505. Conflict (X)
Yesterday, I glanced at an article from the late 1980s by Irving Kristol, “the grandfather of neoconservatism”, in which Kristol expressed the view that the sexual revolution could not go any further because the AIDS epidemic would bring it to a dead stop. Kristol observed that the virus, though it was politically incorrect to say so, mostly hit homosexual men; and he observed that the epidemic would not have been possible without the sexual revolution—without bathhouse culture and the ability to indulge male sexuality to the limits. After AIDS, so thought Kristol, everyone would come to their senses and see the terrible mistake they had made. Similar sentiments are periodically expressed today, along the lines: “How much further can it go? It’s so ridiculous now.”
It can go on—it will go on, indefinitely. Kristol was wrong about the sexual revolution, because the sexual revolution is non-negotiable. Sure, if in the 1980s, when AIDS first hit, governments had curtailed sexual licence—immediately closed down the bathhouses, for example—and returned to the status quo circa 1950, then thousands of lives would have been saved; and yet nothing was done—perhaps that was due to America’s Lysenko, the then-already prominent Dr. Anthony Fauci; then again, who knows.
No action was taken for exactly the same reason why no action was taken when Ukraine starved and the peasants failed to produce grain under Stalin: the revolution is non-negotiable. The revolution is more important than empirical reality; if the facts disagree with the theory, so much the worse for the facts—collectivisation must continue. To reintroduce more repressive sexual mores—to return to the old rules—would have been counter-revolutionary. It was more acceptable to let people die horribly and wait for years for antiretrovirals to become available—wait for a pharmaceutical patch that allowed the revolution to continue—than to stop the virus in a counter-revolutionary way. Even today, antiretrovirals are not a cure; and although people can “live with it” AIDS is still a heavy burden.
So the conservative notion—the neoconservative notion—that suddenly it will seem “too much” and all stop is a chimera, a false hope. The regime allowed people to die in tortuous ways from AIDS rather than stop the revolution, so it is unlikely to be concerned about the casualties from the recent initiative to encourage sex-change operations—by comparison to AIDS these are hardly casualties at all. So it is likely that the regime will get its way, biological sex will go the way of race—down the memory hole—and everyone will have to talk around the subject instead. It is no more preposterous than any other revolutionary delusion; it is no more absurd than collectivisation—a move that had many supporters in the Western press.
The sexual revolution, as with Stalin’s collectivisation, is underpinned by a worldview that thinks in a religious way—a mythological way. As such, it is impervious to the facts; it is pointless to deal with it on a factual basis. Sexual austerity was the only measure that could save homosexual men in the 1980s; yet to demand it was “hateful homophobia”—even if sexual licence killed people in a grotesque way it was still “liberation”. This is precisely a mythico-religious viewpoint; except the myth has been developed on the fly without reference to reality.
The sexual revolution has had many, many casualties over the past fifty years: AIDS; divorce; child abuse due to divorce; feralisation of underclass children; Britain’s rape gang culture; a vicious sexual marketplace; the mass pornographisation of women; and sterility among women who would otherwise have had children—the list goes on. The revolution will only stop, as with all revolutions, when it has exhausted itself—or if it is toppled from within, or if, as with Stalin in 1941, it faces such a massive existential threat that it is forced to be more realistic to survive. A revolution cannot go too far, to go too far is a revolution.