What's Behind Lobotomy

 

It is generally taken as given that we love children. Dictators wanting to look good always open a children’s park.

But as in the case of dictators, is it often or even usually a sham? After all, honestly, how often do we have sex in order to produce children, and how often do we do it just for physical pleasure? Aren’t kids usually a dubiously welcome byproduct?

We pretend to love kids. Some of us do; some of us are good people. But a lot of us love ourselves. We do not want to waste such effort on the benefit of some other. What’s in it for us? How does the kid earn his keep?

Such bad people will of course pretend to love children. Because if you are going to get away with being a bad person, you have to pretend to be a good person.

Abortion statistics are a preliminary measure of how much we love children: last I checked, 25% of North American women had already had at least one abortion. Most of us insist on a right to abortion, according to polls. So most ofr us don’t have scruples about killing them, do we?

That is not to suppose that those who make it to birth are going to be well treated. There are other reasons to have children than for their own benefit. Small children can make good punching bags. They can be fun to bully and dominate. It is exciting to have complete power over another. Or they can be a welfare ticket, allowing a life of idleness.

This is not new. Most pre-modern societies practiced infanticide. Many practiced child sacrifice. A convenient alibi: “the gods made me do it.”

The current drive to encourage children to get “gender reassignment surgery” looks to me malicious. The demand that children get vaccinated for Covid looks malicious; the vaccine is likely to be more dangerous to them than the disease. Our wild deficit spending suggests we don’t give a damn for the children. Much of what we teach in the schools seems designed to hold children back; it is not what they would need to achieve any kind of power. It turns them into useful drones. This includes the current relentless drive for STEM. We set up elaborate and unnecessary barriers to entering almost any trade or profession.

And then there is “mental illness.” The evidence really has been clear all along that what we currently call “mental illness” is in most if not all cases a result of childhood abuse. Writers, artists, even psychologists have been pointing this out for centuries, millennia. It is the essential message of almost every fairy tale, for example; if you go behind the Disneyfied versions.

Even Freud pointed this out. He was then forced to invent his “Oedipus complex” as a socially acceptable substitute. It would not do to blame parents; he had to find some way to blame the victim. Society would not tolerate the truth.

And this is the continuing problem. There is a general social conspiracy to look the other way, and venerate “family values” and “motherhood.” Consider the Indian Residential Schools. They functioned largely as a place to care for abused and abandoned children from alcoholic homes. There is every reason to believe that the average student was far better off there than at home. Yet they are blamed for everything, and Indian children, including obviously troubled children, are now always forced back to their birth families.

Even for the general population, there is actually evidence that the average child who grows up in an orphanage has a better adult life than the average child who grows up in a family. We just assume, or insist on believing without evidence, that families are better. All we can really say is that two-parent families are better than one-parent families.

In practice, the entire social construct of “mental illness” is an alibi used to conceal child abuse. And not just to conceal it: society almost always sides with the parents and family against the abused child, even joining in the fun of abuse. Lobotomy is a good example.