The Politics of Self-Loathing and Death Instinct

a culture of no future

Start putting pieces together.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution runs an essay thanking children for being tortured and ruined so mommy can feel safe, but offering the consolation of “the mental health services that you deserve because of life-altering trauma.”

A high-profile California state legislator constantly and openly celebrates the state’s success at making sure 12 year-olds can get their STDs and rape injuries treated without their parents finding out, and warns against the critical discussion of grooming behaviors.

Senator Scott Wiener @Scott_Wiener

California law already allows 12-17 year olds to access various forms of healthcare without parental consent, eg: HPV & hep B vaccines, abortion care, birth control, mental healthcare, domestic violence-related care. SB 866 builds on this existing law to expand vaccine access.

Senator Scott Wiener @Scott_Wiener

The word “groomer” is categorically an anti-LGBTQ hate word. It’s super homophobic/transphobic. It plays into the slander that LGBTQ people are pedophiles. It’s no different than calling someone a fagg*t. If you call someone groomer, you’re inciting violence against LGBTQ people

A luxury fashion designer releases a new ad campaign featuring young children posing with, for example, teddy bears in bondage gear, on sets dressed with partially hidden references to child pornography.

An investigative report published yesterday by the Daily Mail finds that California is engaged in the mass decarceration of people convicted of felony child sexual abuse:

More than 7,000 sex offenders were convicted of 'lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 years of age' but were let out of prison the same year they were incarcerated, data from the California Megan's Law database says.

Others who committed some of the worst child sex crimes on the statute books served similarly short sentences, including 365 pedophiles convicted of continuous sexual abuse of a child who spent less than 12 months in prison, 39 cases of sodomy with a child under 16, and three cases of kidnapping a child under 14 'with intent to commit lewd or lascivious acts', according to the data.

And finally, though it’s about a grown woman rather than a child, a Canadian clothing retailer markets blouses and skirts with an ad about the beauty of suicide….

.…in a country that’s recently been caught offering assisted death to military veterans who ask for help with post-combat depression — or, more simply, in a country that now offers medically assisted death for an increasingly large range of reasons that include depression and persistent poverty.

Wittgenstein @backtolife_2023

Canada: A St. Catharines man says he will choose medically assisted death over homelessness. CityNews explores the ethics of MAiD amid concerns some feel they have no other choice. Source: CityNews (Youtube)

Are there any mysteries about what all of this adds up to, or what it means? The decline of future orientation, the disgust with childhood and the bodies of children, the increasing turn to death as public policy in the case of a difficult life: Of course this is a narcissistic descent into the instrumentalization of the lives of others, including children — a view that the purpose of the people we pass on the street is to protect me and give to me and serve me, and if you can’t offer anything to me, what’s the point of your life? We should probably just switch it off.

I can’t fuck you and you might make me sick, so maybe you should just be dead.

At the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Beth Collums writes on the premise that children were sacrificed to protect adults — that young lives were severely damaged to protect older lives. And she says thank you; she proceeds on the premise that this was a positive, and that it was to be celebrated, even as we maybe tidy up a bit in the aftermath by hiring some therapists. California increasingly appears to suggest, in policy and whenever Scott Wiener writes legislation or posts on Twitter, that children exist to provide sexual gratification. Instrumentalization: Your life exists for my purposes.

Children are the future. They’re the people who will be here after we’re dead. And we increasingly seem to have a considerable subculture, or a growing explicitness in mainstream culture, that there is no future — that there’s no point to the existence of any continuing human presence after we’re gone. Relentless sexualization of childhood, relentless hysteria over the health risk of contact with children’s bodies (a psychologically interesting combination of premises, sexualizing frightening bodies that carry disease and have to be covered with masks and locked down), the casual turn to suicide as a solution to social pathologies: death instinct.

This is a culture that doesn’t see a future. It’s a widely shared dead end, pointed toward oblivion and expecting termination. I strongly suspect it’ll end in the ruin it seeks, but all the questions that come next are about the possibility of opting out.