To make things clear right off the bat here, we're not discussing whether this view is necessarily right or wrong. I'm simply asking if anyone has any knowledge as to this - in my opinion, rather peculiar - belief system's "family tree," so to speak.
The idea that sex, given freely, and paired with a generalized lack of "inhibition" on the part of the greater population concerning personal conduct, often going so far as to glorify and promote hedonistic extremes with regards to things like recreational drug usage, partying, lax social attitudes, and etca, etca, will somehow create a "better," or even possibly "utopian," society is pretty damn close to being
universal in the thought and value systems of the modern ideological Left. Hell! I just saw the movie "
Sausage Party," and it was basically a giant, thinly veiled, parable trying to push that very idea - i.e. "the Gods" (humans) are evil, and the belief systems and inhibitions foods have built around them are all a lie, so the food ultimately rebels and kills "the Gods" (again, humans) in order to free themselves from all of that, and they celebrate by having a giant pan-sexual food orgy, which makes everything right with the world.
Sure, it's comedy. At the same time, however, you can't tell me that the message being pushed there isn't
very much indicative of how the person behind the writer's pen actually views the world at large, even outside of their work.
I'm sorry... But the simple fact of the matter is that the whole thing seems like a Hell of a lot of innate ideological and psychological importance to place on the simple act of a couple of (mostly) hairless primates rubbing their meaty bits together for a couple of minutes in the interests of pair bonding and procreation. The narrative surrounding this is almost like a dogmatic "gospel," of sorts, accepted on the basis of faith more than anything else among the ranks of those who believe it.
How did that come to be? Where does this mindset originate? What pre-existing assumptions must be in place to give the world view in question the logical grounding its adherents clearly believe it to possess?
I
would be inclined to chalk the phenomena up purely to Marxist thought and impulses, given its general focus on "tearing down" conventional institutions, and replacing them with (what, 'true believers,' at least, believe to be) some sort of "Revolutionary" new framework. In that regard, it falls within the confines of broadly defined "Cultural Marxism" rather well.
However, at the same time, Marx really didn't have much to say about sex. Most self-avowed "Marxist" societies, in point of fact, have actually tended to be pretty damn prudish and restrained. To the contrary, this apparent fixation on the "pleasures of the flesh" appears to be something rather unique to the Left of the "Capitalist Peeg" West, and the United States in particular.
Is it
Freud who is at the heart of the matter then? Are these simply the cultural after-echos of his own (long since discredited) views regarding neurosis as being in almost all cases tied to so-called "sexual repression?"
Is it Freud by way of Marx, basically? With the perceived "neuroses" of society
as a whole being blamed on the supposed "mass sexual repression" imposed by more traditional social institutions, and society as a whole therefore requiring "revolutionary" intervention to be rid of them as such? Has that view simply been mixed with good old fashioned Capitalist Yankee materialism and decadence, resulting in the "anything goes - if it feels good, do it," cultural consensus seen among the ranks of the "Pop Left" today?
Or... Does it go even deeper than that?
Walt Whitman and a number of other 19th Century bohemian radicals actually had some rather hippie-ish views regarding "free love" and other such things as well. Did that influence die with them, or did some sliver of it remain (most likely combined with the other three factors mentioned above) to shape the sea-change in the social values the American ideological Left experienced from the 1960s onwards?
There are really quite a few directions a person could take this analysis, when one stops to think about it.