Libido dominandi is a Latin phrase meaning “lust for domination,” taken from Book I of Augustine’s City of God. In modern use, it’s also the title of a book by E. Michael Jones (Catholic author and former professor at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana) that I am currently reading (Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control) which argues that sexual “liberation” was used as a form of social control from 1773 (starting with the French Revolution) onward. Michael Jones, PhD, writes in the introduction to his well-researched 900+ page magnum opus Libido Dominandi,

The best way to control man is to do so without his awareness that he is being controlled, and the best way to do that is through the systematic manipulation of the passions, because man tends to identify his passions as his own. In defending them he defends his “freedom,” which he usually sees as the unfettered ability to fulfill his desires, without, for the most part, understanding how easy it is to manipulate those passions from without. It took the evil genius of this age to perfect a system of financial and political exploitation based on the insight that St. Paul and St. Augustine had into what they termed the “slavery of sin.”

Jones summarizes the content on his book,

Unlike the standard version of sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. The logic is clear enough: Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy. Over the course of two hundred years, those techniques became more and more refined, eventuating in a world where people were controlled, not by military force, but by the skillful management of their passions. It was Aldous Huxley who wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that “as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.” This book is about the converse of that statement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used to engineer a system of covert political and social control – including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and, when push came to shove, plain old blackmail – allowed the Enlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustine’s insight on its head and create masters out of men’s vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of how that happened.

He lays out a well-constructed argument that the sexual “liberation” and “freedom” is in fact a powerful form of bondage that is now advocated, pushed and promoted by those in power in Western Civilization as a means of cementing their political control. As Augustine said, “A man has as many masters as he does vices.” In John 8:32, Jesus says, “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” True freedom is available only in Christ, not in the empty, hollow proclamations of sexual “freedom” that contemporary ruling elites increasingly embrace and champion today but which instead ironically makes its participants easily dominated and controlled . . . without them even realizing they are being controlled. In John 8, the people with whom Jesus is arguing do not understand that they are being dominated by their bondage to sin and that Jesus is offering them true freedom.

The prevailing sexual revolution is the death knell for Western Civilization. The freedom from bondage to sin that Jesus offers is a grave threat to today’s ruling elite. This is why the church is under increasing attack today — because with the gospel it offers true freedom, something that cannot be tolerated.