapsing birth rates, epidemic loneliness, and a generation medicated for despair. A civilization that worships desire and the new gender politics cannot sustain duty; a nation that mocks virtue, manliness, and the strength of the soul — becomes weak and cannot defend freedom.
Recovering the Higher Path
In today’s West, ideology hangs thick in the air — feminism elevated to dogma, masculinity treated as a crime, consumerism replacing character, and government-funded mass immigration justified by slogans rather than reason.
Everywhere, the marks of decay are visible: families fragmented, men feminized, and citizens numbed by propaganda that preaches equality but breeds resentment and confusion. The farther one steps from that chaos, the clearer it becomes that strength and sanity survive only where tradition still holds. Succes comes not from indulgence, but from mastery of self in obedience to God’s laws and a higher purpose.
Freud promised liberation, and the new gender politics promised compassion. Both delivered confusion and bondage. The cure for both is timeless: self-discipline, moral courage, and an understanding that we are not playthings of desire, but children of God, called to follow His instructions given for our good.
The West can recover its strength, but only if it rejects the false gospel of Freud, respects and honors its men again, and reclaims the virtues that once made it great — faith, family, chastity, and truth.
* Mark Keenan is the author of The War on Men: How the New Gender Politics Is Undermining Western Civilization and Climate CO2 Hoax: How Bankers Hijacked the Environment Movement. A former U.N. technical expert, he writes on culture, spiritual values, and the ideological forces reshaping the West.
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/10/how_freud_wrecked_the_west.html
