The Child

They raise their children the same way they arise in the morning – in renunciation of what they love.

For as long a time as they’ve forced themselves to ignore their secret desires, they’ve never stooped to learn anything about children. The more pressing needs of making war and governing hardly authorized them to study such subjects.

Looking back over the centuries, the truth is that above all they were scared by this always-new Life, surging from the belly of woman to grow and multiply. The mirror of their own past uniqueness sent them the confused memory that existence was somehow promised to all spirits from the depths of their own infancy. And there in those depths, they found an embarrassing presence that the crushing vise of adulthood had failed to completely stifle.

They hated children as they hated themselves; they beat them for their own good, and educated them from the perspective of their own incapacity to love life.

The Misery of Birth

They propagated the idea that true birth was only found in death.

At the time when the Roman Empire was imposing its mercantilism on everyone within the limits of the known world, Christian mythology was able to translate the omnipresence of the economy with a flair. Their cyclopean “God”, whose one eye commanded the universe, was not unfamiliar with the need to set the fates of children in line with its design.

What does the Christ-legend tell us? That he is God become man in a womblike cave where harmony reigned between humans and animals; that after having received at birth a set of prodigious gifts from three magicians who came from the earthly kingdoms, he was condemned by his divine father to carry the cross of existence, which would serve him conveniently as a coffin, and to go through the door of death to receive, in celestial coin, the prize money for having gone through his trials.

He is God until God is reborn beyond the grave. Between the two poles of glory, a valley of tears determines the path of his destiny. And so chased out of the uterine paradise, the child learns to economize on his life, perinde ac cadaver[1] in order to pay the toll on the road to a celestial survival.

Replace your hopes of sitting on the right hand of the Lord by the promise of a happy future and you’re left with the destiny of the newborn child, now that the light of science has dissipated the fog of religious obscurantism.

Discovery of the Child

The 20^th century has not recovered from its myopia, though the obvious sits two inches from its nose. Lucidity isn’t doing much worse. Childhood isn’t either – and that’s something they’ve always had right before their eyes without really seeing it, something they now scrutinize closely, less out of conviction than necessity. Their observations confront them with a painful and exciting saddling up of opposites into which they are born to themselves and die to themselves each morning. The child, who was the cross of conscience for adults, ends up at a crossroads – forced to make a clear choice. A choice of civilizations.

Learning

Children begin life through the practice of pleasures, and the practice of pleasures shows them the ends of the world. To learn to enjoy things and beings – that’s what true intelligence is, and in the face of that, the most brilliant intellectualism is no more than a parade of imbeciles, of those who are lacking in life.

This is not a new idea, but it’s a long way from ideas to desire – desire, where everything becomes truly real. Knowledge comes to their heads, very traditionally, by way of kicks in the ass; following one’s heart becomes a useless, time-consuming detour. Besides, how can we escape the very specific efficiency of the straightest, quickest path, when the family and school is filling every child’s head with lesson plans that are as useful to business as they are useless to life?

For a few years more, social customs persist in dragging children from the maze of laughs and tears, removing from them the thread of satisfactions and dissatisfactions that guide them towards a progressive refinement of the self. Instead of taking them by the hand through the labyrinth of affection where one gets to know things clearly and deeply, you push them down the road you went down and lost yourself on; you lead them on into an impossibly knotted net of moral and social conventions, into a muddled world of constraint and subterfuge, into a tangled mess of subtleties which are as good for duping others as they are for duping you.

And that’s how the universe of enjoyment slips into the shadowy depths of unconsciousness. Later, psychoanalysts, discoverers of whole continents voluntarily swallowed up, will play dumpster-diver, and, bringing to the surface various objects of desire and resentment, will return them to their owners, who often don’t know how to use them anymore and will keep the best of the lot as souvenirs.

The Inversion of Priorities

First get to work; you can enjoy yourself afterwards! Such is the recurring, rhyming themesong that is passed down into the head, programming militarily the rhythm of the body’s movements. Such is, in its numbing insistance, the tune that orchestrates the retreat of nascent intelligence. And rest assured – it will be a different intelligence that ends up in charge over the frozen behavior of working hours, an intelligence in which heart counts the least and is petrified the most.

The Child As a Commodity-Value

They discovered the child by following the ogre’s footsteps.

Their generosity is very often nothing but the alms given by Profit to those that serve it. For their “niggers” to go from being animals to the status of being humans, wasn’t it enough that they became purchasers of refrigerators, of cars, of expired medications? How did the proletariat manage to lift itself up enough to get the democratic right to choose its masters? Certainly these things took place due less to the proliferation of its “final conflicts” than to the evolution of a market on the quest for a more massive clientele. Equality owes more than anyone suspects to the appearance on every table of frozen spaghetti, perfumed with artificial truffle-scent.

When it happened that the ogre of mercantilism saw signs of tiredness and satiety among the African nations and among the western nomads looting the supermarket, checkbooks clenched tightly in their fists, he descended even lower on the social ladder in order to sink his teeth into one last bit of food.

In the 50s, the child was worth nothing outside of the family and was considered rather a despicable thing; worth a little more than a dog, a little less than a black man, a worker, or a woman. The old wisdom advised beating the children, pounding them into shape like coins, molding them like clay, hardening them in the kiln of tests and proofs, and whitewashing their knowledge so they might have a future as lucrative puppets.

Thirty years later, promotional sales discovered that it could call up good feelings by making use of children’s pretty little heads, arranging them in an orderly fashion like the x-axis on their graphs. That’s what set them right with God without them having to confess their sins; that’s what gets them credit cards, bank accounts, computers, and fast food, the privilege of being able to talk loftily, and decide out of hand; the privilege of imposing another choice on the planetary consumption-market.

However, the economy, licking up its last pennies, is running the risk of dislocating its jaw. The marketing specialists have left out of their calculations the fact that the ogre always falls beneath the blows of an innocent hand. The commodity offensive has come to its most vulnerable point by approaching ever closer the source of life.

The falsehood of advertising, which made children grow old by disguising them as well-informed consumers, has contributed, and not just in a mediocre way, to the removal of children’s status as inferior creatures. But did they ever think they’d really understand children when they could only see immediate profit and have narrowed their view on everything so much? Did they think that they could raise the children’s consciousness with impunity, only to reduce them just as quickly to the weakness of the herd-mentality which yesterday’s consumers were so horrified of?

And what a haste they’re in to confuse children with breeding dogs and apartment cats; they too have benefited, at almost the same time, getting more attention, more respect! Was it plausible that a simple whistle would make them salivate and come running to go off to war or to elect a führer, as past generations have done?

They weren’t counting on the changes that the development of commodity society has made to behaviors and modes of thought. To the extent that the tyranny of the family has fallen into disuse and the decline of patriarchy has put an end to the practice of brutal constraint and wily lies, children make the appropriate distinction between the humanity and the inhumanity which tie and untie people to and from each other, whereas long ago a slap, a dark look, or the raising of an eyebrow would make them sing a sad, bitter song.

The child can soon feel the iron hand beneath the velvet glove that mercantile solicitations hold out to him, an iron hand poised to make the child pay its dues. Blessed be the litany, “help yourself, take what you want, you can pay for it on your way out”! Nothing could convince the child more effectively of the odious character of all commodity-dealings. Nothing could better prepare the children for propagating everywhere an absolute refusal of the devastating blackmail, “obey me or I won’t love you any more.”

The Naked Truth of Economy

Gazing upon the child, the presence in the adult’s heart of an unfinished life, oscillating between birth and death, is clarified.

Noting the checkmate of a civilization that exiles everybody from their own bodies, Picabia observed : “What men lack the most is what they actually have: their eyes, their ears, their asses.”

A voluntary blinding, over the course of the centuries, has made it seem imperative, in order to know, honor, and admire the lessons of the world, that one must not know oneself, and to never even examine oneself except with contempt. If a generation of blind men has given birth to a generation suffering from mental blindness, that’s doubtlessly less the result of a mutation of intelligence than it is the result of an ensemble of circumstances in which everyone is induced never to leave the surest paths except in the immediate experience of living their lives.

There are hardly any branches left that would be high enough to hang death’s companions from, or to hold them up. The systems that once governed earth in the name of heaven have been drowned in derision. Show me a single one of these eternal values, through which societies imposed respect for themselves by refusing themselves to the living, that has been left still standing on its pedestal!

Who still believes the lies, the enormity of which brought up waves of enthusiasm and ferocity in their believers, sustained both noble and ignoble causes, and threw hordes of fanatic militants into the blazing flames of ecstasy and torment?

The economy has ceased hiding itself behind mystifying words like God, devil, fatality, grace, damnation, nature, progress, duty, and necessity, with which, over the years, it gave itself an inescapable credibility. It no longer troubles itself with the frilly liberals, it is no longer bothered by the leninists in blue jeans — it laughs at the idea of taking any great leaps while wearing fascist jackboots or socialist bootees. It’s so simple and obvious it stands naked, and its omnipresence makes it familiar and familial.

Reduced to the final necessity of survival, the economy brings together all its past lies; the lie that there is no hope for humanity’s survival outside of the economy.

The End of Values

The old principles that were once inculcated in children have ended up quite tightly held down by the progressive strip-down through which the empire of commodities has annulled the majority of the traditional values. Scandals arise; quickly they rush to sacrifice to the fatherland, prove their devotion to the State, show their obedience to the bosses, and to screw over those who don’t submit; they crush the very revolt and insubordination that they need to balance out their accounts in the registry of hatred and scorn. Let’s call the economy by its real name: “Make-money-fuck-the-rest-of-the-world.”

The 80s fashionably mirrors a manner of speaking frankly which called a penny a penny, spoke highly of profit, got the financial schemes up and running again, exalted the struggle of the loan shark, and held commerce high overhead like it was the winning sports team. Teams of audacious thinkers restored the virtue of work, reanimated the dynamism of private enterprise and resuscitated a capitalist spirit, scruffy and ragged after its statist redevelopment. A vain and short-lived pretension.

In less than a decade, the wedding of business and individual initiative has left nothing but stock-market collapse, joblessness, inflation, and industrial bankruptcy in its wake, piling upon the landfill a not-so-very encouraging model for the schoolchildren to follow, schoolchildren who the present pedagogical politics are already trying to fold into the great army of the renascent economy.

And as if they had confusedly realized the fact that the economy was obviously not going to take its first or second breaths again any time soon, that they were going to be left with no future, they suddenly saw, in children and in their own far-off childhood, the point of a radically different existence.

Ever since their little ones stopped kneeling before the altar of examples-to-follow, since there was nothing there but grimaces and frowns to imitate, they asked themselves why they had to renounce belonging to themselves, why they kept themselves from approaching things and beings for the sole pleasure they might take from doing so. Because, after all, there’s no reason anymore to take up arms and go to war, to start on a career, to gamble at the stock-exchange, to play chicken; so why should they bring ridicule and disenchantment upon themselves by repeating, by inertia, the gestures that deprive them of life and don’t even bring in a compensatory profit anymore?

The Derision of Power

Out of all the collapsed parties on the fixed horizon of politics and business, there is only one faction still active — that of power. It is not negligible, since it makes arguments out of death to support itself with, but death is on its way towards losing its monopoly over absolute belief.

See the masters of thought and action suffer an attack of old age, now that they haven’t got the perch of religions and ideologies to put their ambitions up on.

They wanted to engrave their existence into the televised image they send out for the masses’ sarcastic devotion. They thought they could still fascinate everyone, but they only ended up x-rayed, scrutinized inside and out, and given a medical examination that naturally treated them as if they were ill. They had better readjust themselves according to the world’s new demands; fashions get used up quick in the accelerated-speed world of the spectacle. They’ll end up abandoned in a few seasons. They’re playing at renewing themselves when it’s already their wintertime.

As long as the ideological discourse was misting up the masses’ eyes, they couldn’t see with such clarity how totally the media stars had become little more than the mechanical pasted onto the living. Today, now that the breath of history no longer blows up their empty words with such hot air, the calculated gestures of these “stars” miss the boat, and their effectiveness is reduced to naught. They reveal their failed humanity, showing quite plainly in their features the wrinkled faces of babies that were never born.

Heads of State, of clans, of cliques, cops, bosses, politicians, ministers, military men, lawgivers, stars, bureaucrats, and the other familiar bits of residue from authoritarianism — all of them have clown-masks in their dressers, fetuses in their jars, dried up embryos in their hearts. The more they try to get rid of their repressed childishness, the more it comes to light.

And all this foot-stamping of offended dignities, these accusing fingers, these pitiful jeremiads, these hypocritical smiles, this aggressive guilt, this contempt from the judges who themselves get judged — is this anything other than the antics of frustrated toddlers, old wounds from the past hurting again, awkwardly hidden behind the gravity and seriousness of the “responsible adult”?

Do they really still expect us to believe in them? It would be easier to believe they were human if they were to quit treating people like snotty kids, dumbed-down by slaps and lies, and chose suddenly to prefer lived authenticity to the derisory prestige of appearances; if they were simply to decide to try and rekindle the light of whatever little bit they still have in them that’s alive. But how will he learn to live, he who has only ever learned how to humiliate and dominate others?

A Wounded Childhood Takes Refuge in Sickness

The revolutionary epochs offered a great variety of opportunities for the resentment of stolen childhoods to choose to exercise itself. To break the heads of the blacks, the bourgeois, the proletarians, of the “hereditary enemy”, to beat up women — this was ordinarily enough to channel off for a time the rage and moroseness of maintaining in an endemic state a gangrenous existence full of rotting desires.

But there’s less and less release now, with the growing meaninglessness of the great causes, wherein civilization came to terms with itself. It’s taken them almost a century to admit that a good part of the sickness that pierced their stomachs, their hearts, and their heads came not from a random malady, but rather from an infancy on which the door of adulthood had been brutally slammed, and a childhood that had lashed out everywhere because it was suffocating.

Accustomed to taking everything negatively and undertaking everything with a negative bias, they make thought afraid to come to life within them. Panic carries them from the psychoanalysts’ couches all the way to the operating rooms. Rushing to deliver themselves from the penetrating presence of their desires, they are filled with the seeds of death, with a vitality proliferating upside down, with a cellular panic, and rush along in a backwards flight wherein the organism becomes crablike and cancerous.

The end of the 20^th century has brought to society a certain disarray which the proliferation of survival-sicknesses shows quite clearly. Since war, revolution, riot, and legalized murder no longer offer to people’s suicidal tendencies the excuses that they need, choosing death has become, for many, like a daily pastime. Their blood is soured every morning when they get on the road and go off to work; they hold back their desires all day long, lock their exuberance up in the cupboard, snapping the neck of their childlike vivacity, and cutting their life-lines at precisely the point where passion holds them out. Here, a general consciousness has at least gained some precision — there is no longer any boundary between the world and the individual, just a lonely border, delimiting with an excessive cleanliness the zones where the energies of death take over and the places where a new way of life might be born.

The Rebirth of the Child

They are ready, now more than ever, and more than anyone would suspect, to remake ties with their childhood, not the childhood that mechanical gestures kill and which is autopsied on the analyst’s couch, but the childhood that responds to the call of desires.

They readily impart a knowledge to the children, theirs or those of others, a knowledge which helps them greatly to confidently come up to living a life at last accepted in its exuberance. Nothing prepares them better to push away the ruses of sickness, to dismiss the sudden impression that a spoiled life has no hope besides a successful death, that is, a death hurried by the alcoholic derelictions of those who “live well”.

Although the familial order remains as it was, with all its typical characteristics, and in spite of the fact that for better or worse they insist on keeping it up, they very often refuse to perpetrate the same muffled murder that they were typically victims of in their young lives. Fathers and mothers seem to more and more be leaving behind the old morgue of patriarchal tyranny, which imposed itself upon them long ago as their heritage. They repress feebly, give beatings infrequently and clumsily, scream less at their kids, blather on and argue more. Above all, they have changed their attitudes on one particularly delicate subject — parents these days, without hesitation nor reserve, are giving out freely an affection which in the past was always only given in a kind of protection-racket-style blackmailing and submission.

The child can feel that the sting of imbecile constraint is getting duller, and has won the advantage of being able to go more easily the directions it is pushed in by its desires, of being able to speak aloud the words that nature is murmuring everywhere. Among those who appointed their masters and never mastered anything but their own agony, an appetite for life has unexpectedly awoken, which the scheming of work had plunged into lethargy.

Isn’t it marvelous to see the children flit around in pleasure, take hold of their happiness as soon as it passes within their reach, to see them try with all their might to get back happy moments past? The reality that this reveals is the center of a labyrinth wherein so many able maneuvers, so many fanfares and subterfuges have been lost. It’s authenticity itself they’re refining, that ceaseless, relaxed agreement between bodies and desires. Aggressive infantilism and the complaining incontinence of adults were never more than lies, a “puerile reversal of being.”

Children spontaneously and ceaselessly teach us to open up our eyes for the first time, to be able to tell the color of the foliage, to read a landscape, to comprehend the language of the birds, to seize the grace of an instant — to seize it, but no longer with eyes which pass everything before the hairsplitting hatchet blade, eyes like rifle-sights, a vision caught up and blurred by so much thinking about how short-lived everything is, about death. And it is the only the little child inside us all which can allow the flowing forth from the self of the perennial sap of the trees, the savage ardor of animals, the voluptuousness of a amorous presence from whence only amiable things are born.

Creation Falsified

It is a strange and imperfect amorous alchemy which, in two successive transmutations, conceives and gives birth to the child, never waiting for the third, wherein humanity would take it upon itself to create itself by creating a new world.

Isn’t the creative act “par excellence” the embrace of man and woman, engendering life in the maternal womb? Do they need any shame, love, or life, to impute to a celestial and disembodied god this most earthly operation, this most carnal alchemy? What scorn for the enjoyment lovers get from being together, what disdain for the happiness in which bodies commingle to impregnate themselves, whether or not a child is born from the privilege of union! Has patriarchal virility ever given greater homage to mutually consenting powerlessness? From what unbalanced imagination comes this idea that there was one and only one creator of the universe, a Spirit, a seed of nothingness? Wasn’t it necessary, to give rise to such nonsense, that everyone be made to work and end up incapable of creating, that power castrate totally the pleasure of gaining control over oneself, that the expansion of commodity society substitute the expansion of human nature?

There is no other genesis of humanity and inhumanity than that which is found in those people who are borne of the earth and destroyed in the name of the heavens.

Evolution, Interrupted

Their men of science admire the fact that in a period of nine months the human embryo reiterates, in its development from conception to birth, the ancient evolutionary forward-march of aquatic creatures becoming earthbound mammals. What happened after that, if they’d look to see, would give them reason to be surprised. Looking at such a great leap, going from marine existence to the conquest of the earth, wouldn’t you say it was probable that we could hope for a similar evolution of nature wherein the human species would announce itself as the transcendence of the animal species?

But something apparently got derailed en route. There wasn’t any great human miracle. The animal side of the human species was only perfected and socialized by becoming denatured. The genius of humanity has taken hold of the universe by means of techniques that don’t obey humanity, and that sterilize life everywhere. The phenomenon deserves more analysis than is given it by the metaphysical contortions which people use to justify it as a fact, as the only possible kind of evolution. And it’s true that it’s something the wise, judging life on earth by their own way of life, usually tend to scorn rather terribly.

Birth Achieved

It happens that in growing up and developing inside the maternal womb, the child finds itself getting more and more cramped, bit by bit, within the sweet confines of the uterine universe. The protective envelope chafes the baby; it restricts its movements and smothers it. It begins to practically swim towards the exit, energetically moving towards birth, towards autonomy.

Its impatience weighs it down, and encumbers the body of its mother, who is also impatient to get rid of this presence, which has become inopportune. There’s a common agreement between mother and child when it comes to the expulsion from the womb. The mother pushes the child out towards a freedom it aspires to, with all the violence of new life. The moment birth emancipates the woman and child, or more exactly, commits them both to a process of emancipation.

The umbilical is cut, the ties of dependency broken, the emotional unity is lightened up, and from this freeness it gains a more dispassionate force... Idyllic vision. Their civilization doesn’t cut the tube of the IV, it just sweetens the water, stretches it out, and makes whoever is hooked-in turn out brittle beneath the constant threat of cutting off aid, of taking away their allowance. It knots everything up with such dramatic complexities that mother and child cling to one another, parodying, for their whole existence, the game of assistant and assisted; they attract and repel, and are mutilated with every vague desire for independence; they find themselves again in the morbid stickiness of the family and try to heal the wounds they’ve had inflicted upon them.

Education is Adaptation to Survival

Learning, in animal milieus, is limited to learning to respect the law that rules the survival of animals: adaptation. Observing a female animal with her little one shows the diligence she must have in protecting it, just like she had prepared it, from the moment it left the cocoon it was enclosed in, to move forward in a perilous environment. The maternal lesson teaches the child to hide itself, to pounce, to build refuges, to follow trails, to get some territory for itself, to carve out a place under the sun and moon for itself, a place that attracts it, an ephemeral place.

From on high it was affirmed that animals were inferior to people — why then have we got a mode of education which retards so much the simple faculty of adaptation? We’ve just got to put it all down — and right away!

Not so long ago, more children in a human family died than died in a litter of rabbits. They’re still dying, even today, beneath blows, torments, the hassle of having to put up with the misery and resentment of the adults.

The normal ferociousness of children doesn’t take well to any transcending of animal behavior. Are their schools really anything but schools of survival? The human child is better-armed than the chimp; it has sophisticated techniques at its disposal, as well as linguistic ruses, but its destiny is the same — to interpose itself somewhere among the strong and the weak, to adapt to the laws of its surroundings, to save its skin and gain prestige. Nothing more — and often less because it is refused the natural freedom of appeasing its impulses.

Become a Man by Ceasing to Be One

The stories and legends illustrate with enough cruelty the fate set aside for children. Naive beings, generous, frail and intelligent, confront giants who are powerful, fearsome, mean, and stupid. And when it comes to merciless combat, the weak win out over the strong. David decapitates Goliath; he detaches from the musclebound body of the brute one of those gigantic false heads put up by governments on statues in cities and towns.

Meanwhile, the little ones are being hardened beneath the beating-switch of proofs, learning to deploy an equal barbarity against their enemies, and, moreover, an underhanded ferocity, clever and deceptive like that of the servant that tricks his master. Their time has come to rise to the functions of the kings, the giants, and the adults. Their journey through the social jungle makes them into exploited people — with the status of exploiters.

And what’s the moral of this story? That the strongest is not always who you’d think, but is usually the one who thinks — it’s not brutal violence, but the art of controlling its use, that wins out.

The little ones triumph by using their minds, and their spirits compensate them by making them grow up, get old, get embittered, slowly making them identical to the monsters they had vanquished. Nothing has really changed; the paving stones thrown into the sea have only sent the same concentric circles floating across the water.

As regards the emotional wealth of the hero, it gets gathered up into a stereotype, a final pirouette: “they lived happily ever after and had many children.” You might as well send that affection back to the land of nowhere, to utopia, where there is no more history. As if happiness could only come to being in lands of fairylike unreality, where nothing but death and a state of being too spent to be able to give birth to anything are all there is to look forward to.

The Emotional and the Nutritive

Children have, up to now, been treated in a way opposite to the evolution they announce. When they’re just beginning to grow in the mother’s belly, they receive, on the frequency-scale of the first sensations, all the echoes that rebound, like in a valley, from the storm that comes from the difficulty of loving and loving oneself in an environment such as that of couples. Anguish, joy, fear, irritation, indifference, surges of love and hate, ring out on the keyboard of the child’s embryonic psychology, a biological rhythm that could indeed decide his or her definitive implantation in society, or premature expulsion from it.

If he oversteps the gap and escapes miscarriage, which so often ends up a convenient substitute for voluntary abortion, then between the child and mother there arises an agreement, a consensus that science, after having studied everything about death, has at last dared to discover.

I’ve neglected to highlight, up to this point, the importance that receiving food simultaneously and freely takes on for the infant in utero, giving it a feeling of love as well as a message, mental and sensual, which communicates serenity and confidence. However, that’s a privilege that birth doesn’t abolish, since the maternal breast keeps on dispensing milk-energy and the sweetness of affection, with all the psalmodies of tenderness.

This terrestrial manna, these caressing murmurs, these generational odors, these almost epidermic thoughts, this is the true fountain of Youth, the spray which strengthens the life of the young child more surely than all the arsenals of the most sophisticated medicines could. Lovers know well that in the paroxysms of their passion, a love and freshness arises, making them resemble little children once again.

And then comes the rupture.

By means of an unfortunate thing that produces a number of others, their civilization is structured in such a way that it separates the affective from the nutritive; it disassociates in one fell swoop the original language that sustained their unity.

The truth is that if it were the contrary, it would be surprising. It is unthinkable that a society whose existence is founded on work, that producer of commodities, would give a legal interest to the surges of a love offered naturally, to the necessity of nourishing oneself, by which the price of wheat and of men are regulated. Affection is given without preparatives; it isn’t a serious thing. Seriousness, in adulthood, consists in denying freeness in order to make things yield a profit; it consists in destroying everything in the crop except what gets paid for, starting with the need to eat, to move, to inhabit a space, to express oneself, and to love.

And so it must be clearly seen that in a few years the emotional language of mother and child makes way for the language of efficiency, of output, of economy, a language solidly structured according to the Aristotelian logic of “do this, don’t do that!” and which, unlike the former, folds itself perfectly to the pedagogical exigencies of the computer.

Affection, Nutrition, Creation

The creative faculty is the human phenomenon par excellence. It comes into being with the body, which the fetal ambiance feeds in abundance. It gives to the newborn the power to develop itself by transforming the earthly environment, and to enrich its original abundance by the creation of a world of abundance wherein the child can learn to conquer its human autonomy fully.

The creative genius participates in a natural evolution, denatured by the civilization of work. Life and creation are inseparable. Both work to hold back and exhaust the system of the exploitation of nature and of human nature, which is the basis of the economic era.

The educational butcher knife has cut apart emotional enjoyment and the satisfaction of primary needs. The body-to-body connection between woman and child hasn’t managed to push forth a relationship wherein the sovereignty of love would teach the art of creating oneself by creating one’s independence. Communication has been interrupted, alchemy has fallen short, and the third mutation did not take place. Life no longer plays nurse — death does. Fate unravels like a film running backwards. Such is the ordinary nightmare they are surprised to see still showing up in rare moments in life.

Infancy Forever Unaccomplished

How could human beings be born when children become fetuses in adulthood and adults curl up into fetuses inside the children?

It’s a terrible damnation to have to try to be happy in a world where happiness is relegated to some future release. The word itself has an odor of idiocy. It makes one shrug one’s shoulders out of spite as often as one shrugs off regrets.

Because if they have trumpeted through the ages that man was not put here on the planet to give himself over to voluptuousness, they have kept written in the secrecy of their hearts and in their imaginations the memory of their fetal paradise, Eden at the center of woman, the happy isle where the gift of love nourished nascent life. How many times have they rushed in with a haughty approach to assault riches and power, only to cave in at the least feeling of weakness and abandon, to snuggle up into the arms of the first mockup of a maternal womb presented randomly to assuage their confusion!

The more they put their endurance and steadfastness into harping on what distances them from themselves, the more they regress, with a childlike step, towards a primordial state that once pampered and protected them. And thus their existence never ceases reproducing, in the monotony of sarcasm and boredom, the trauma of infancy and history, which chased them away from their original enjoyments to send them into the hell of daily work.

In a few years, in a few months, perhaps, the child finds itself deprived of the privileges that love had accorded it without reserve. It’s not so bad that the easy existence it enjoyed passively in its mother’s belly is taken away — on the contrary. As the child comes into earthly life, it embarks upon a human adventure that invites it to abandon passivity and to create a natural abundance that the fetal world was nothing but a taste, a summary sketch of.

That’s the big disgrace — as soon as it escapes the protective uterus, which with time had become inopportune and irritating, it runs into such unfavorable conditions that everything incites it to want to go back in, to abandon the hope for a different humanity, for a human mutation — the child runs to deck itself out with arms and baggage, curling up again into the fetal position.

The dissociation of the emotional and the nutritional produces a feeling of insecurity and anguish in the impressionable newborn, at the very moment when nothing is more important to it than to enter into a foreign world taking only the provisions of an affection without reserve.

A threat paralyzes the child when its weak movements need reassurance, the threat of not being loved anymore if it doesn’t eat, if it doesn’t sleep well, if it cries, screams, wriggles, gets annoying, gets annoyed, disobeys, or follows a rhythm that differs from that of the marketed and scheduled time of the adults. What contempt in ignorance, which persists in infesting the particular universe of the child as if it were a conquered land! What self-loathing!

Is it not love which sustains the audacity to face the unknown, to make an effort stubbornly, to throw oneself into a frenetic succession of undertakings, to find the nipple, to clutch the bottle, to take hold of a chair, to stand up, to walk, to articulate words, to rouse the happy dispositions of nature in the experience of beings and things?

Education becomes a glacial mechanics from the instant it is no longer founded on the pretext of an affection accorded without reserve to children, whatever happens. Alas, how can the predominance of love be guaranteed when work imposes the precision of its cogs on the cycle of days and nights?

Doubtless it isn’t the custom anymore in families to encourage the vocation of pianist by beating rulers on kids’ knuckles. But if slaps and screams aren’t the thing to do anymore, it isn’t so easy to avoid the sentimental blackmail that paralyzes gestures of independence and autonomy.

The certitude of being loved is the surest incitement to self-love through loving others. It is the fundamental assurance that permits the child to fly with its own wings. Without it, destiny gets dragged down into the rut of a dependency that makes death look like an all-powerful mother.

That affection folds to the law and to supply and demand, and certainty vacillates; the heart is depopulated, the body empties out, and the emptiness is filled with a morbid tangle of real anguish and artificial conciliation.

That’s when children’s clumsiness becomes voluntary. Falls, accidents, sicknesses, originally inherent parts of errant inexperience, become the frightened cries of an emotional deficiency; they demand aid and protection from the mother, to which she replies with another blackmail. The brutal reminder of one’s duty to love and lend assistance engenders in her the guilty feeling of having fallen out of grace with god. The agony of life begins there, when the child’s first steps lose their random nature, stop being fruitless attempts, and become reflexes of a voluntary weakness, a simulation of death, and, through a gradual overbidding, become a suicidal reaction wherein the individual denies him or herself in order to attract the interest of other people.

Affection Economized

Bargaining with emotions instills in the child’s heart an endemic fear. The memory of “I won’t love you anymore if...” freezes over the spontaneous conflagrations of enjoyment. Every time the child takes on an independent desire, the burning feeling of a possible disaffection sanctions its vague desires for autonomy and engraves upon its mind the law of submission and renunciation that rules the adult world.

I do not claim that it would be good to abandon children to the chaotic freedom of impulses. A few of the experiences that they pursue gropingly present dangers; they sometimes need rectification, and merit a little help from the more able. But it is sure that an authentically emotional communication has the patience and the efficiency to be able to explain to the child why there are certain gestures and actions that should be avoided; that’s better than the brutal injunctions and the flashes of fear, which illuminate and incite a morbid fascination with danger, which the children will try to return to rather than distance themselves from.

Fear plunges into an artificial and haughty hardness anyone who tries to drive the demons out of himself without conquering himself. The muscular armoring, reflecting upon the outside the stricken terror from within, is the foundation block for an empty fortress which exudes everywhere the shadows of power and death.

Withdrawing into a body blocked up by fear, and from which they spurt forth intermittently like the furies to propagate worry — is this not the caricature of the maternal belly, of birth, of a sterile, dried, overdrawn, hostile womb, a birth inverted in the middle of its progress, which opens out upon ruins, destruction, nothingness?

Yes, and it is also, by an obvious analogy, the wall they construct around their villages, their cities, their property, their family, their State.

A society that subjugates emotional resources to the principle of economy makes the child grow old prematurely in the adult, and makes adults into children who are never born, who never fulfill their destiny of becoming full grown humans.

Is there a single power, any one lone authoritarian instance, which does not reproduce itself, under the guise of the grandiloquence of seriousness, in the tried-and-true maneuver of sentimental blackmail? The magistrates, the cops, the hierarchical superiors — do they have any other intelligence besides that of the complex alternation between caresses and blows, as a result of which the substance of the unfortunate ones who appear before them expresses itself in guilty truths? And they are not satisfied with calling them “the accused” the suspects, the guilty or incompetent — they take away from them their unction, their confidence, their protection, their esteem; they exclude them from the familial cocoon, which they say they no longer deserve; the reduce them to the state of weaklings and keep them at bay, sinking them into childishness.

But a frightened dog is the first to bark: the arrogance and respectability of the notables stink of an infantile terror into which they were plunged long ago, and in which they suffer still — the daily fear of being suspected, judged, condemned, made inferior.

Their servitude, dressed in mortuary clothes, carries the mark of a castration of the emotions. Hunted out of Eden to work by the sweat of their brow, they make an infernal present with which to pay the price of a lost paradise. Progressing in a world of cripples, they have only the sad genius of inventing crutches, which don’t even hold them up without mutilating them even more.