The other day I was listening to ABC News Radio, when I heard a segment on how Dylan Voller and his friends were suing the Northern Territory government. When I heard the lawyer starting to talk, outrage overtook me and I actually switched the only news station I listen to, off, in visceral disgust and anguish.
For me, the Royal Commission that has given rise to this legal opportunity for a bunch of out of control and shameless young criminals, has become emblematic of:
1. The unprecedented social damage that the irrational rationality of the human rights movement has brought on us by way of the loss of moral anchorage via accountability to enforced excuse free bottom lines.
2. Grossly premature civil empowerment of the young without first ensuring the consciousness underpins of civil duty and obligation to others, responsible attitude and maturity of judgement, and the training and the mentorship necessary to give those rights authentic content and legitimacy.
3. The loss of adult standing and authority, the rise of adolescentism and ‘youththink’ as cultural benchmarks, and the delegimization and systematic take down of coherent parenting templates that control children so that they can be effectively guided, governed and disciplined by significant others, until they reach an age when infantile/adolescent egoism is meant to grow into reliable self governance.
4. The corrupt fudging of freedom into licence, compassion and forgiveness into indulgence and rights into an unjustified sense of entitlement, which has trashed its human subjects and enabled consumer marketing to take over socialisation in ways that the old fashioned autocratic totalitarians tried but failed to do.
It is obvious to me that the detention system for criminal elements young and old, is hopelessly out of its depth, because the larger system of governance is disintegrating.
There is neither obedience, nor respect, or failing that, fear of its wardens. Worse, the social product they are dealing with has been so badly mismanaged, neglected and damaged that it is incapable of conscience, remorse, shame, emotional consequentiality, or even the recognition of the separate existence of others, because no one has given them even the most basic social potty training.
The Royal Commission itself is as much a denial of responsibility and blame shifting as the corporate system has proved itself to be when it comes to things like climate change.
It is a regime show trial in the Stalinist tradition to crucify small fry apparatchiks who have to cope with the larger society’s more egregious failures, as sops to smooth away the chronic failings of the established social ideology, administration and (mis)governance, of which the petty bourgeois humanist ‘wets’ and their corrupted libertarian agenda are a principal part.
It is time the emperor’s wardrobe malfunctions were pointed out and his bluff called, because if it isn’t, places of detention will become so chaotic, we will be faced at some point with the humiliating necessity to pay for the exile of our most ungovernable criminal elements, to countries that know what to do with such people, in at least getting their basic compliance, even if it is only fear of their gaolers, without a worry in the world about human rights, or the interference of local do gooders or well meaning lawyers.
And the Dylan Vollers will learn the meaning of hopeless despair as their rebellious and criminally noxious habits are put under so much pressure, either they crack, or their nihilistic anti-social attitudes do.
A Chinese artificial island in the South China sea would be good, because the Chinese are much more interested in going after the noxious attitude than merely the behaviour that is its outcome. They are experts at applying psychological pressure. Very nice. Could be a top Chinese export industry to service decadent and effete democracies throughout the west…Mao Zhedong’s getaway-from-it-all seaside sanatorium for the morally challenged.
Perhaps when our criminal exports have been suitably humbled, who knows, they might even start listening to counsel and considering other options that might lead to coming home … and a more normal life …
And the lesson that may come out of this is that the necessity for a such a drastic resort would be entirely the fault of people who have become so morally and intellectually blunted, they congenitally cannot tell the difference between authoritarianism and firmness, compromise and being compromised, compassion and a soft touch, repression and discipline, toughness and abuse, chastisement and battery or dissidence and treason.
The very things these libertarian wets most fear will be brought on them and their ‘clients’ because their rotten judgement and far greater social power and ideological influence than they deserve, have created the conditions where only the most naked uses of autocratic force have any chance at all, at least as a temporary remedy until a proper system of social reproduction can be rebuilt. This is because all the lesser alternatives have been cut off in what has become an inter-generational social plague of unsustainable behaviour, delusional ideology and existential annihilation.
We live in a time when petty bourgeois ‘humanist’ ideology has become so compromised, dysfunctional and damaged that it is no longer in a position to pass judgement on anything. Its categories of condemnation are no longer legitimate enough to be taken seriously or listened to. And its functionaries need to be discredited and eventually removed from positions of influence in the system of social administration; i.e., education, welfare, and lobby parts of the legal, health and social/political system.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a really aggressive environment movement that was as tough on attempts to undermine the social and existential commons, as it was on the planetary ecological ones, and went after corporate and humanist denialism and obfuscation with equal urgency and resolve?
The Dylan Vollers are going to cause constant ripples of distress and injury to everyone around them, including their own eventual children, who they will almost certainly destroy by turning them into clones of themselves. And no one has a civil or human right to do that.
Voller is not an island. He is a distributor and promoter of destructive attitudes and behaviour and needs to be dealt with with the same ruthlessness as any public enemy who threatens the wellbeing of the commons. Those who cannot see or respond to this threat are either traitors, backsliders or blindsiders, and need to be shown the door out of decent society and respectable opinion, before they infect anyone else with their wretched disease.
The doleful fact is, it will take the best part of a hundred years to clean up the mess left behind by people who genuinely thought they were do gooders and protectors of ‘the people’.
The legacy they and their awful libertarian agenda are going to leave behind will be chronically weak governance and an entrenched criminal class whose increasingly effective raids on and corruption of civil society will morph into parallel governance in its own right, which will one day challenge what is left of the state. The Dylan Vollers will be its footsoldiers.
And he will do a good job because not only will he enjoy the work, he will know that his sergeant-at-arms will mercilessly kick his head in if he doesn’t do exactly as he is told fast enough.
The warning is, when a regime has become too degenerate to govern itself properly, it creates a vacuum that other and not necessarily particularly benign forces will step into. And the Royal Commission is just the ticket to move that one right along … giving credence to the criminal storm troopers of the future, which already belongs to them.
And if we tolerate this, we deserve that future.
*Christopher Nagle has been writing for the last 20 years as an essayist, poet and polemicist. The twin tower attacks propelled him from being a liberal/Marxist critic of capital to a broader critic of modern thinking, myth-making and practice across the board, which has culminated in his collection of essays, ‘The Secular Fundamentalist’ ( http://www.writing.com/main/books/item_id/2064958-The-Secular-Fundamentalist )
