Infantile adults are everybody’s problem

It’s a wonderful thing to live in a country where the rules that govern our everyday lives are compatible with good sense and reason.

Most of us have taken that for granted, so we’ve not had to think: what should we do if the rules are irrational or, worse still, downright wrong?

Blind obedience is a virtue, but only for very young children. They know so little about the world and can be a danger to themselves and others. The criteria for a good baby or toddler is basically just that – compliance with adult wishes. 

But absolute obedience stops becoming a virtue pretty quickly. For a toddler it’s fine, but no parent should be happy if their child still unquestioningly obeys them when they are 10. To thrive in the world as a responsible adult, they need to develop judgement, good sense and the courage to act on it in the face of ‘authority’. 

In the modern age, whole societies periodically lapse into this infantile mode.

For this to happen, the groundwork must be laid: adults need a father figure. For a long-time this was God and religion, but these days of course, it’s the State. Outsourcing our personal responsibilities to the State begins when we vote for strength in the face of external threats; when we choose to display our ‘kindness’, not through acts of personal charity and sacrifice, but by paying more tax. Soon, people begin to identify their moral worth by how they vote rather than how they act in the world. Immolation to the State becomes a proxy for morality. 

And so adults cease to be ‘consenting.’ They become – not children even – but infants, toddlers. Meanwhile, the State becomes ‘tyrannical father’ and ‘devouring mother’. 

It’s untenable though, because, in a very real sense, there is no such thing as a ‘State’. Yes, there are instruments and machineries of power. But they are just wielded by other toddlers. If the State is the people, and the people are infantilised, then adult supervision is an illusion. No government or legal system, however august or ancient, can uphold moral rights when presided over by grown-up infants. In such a situation, reason gives way to the moral imperative of the creche: fear, jealousy and greed.  

An inevitable consequence of adults behaving as children is that children must be treated as adults. It is therefore logical that they are given autonomy and decision-making power over whether to irrevocably change their hormones and sex, for example, or their genetic make-up via a novel drug. 

During the French Revolution, there was a popular saying. “Revolutions devour their children.” It was not just a metaphor. Many children were executed by the French revolutionary state, and many more ‘unofficially’ massacred. (Children can be a real threat to ideologies, you know.) Infantile societies destroy their children too. It begins by removing their innocence, then their childhood, and if it persists, it ends in blood. 

I’m reminded of those buffoons at international football matches and political shindigs last summer while tens of thousands of perfectly healthy children were locked at home ‘isolating’. Their parents and teachers were all following the rules and held their heads up in society for doing so. 

And now we are entering, not the endgame, but perhaps the Squidgame. A risky pharmaceutical intervention to alter children’s genes. An unconscionable act with no plausible medical justification. It simply fulfils a deep psychological need among infantilised adults: to demonstrate State allegiance through child sacrifice. And let’s not forget, there’s the added kicker of being able to vacation abroad.

Make no mistake, every act of mindless compliance to nonsensical rules that every adult makes, trickles and then floods down on to children. 

Every time you wear a mask, even though you know its efficacy has no basis in empiricism.

Every time you track-and-trace.

Every time you nod along to some virtue-signalling covid conversation.

Every time you submit your body to medical coercion, you deny to all children the freedoms you were born with and that our grandparents’ generation fought and died to protect.

You deny them the freedom to act out of conscience and personal responsibility, and the freedom to say ‘no’. 

It’s not the State. There is no State. It’s me, and it’s you. 

We are the problem. 

Our compliance is violence.

________________________________________________

Ross Butler is founder of the Children’s Union