Inside-Out Ethics

When ethics are sourced by man’s instincts, feeling, and emotions, there is no logical off-ramp before cultural anarchy.

Wilhelm Reich was the sexual revolutionary of the Frankfurt School in 20s and 30s Germany. The Frankfurt School were Cultural Marxists. When you hear the expression “sexual revolution,” you have Reich to thank. He wrote a notorious book with precisely that title: The Sexual Revolution.¹ Reich’s ideas influenced mid-20^th century Western elites, and by the 60s they filtered down to the wider population via secular higher education and popular culture-shapers like Hugh Heffner and Playboy. Without Reich’s The Sexual Revolution, what Augusto Del Noce termed “The Erotic Regime” of the 60s would not have developed as it did.

Outside-In Ethics

Reich was a vocal proponent of what I call inside-out-ethics, in stark contrast to outside-in ethics. Outside-in ethics are standard traditional ethics: our standards of right and wrong are sourced outside oneself. For ancient pagans, that source was often tribal rules. Or it was the law of the king or emperor. In ancient Israel and the primitive Christian church, that external standard was the Bible as God’s word.  Later an additional standard was added — natural law, popularized by ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle. In the 18^th century European Enlightenment the outside standard was universal human reason. This was the view of the greatest Enlightenment philosopher of all, Immanuel Kant. Outside-in ethics are objective. We don’t get to decide right and wrong — an objective standard outside decides for us.

Inside-Out Sexual Ethics

The turn to inside-out ethics began in earnest in 19^th century Romanticism. Romanticism reacted wildly against the external “reason regime” of Enlightenment.² It replaced it with an internal “passion regime.” Man was now to be governed by his individual instincts, feelings, and emotions. We live now in a deeply Romantic culture.

There is probably no more prominent example of inside-out ethics today than sexual ethics, and probably no person stated it as starkly as Reich. In the very first chapter of his book, he writes:

The formerly insoluble conflict between instinctual [sexual] needs and moral inhibitions resulted in a sickness in which the person had to act according to the criteria of an established norm outside himself. Everything he did and thought was measured by the moral standard that had been created for him; at the same time he protested against it. If in the course of restructuring [social sexual ethics], he recognizes not only the necessity but also the indispensability of genital gratification, the moral straightjacket drop drops off along with the damming up of the instinctual needs.³

Reich argues that we are sexually frustrated because we adhere to objective sexual standards. The way to alleviate the frustration is to allow our sexual instincts to run wild. Our instinct decides what is sexually right and wrong. And objective sexual standards are wrong.

The Relentless March of Inside-Out Sexual Ethics

Because inside-out sexual ethics are inherently subjective, there is no boundary to their progress (or, more accurately, regress). In the 60s, sexual subjectivity was manifested in increasing premarital sex and then “swinging” married couples, “open” marriages, that is, sex with someone other than one’s spouse. But over time even this “progressive” program was seen to be inconsistent to draw the line at homosexuality. After the revolution had bulldozed normative heterosexuality and routinized homosexuality, the next frontier was androgyny and transgenderism. This is where the revolution stands today. Teenagers can demand their genitals be mutilated to create their “real” gender, that is, not the one they were assigned at birth, that is, not the one with which God created them. The number of so-called transgender teenagers in the United States is breathtaking.

It is apparent that the new frontier of the sexual revolution is pedophilia. Sociologists, psychologists, and “sexologists” at elite universities are already laying the ideological groundwork for a pedophilia regime. After all, if we champion inside-out ethics, who is to say that 35-year-old men with instincts for 12-year-old girls can be excluded? The pedophilia regime would probably already be in place were it not for the Left’s use of pedophilia as a bully club to bludgeon the Roman Catholic Church in its well-publicized priesthood scandals. And we dare not forget about the push for AI sex with humanoid machines.

Conclusion

This sexual horror show is only the most prominent, visible, and dangerous example of inside-out ethics. Other examples abound in economics, business, education, music and the other arts. When ethics are sourced by man’s instincts, feeling, and emotions, there is no logical off-ramp before cultural anarchy. The only escape from the horrific inside-out Erotic Regime is the restoration of the only infallible outside-in ethics: the divinely inspired Word of God, the Bible. Short of that recourse, we are destined to recoil through the horror show.✞

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Yours for the cosmic Lord,

Founder & President, Center for Cultural Leadership

Isa. 49:1–2

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1. Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1945).

2. Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999).

3. Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution, 6, emphasis supplied.