re: #187 mmmirele

I’ve been following this case because it’s a disturbing intersection of several conservative trends:

1. the assertion that children being noncompliant is both a psychological and spiritual sickness. This doubles down on stuff like the Pearls’ vision of corporal punishment, but incorporates a supernatural component that really emphasizes that the child should not be perceived as a person just a receptacle of ideology.

2. The creation of a para-therapeutic industry that caters to conservative beliefs that focus on using professional authority to coerce people into their expected social position…usually a subordinate one with obvious drawbacks. Hildebrant’s not a lone nut but part of a whole industry that promises compliant children that’s using methodologies that are basically rendition.

(1) is notable because it tracks with the general “no, really, your body is not your own” trend that defines conservatism in general, but also point to how their internal understanding of belonging involves brutalization: this is how they treat their own, because the in-group is not a fixed set but a constantly-moving goalpost of either suffering to show compliance or inflicting suffering to show solidarity.

(2) is just the right-wing vision of everything—ideas and methodologies cannot ever be pried away from compliance, knowledge and truth exist only relative to pre-declared outcomes. People that otherwise despise psychology…when it creates options or permits vulnerability…are perfectly happy with psychological manipulations that they believe will create their preferred ends. Every idea a conservative screeches is invalid they will immediately scrape back when they find a way to make the methodology a means of delivering their rhetoric.

Together we get a picture of what something I feel gets neglected in discourse: conservatism simply accepts spillage of human beings in ways that don’t fit into conventionally-taboo bigotries and chauvinism. They absolutely will destroy some of their kids to get the kind of compliant perfect-copies that they want. Any future these people plan, even their most utopian vision of paleoconservative perfection where there’s no outsiders and everyone knows their place, incorporates a Moloch.