I don't know when the war began, but I do know the first attacks were not an open declaration. The utilization of children came later. First, they had to weaken us.
It began with appealing to our inner child. They played up to our nostalgia. They gave us rose-tinted glasses. Everything retro was cool again. The digital age was not one of old mediums dying, but of being able to reach back into the past at a whim. Trends are now recycled on a dime. Only then, once we were made soft by consumerism that felt like coming home, did they unleash the children.
Crying children.
Serious children.
Dead children.
There’s no better way to make an appeal than by way of innocence.
I got the nostalgia bug back when they released Future Cop L.A.P.D. on PS3. Right to the gut. My brother and I played that shit on a demo CD that came with a PC Gamer magazine. We played it endlessly. Did you know that game was one of the first iterations of the M.O.B.A. genre? I didn't, but who cares. What mattered was that I played that game in fraternal combat and it seeded itself in my head, so that future exploiters could then drag cash out of wallet as a twenty year old pining for better times. My dad clued me on to it, told me I was an idiot for buying an old game. He didn't get it though. Still doesn't.
I have a friend who is always posting pictures from ten years ago. Videos of our teenage crew slamming beers. He's one of the least successful of the group. Actually, now I think about he's posting less. Got a job and girlfriend. Good for him. Change does happen and change is good, but for some reason no one wants think they have changed. Facebook Memories are cringe. No one really wants to see what dumb, immature comments they wrote over a decade ago. Do young people even use Facebook now? Or is it solely the playground of Boomers who wanted to be 'hip' and are now stuck talking to themselves?
The strongest person in our culture is the baby. The baby rules over the adults with his weakness. And it is because of this weakness that nobody can control him.
Excerpt from The Courage to be Disliked
Society has devolved into a fight between maturation and neoteny. Take abortion. On the one hand you have people who want to rescind responsibility and be free to make whatever choices they like. They kill the unborn for a chance of an extended childhood. On the other side you have those that want those clumps of cells to have at least the chance of an adult life, decades of experience and all the good and the bad that comes with that. The problem is that women want to be permanent children. They want it all now, and then forever, but they don't want any consequences, and so they sacrifice their childbearing years (and their children) in order to develop mental illnesses and envelop themselves in ill-defined careers.
“Well, I scheduled the abortion,” she said, rushing past me into the living room. “I need you to tell me I’m doing the right thing.”
“I ask you to be citizens: Citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects; responsible citizens building communities of service and a nation of character.”Excerpt from My Year of Rest and Relaxation
That's the friend of the main character discussing her abortion juxtaposed with a speech given by George W. Bush. The book is an exploration of female desire among many other things, about a woman who returns to the metaphorical womb by locking herself in her apartment and taking countless (prescription) drugs to completely zone out. The book ends with September 11, which many would argue was the end of innocence. It's a scathing book which is no surprise since if women do anything well, it’s to cut to the core of something and make it bleed.
“You’ve seen rodents breed in captivity? The parents eat their babies. Now, we can’t demonize them. They do it out of compassion. For the good of the species. Any allergies?”
Excerpt from My Year of Rest and Relaxation
What is abortion but an act of good will? It's the best thing for everyone, and isn't selfish in the slightest. Isn't that why internet racists are OK with abortion as long as it's Blacks doing it? Isn't that why the birthrate of Africa is so frightening? The thing is though, we’re all trapped in the rat race of life and it's hard to do the right thing especially when you're bombarded with images and messages that say, you, yes you, can have it all.
Let's cross the aisle. What about the gun nuts? They want to play the kid for eternity, an endless game of imaginary cops and robbers. In turn they are harassed by no-fun adults who want to protect the children from harm. One side wants their youth to be wrapped in a bubble and the other want their children to run free, trigger-happy. Both sides spend their time thinking of the children all so that they themselves can act as childishly as possible. The children are a ruse. Always have been. They're just a way to get one-up on the Other. We don't treat them as adults because all the world's a game and playing games is what children do.
You become an adult when you realize that your parents, your elders, those in charge, were full of shit.
(My fear is that the opposite is true.)
Mother. Father.
No. Yes.
We begin simply. Knowing comes slowly.
Observe. Touch.
Cry. Laugh.
Baby steps, one at a time.
The world of the child is monosyllabic. A child knows only what it takes in, the bare facts. Not facts as found in a text book, but a repetition of the what actually happens. They imagine because they don't see all that happens at once. They make connections for themselves as their neurons string together. Children will fight for control, are highly competitive, yet war is unfathomable. Children will touch and hug, play pretend mummy and daddy, yet love is unattainable.
To a child, everything is as it is and as it should be. This is bliss. Unable to manage their awkward body, but nonetheless infinitely confident. Unfortunately, like with most things in life, the rational mind reaches out and disrupts this process for its own end.
We now live in a time where up is down, right is wrong and childish innocence has been flipped. The young are now expected to be the vessels of all wisdom while the physically mature are meant to live vicariously.
Perhaps the greatest lessons of my life can be attributed to my parents who insisted that if my little brother were trying to annoy me, or not even trying, but just by his essence was annoying, I should ignore him. Don't give oxygen to the problem and that irksome flame will wither out. Callout and cancel culture are the same thing: charges of hypocrisy.
Unfortunately I don’t think their advice was taken on board by society at large.
In the war of adult versus child two great leaders stood facing each other down. Orson Scott Card in his introduction to Ender's Game says, "I remembered so well the stories of the commanders in that war (the Civil War)—the struggle to find a Union general capable of using McClellan's magnificent army to defeat Lee and Hackson and Stuart, and then, finally, Grant..." You can have an army but without a general of worth to lead them the soldiers will die. The media built up the armies, pitting them against each other with endless skirmishes, but it wasn't until 2016 when a general emerged in Donald Trump. Yes, Trump, the king of the Boomers, the anti-PC release valve, the man who wielded social media like no Boomer before him. He had the other side on the run, licking their wounds. And then...
It wasn't until 2019 that Trump's nemesis emerged in Greta Thunberg. Greta rose as the youth's Ulysses S. Grant, bestowed the honour of Times Person of the Year (an honour Trump received in 2016, furthering their innate Yin and Yang), an unnaturally mature autist standing at the head of the children's crusade. Tyler Cowen acknowledges this battle, and preempted his critics when he said, "Call me crazy, but I think of her [Greta] and Donald Trump as the two great orators of our generation, regardless of what you think of their content." Great orators are great leaders.
Trump is childish.
Greta is mature.
Funnily enough both leaders are obsessed by walls.
'We will make sure that we put them against the wall and they will have to do their job to protect our futures.'
Clearly she meant she wants to back the leaders up against a wall so they can't run away and can't do anything but listen to her demands. At the same time, surely her speech writers aren't naïve enough to miss the obvious revolutionary connotations? Of course, she tried to explain it later:
Yesterday I said we must hold our leaders accountable and unfortunately said “put them against the wall”. That’s Swenglish: “att ställa någon mot väggen” (to put someone against the wall) means to hold someone accountable. That’s what happens when you...
Speech can have double meanings. The author is dead much like how climate activists want humanity to die off. Trump, of course, has the perfect answer to Greta's threat, one he prepared earlier:
Is there a brick wall getting in your way? Fine. That happens. But you have a choice. You can walk away from the wall. You can go over the wall. You can go under the wall. You can go around the wall. You can also obliterate the wall. In other words, don't let anything get in your way.
He loves his walls, doesn't he folks? What happened to that in the end?
I also talk about building a wall and oftentimes I'll say, and there's going to be a big beautiful door in that wall and people are going to come into our country because we want people to come in. We want people to come into our country, but we want them to come in legally.
So why does one person taken out of context get off the hook and the other is lambasted in the media daily? It’s not as simple as the Cathedral, or a global conspiracy. The forces of youth attack the adults in the room by calling them childish, and the army of the old accuse the children of not having fun, of not relaxing.
You can't say that! You're an adult!
You can't say that! You're a child!
Who's right? It would appear to many that adults have abdicated their ability to lead in favour of an endless childhood, while the children, unable to mature in normal ways like having kids, buying a house and getting jobs, need to resort to the surrogate activity, as Ted Kaczynski would say, of political activism. This seesaw of nonsense offends the senses and saws through the mind, creating vectors that should not exist.
This may seem like a draw, but in reality the young have won. They are impervious to whatever Boomers have to say.
We have always been at war with children. In Christian tradition we are children compared to God, not only his creation but also a constant thorn in his side that must be tenderly loved nonetheless. When Issac was about to be sacrificed was that not God teaching us how he perceived his own children? When Jesus died it was the reverse, an indication of how cruel children can be, a lesson for God (a lesson in the sense of experience). This tension between parents and children is eternal. Intergenerational infighting is not strange, but what is strange is the modern tendency for it to be fueled by social media and journalists.
We don’t seem to care about our own children, whether it is through anti-natalist or pro-abortion lenses, but other children can be used to political advantage, whether that is kids in cages or grooming gangs. Boomers versus millennials versus the ones younger than that. Gay children versus intolerant bullies; Nazi kids versus tolerant teachers. Kids from far-off lands were invoked when I wouldn’t finish my dinner. Now they’re on TV crying at the border.
Something happened since the 60s. Rates of anxiety and depression are increasing and this is common knowledge now. We live in a therapeutic, diagnostic society, which is either the cause or result of all that anxiety and depression. At the heart of it, everything is perceived as a heckin’ oppression or at the very least, problematic, something to be mended, or amended. Companies have a long list of terms and conditions, warning labels and government mandated cautions. Everything is bubble-wrapped for fear of being sued. Parents act no differently as they hover over their children, scooping them up before they harm themselves physically or mentally. In doing so, all these parties have created long term problems.
Does not feminism naturally lead to juvenism? Is it not essentially the same thing? Power now rests in the oppressed. This seems to be the machinations of those with the “real” power, because the downtrodden are a way to attack the middle class. The middle class, that great mass of normies, the people who make the decisions in a capitalistic society, have always been attacked. Progressive income taxes, two-income families and now the progressive stack are all tools that undermine that most noble of things, the nuclear family. Atomisation fuels capital, the super-heated individuals bouncing off each other, causing friction, heating the economy and the world. The younger they start, the better.
The concept of power is key to politics. What the child-parent relationship can be boiled down to is the friend-enemy distinction of Carl Schmitt. As I’ve shown, all politics is a fight over children, so much so that today children are literally the foot soldiers of ideology. If that is the case, then we must consider parents and children as circumnavigating the friend-enemy distinction. They are traditionally friends, became private enemies, and are now pitted against each other in public.
“The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.”
There is always some misplaced hope in children, in the next generation.
"With each newly born child a new world is born, God willing, each newly born child will be an aggressor!"
While the idea of battle is always present, it is always more a threat. A child throws a tantrum as a political device. A parent raises their voice to intimate violence. Now though, family court, emancipation and gender therapists provide actual ammunition to split apart families. Now, if you don’t get what you want, you have the law on your side.
As Schmitt says,
"...all significant concepts of the theory of the modern state are secularized theological concepts."
Not a new concept, but one relevant here. Eternal revelation. Sacrifice. Acceptance into a new cult. The family is old, staid, boring. Not progressive.
What happened?
"If a part of the population declares that it no longer recognizes enemies, then, depending on the circumstance, it joins their side and aids them."
Parents abdicated the throne because they came of age when universal peace and love was the message. They don’t think anything has changed. Boomers aided their children in becoming their worst enemy, like the US suppling weapons in the Middle East. There’s a part in Helen Andrews’ Boomers talking about the removal of prayer from American school in 50s or 60s. Parents were interviewed before and after the new rule. They changed their mind to fit the rule. This is a pattern across Boomerdom (well, humanity). If the rules changes, you change to fit. You don’t stand on principle. What went wrong is that adults rode the wave instead of digging in.
"Only a weak people will disappear."
Let me go back to Ender’s Game. The book is about humanity fighting back against an alien horde. We follow Ender, a child genius, who is being trained to be a commander. Now, I won’t give spoilers because I recommend the book to any ardent right-winger as either a great novel to learn the craft or for its messages, but I will go through some of the key moments and quotes.
“I’ve been studying history,” Peter said. “I’ve been learning things about patterns in human behavior. There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world…”
Card knows the power of words, knows how in times of flux or uncertainty words can be deceptive. Given we are living through a fluid moment in time, words have more power than ever.
“The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win. Everybody thinks Hitler got to power because of his armies, because they were willing to kill, and that’s partly true, because in the real world power is always built on the threat of death and dishonor. But mostly he got to power on words, on the right words at the right time.”
Ender has extreme empathy which is what makes him such a successful commander. He is able to inhabit his enemies mind, perceive how they work and thus destroy them easily. Empathy is a curse and blessing. Too much, and you become the enemy.
These other armies, they aren’t the enemy. It’s the teachers, they’re the enemy. They get us to fight each other, to hate each other. The game is everything. Win win win. It amounts to nothing.
In classic science fiction style, it turns out the enemy is not necessarily those aliens in the far off reaches of the galaxy. To Ender and the other children, it is the adults who pose the greatest threat. Our world is run by hidden commanders who make us jump through hoops and we think it is out own doing. We think we are individuals who make individual choices, but no one wanted an iPhone before it was marketed to us. Few wanted to be the opposite sex until it was marketed to us. We are all in skirmishes with each other, and that’s precisely what the adults in the room want.
In conclusion…
And that is that. What else is there to say except to acknowledge that everything slows and dies, even you, dear reader. To reach the end of your life is to see your children become mother and father but that is not a promise any more. Nothing is guaranteed to you and what the world wants is for you to abandon any hope of kept promises. You still say no and you still say yes, but the difference now is that you know why you say each, and sometimes even say maybe, based on an instinct born of life itself, of decades of observing and touching and cry and laughing. Every step now is as if you are a child and it is difficult to walk as you move slowly from room to room, if at all because maybe you are bed ridden by now, reduced to a closed mind.
Words come out but they are endless babbling syllables. You try to repeat everything you've learned but no one listens and you might as well be dead, you feel, and it's true, you might as well be a rotting corpse for all your efforts are worth because no one is listening. There are far too many things to listen to. You have no need for news or books, you already know it all and you're trying to repeat it to anyone who will listen like a broken record — remember those? — but all people can make out is a faint scratching, a buzzing they brush away. Your brain is falling apart, each neuron withering and collapsing, turning your mind into soup. Is it even really you, still? You can't fight this decline. You remember what fighting is, what never giving up is, you know this is good advice, but there is a blitzkrieg on your sense of self and you simply surrender. Hugs are so awkward now. Your children hate you. How did this happen?
You just want the bliss of death. Everything is so out of control. You thought, when you were younger, that you would do something meaningful. Maybe you did, and maybe it doesn't matter any more. Everything is not as it should be.