Debate Guide: State hypocrisy

Some Foucault ideas, including Biopower

History tells us it is in the interests of authoritarian, and even western democratic states to problematise and police sexuality in some way. Treating bodies and desires as an area of special "sexual" interest has been identified by many modern scholars as an attempt at using discourse to propagate power.

This (ab)use of power is perhaps understandable, when viewed in an historical context. Behind the façade of "protecting children", nation states, especially those in the developed world are struggling with the demise of historical institutions such as the nuclear family and organized religion - all of which allowed for a degree of stability and predictability via the indoctrination of an uneducated laborer populace. Today's state remains focused on perpetuating the nuclear family as its base unit: middle class, heterosexual society and its moral values/doxas - e.g. propagation of the "social lie" of a non-exploitative order. The order promoted by these values helps ensure a stable economy and national morale, providing a basis for expansive foreign policy and geopolitical power.

One particular threat to the state's control over its populace is the expansion of personal and sexual relations outside of its approved unit(s), since these cannot be moderated by conventional means and give rise to delinquent, anti-authoritarian discourses that subvert norms such as minority. After all, delinquent and degenerate relations are not prescribed any normative structure, as the state disapproves of them. "Sex" for the purpose of heteronormative/homonormative social recreation and procreation, is a fully "vetted" exercise of biopower, and pederasty is not. To governments, giving power to pederasts and other sexual deviants would be like putting a sharpened knife in the hand of an aggrieved chimpanzee and the key to its cage in the other.

How hypocritical states give their game away

We have noticed a number of "tells" re. this policy outlook being a moral scheme completely unrelated to its purported ends of safeguarding children. These can be used as short, punchy arguments at the beginning or end of replies, to demonstrate your natural skepticism:

• Common wisdom would tell us that a sexual offense has a victim and a perpetrator. But this isn't strictly true in CSA clown-world. Ageism details examples where both minors were treated as perpetrators and victims at the same time. If this were not a moral scheme to appease prejudice, wouldn't our reaction to such events be fundamentally different?

• Why do the same governments who "protect" and "safeguard" minors by denying them a variety of civil liberties, permit the abuse of foreign children in waged slavery for their own economies' benefit? The reason is because the suffering of some invisible brown children in another economy matters not to the foundations of their own hive-maintenance, sex-policing moral scheme.

• In many western developed countries, a child is potentially responsible for his decision to commit crime from the age of ten or even earlier. Firstly, if they are capable of choosing to commit burglary or murder at 10, why not a sexual relationship? Secondly, if they are not adults in this regard, why punish these "children" as such and institutionalize them as soon as they engage in "delinquency", when the result is often a lifetime cycle of criminality? The answer is because these countries care not about the fundamental interests of individual "children", but instead the social institution of childhood underpinning their predatory, behaviorist moral scheme.

• Politicians and officials repeatedly talk up "evidence based" policies, but then go on to make ludicrous appeals to the "protective instincts" of parents. They can't have it both ways; either the measures are a reactionary moral scheme or have some grounding in an evidence based approach to child welfare.

• If governments were genuinely concerned about "protecting children", they would also be concerned about the results of cyclical paternalism and the associated phenomena. Only, these are adverse consequences of their own sex-policing moral scheme, so naturally they avoid addressing it.

• The pedophile is pretty much a shape-shifting lizard to the establishment at this point, in that he can be everything bad, all at once. One perfect example of the moral opportunism surrounding the "pedophile" is how in the sciences and in law, pedophiles were once presented as 'childlike', 'regressive' and 'weak' men, who could only cope with relationships on the level of a child. Nowadays, however, ideas have shifted, and the trauma caused by these once "childish" relationships is said to result directly from deliberate, intelligent manipulation and abuse of a power gap.

• We seem to have a nepi problem in Western Society, so let's talk about it. Television networks allow adverts in which mothers intimately coddle, even kiss the buttocks of their babies. What if the father were to carry out such an abusive outrage? If he can't, then why? Surely this isn't because we are in the midst of a cynical moral scheme?

See also

• Special Article: Adverse effects of hysteria.