A new book about an Upper West Side sex cult offers a cautionary tale about today’s progressive narratives.
It sounds fun to be a boozed-up artist in a high-brow sex house! To be a political radical! To totally reject your parents!
But the further you get into Alexander Stille’s utterly engrossing book The Sullivanians, the more you appreciate the unshakeable pull of the traditional nuclear family.
The book cleverly draws you into the characters, motivations, and delusions of the founders of the Sullivan Institute, a radical community created in 1957 around an offshoot of psychoanalytic theory. Its creators, the tyrannical and darkly captivating Saul Newton and the somewhat more sympathetic ideologue Jane Pearce, developed tantalizing theories of human growth. They taught that we develop throughout our lives through engaging with as many different individuals as possible. They therefore endorsed a kind of radical “chumship” that demands constant, varied socialization.
Continue reading the entire piece here at National Review (paywall)
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Hannah Meyers is director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute.
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