Puerility

Kathleen Stock in good form at UnHerd:

As arguments rage about the precise variety of Tyler Robinson’s psychopathic politics, one thing is clear: the killer of Charlie Kirk is intensely puerile. I’m not sure what else you could call the act of engraving a bullet with “If you read this, you are GAY Lmao”, all the while planning to murder someone with it. His fine motor skills may be unusually advanced, but in other areas of development, the 22 year old is — in a perfectly literal sense — retarded for his age.

“Retarded” has in fact become the word of the decade for a reason. Puerility is now a defining characteristic of the political internet, unifying much of the online Right and Left, and explaining why newcomers wandering in from the real world have difficulty telling the difference between groypers and leftoids….

I first heard about Kirk’s awful murder in Berlin, where I was at the SEGM conference on clinical approaches to gender distress in young people. A local transactivist group, bent on disruption, had put up an Instagram account to help “know your enemy”, and my face was the first one posted. As I am aware from long experience, there’s a particularly queasy aesthetic to transactivist protest, and it, too, is astonishingly juvenile: malice, grandiosity, and self-pity rendered in babyish pastel colours. People dress up as clowns and skip about, ponderously performing “trans joy”; they drown out opposing voices with screaming or loud music, as if their very existence is threatened by dissent; they lie down dramatically on the road and pretend to die. In between, there are board-game nights, soft toys, and onesies.

Inside the conference, we heard about the ways in which adolescent development can get stuck in perpetuity — descriptions which, let’s be honest, now apply to much of society at large. There’s black-and-white thinking, and a lack of tolerance for ambiguity. There’s a splitting of the world into good or bad objects, along with an inability to think through the consequences of present actions or to care about the future. There’s a fear of sexual development and reproduction; and a failure to distinguish fervent wants from real needs.

Yes,  I hadn't thought of that – giving puberty blockers to stop normal adolescent development does seem a fitting symbol for a more general puerility. Let's all stay as children and call each other names. In more extreme form, the autogynephile obsession with wearing nappies…

Gloating responses to Kirk’s shooting partly came from basic frustration that, during his life, he wouldn’t say what they wanted; he had always refused to toe their preferred ideological line. They probably also hated him for the complicated feelings of ambivalence his arguments gave them. But there were juvenile fantasies of power as well: life as a video game with you as the hero, and conservatives imagined as your evil antagonists. Oxford Union president-elect George Abaraonye certainly sounded like he thought he was in a game of Fortnite when he haplessly texted things like “Charlie got shot let’s fucking go” and “scoreboard fn we are so up rn” on hearing the news.

But it’s tempting to think that it was not just the conservatism that these young people hated about Kirk: it was also that he acted ostentatiously like an adult. He was not frightened of sexual maturity and responsibility; he embraced these things. He actively told people not to give into every passing desire, but to be continent and restrained. He was also able to tolerate opposing viewpoints to his own, without feeling the threat of personal disintegration, or the need to get lost in defensive persecution complexes. Whatever else you think about the content of his particular belief system, these seem like decent qualities to aspire to; and presumably they made resentful, fearful, emotionally delayed adolescents of all ages stamp their feet and hate him all the more.