System of A Down’s
When You're The Retard
Recently, on social media, a brief but intense controversy erupted within the right, occasioned by a post by a couple who first showcased their joy at discovering they were expecting, followed by their horror at news that their unborn child was likely to have Down’s Syndrome, whereupon they decided to abort him. It’s not certain that this even really happened, the internet being what it is, but the prospect of it, and the ease with which someone would proclaim their comfort with terminating such a pregnancy, drew the attention of Matt Walsh, who condemned the decision on X as the “most evil thing [he’d] ever read on this platform.” This then prompted a deluge of not-especially philosophical discussion on whether it was actually worse than, for example, what happened to Henry Nowack. But alongside this was a line of reasoning that argued that it was not only quite acceptable for the couple to do what they said they did, but that they actually made the correct choice, a choice that those on the right would do well to respect.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but before I begin, I want to make clear that I’m not attacking anyone. This isn’t meant to be my end of some sort of flame war. I’m certainly in a fight, but this isn’t one won through aggression. What I hope to do is to pull people back from what I believe is a deep spiritual evil that threatens not only the long-term prospects of the right, but individual souls. I’m not perfect, and the sickness of which I write touches me as it does everyone else, but I would be remiss as a writer and a man if I didn’t say something when I had the chance.
I wasn’t shocked exactly by what I was reading. I understand that not everyone is a Christian, and that as a resurgent paganism has replaced the faith as normative, appeals to Christian reverence for life will sound alien to many people, even on the right. When I say paganism, I don’t mean some Viking LARP but the real, atavistic, sacrifice-your-children-for-goodies stuff that floods in whenever there’s a crack in the spiritual dam. That’s really what we’re dealing with here. If you doubt me on that score, just check out some of the comments threads on the subject on X. There is some cold utilitarianism, but you’ll probably be taken aback by the sheer malice of the discourse. People aren’t merely rejecting the idea of allowing babies with Down’s Syndrome to come full term, but denouncing them in the most vicious terms. It’s not some policy difference, but a real, visceral hatred- of babies.
#DINKlife!
Being mindful both that many people do not share my moral universe and that there are a lot of emotions at play inhibiting rational exchange, it would be counterproductive to try to make any kind of religious appeal to dissuade people from holding such opinions. What I hope to show instead is that such beliefs are of a piece with a larger spiritual sickness in the West, one which ultimately harms the people holding them as well. However, I will say that it is reprehensible to attack people with disabilities, mental or physical, something that in the recent memory of Western man was universally understood to be true. Calling developmentally disabled people, including children and even infants, “retards,” “overgrown pets,” “downies,” “waterheads,” etc. is simply vile, no different than abusing a blind man or an old woman in a wheelchair. That this even has to be mentioned is a sad indictment of where the right is at the moment.
I get that people will call others who aren’t actually diagnosed as intellectually disabled ‘retarded’ in a colloquial sense meaning stupid or inept. I don’t do it myself but I understand the distinction.
Before getting into that, I should note some practical points advanced by people who hold some variant of this position. One will hear that Christian talk about the sanctity of life and proscribing abortion is poison electorally and that the “religious right”- by which is meant conservative, politically engaged Evangelicals- are a has-been faction within the right and can and should be dispensed with yesterday. This is bound up with the notion that women are so infatuated with abortion and so committed to destroying sub-optimal pre-born children that it would be lunacy- politically and socially- to cross them. But fundamentally, all of this is animated by the idea that retarded people are burdens, and by eliminating them, we free up resources that could be put to more productive use.
That Evangelicals are no longer relevant is simply the opposite of the truth. White conservative Protestants are the most reliable voting bloc advancing a rightist program in the US. There is simply no group more supportive of Donald Trump and the changes wrought by him- the dismantling of leftist power centers, the legal attacks on anti-white discrimination, and the remigration agenda- none of it would be happening without them. They and the gun rights people (large Venn Diagram overlap there) have relentlessly and successfully pursued particular goals for decades- overturning Roe v. Wade and enshrining a legal right to own firearms, respectively- and if anything, they now suffer from a lack of focus in moving on to the next stages of their programs. Granted, they’re not always explicitly rightist in outlook (older Evangelicals trend conservative liberal rather than right as such) and the pro-life lobby (not the movement per se) has degenerated into a bit of a racket. But for anything meaningful to get done, they are simply indispensable.
It is of course true that most women support legal abortion, to an even greater degree than men, and that for many- especially Democrats- it’s the locus around which an entire ethic of autonomy and sense of self has evolved to the point where for a significant number of people it ranks as the number one issue. It is also true that a number of pro-life initiatives were shot down at the state level, even in red states. But then, the Republican Party platform is explicitly anti-abortion, and due to the influence of Evangelicals and other religious conservatives, it would be unlikely to impossible for a Republican to run a successful election with a pro-abortion stance. Ron DeSantis won in then-purple state Florida on a hard-line anti-abortion stance and signed into law some of the most comprehensive restrictions in the country. His state has only gotten redder since, though cleaning up the voter rolls has certainly helped as well. The notion that being anti-abortion is intrinsic electoral poison is simply not born out by the facts.
Above: A rational actor within an engaged citizenry.
But the main notion I wish to explore is that retarded people are burdens and that society is better off without them. I should first begin with an important distinction, between dependents and burdens proper. One can be one without being the other, and the nature of the difference is important in grasping what I mean. A dependent is anyone who relies upon another person for some or all of their capacity to thrive and function. A burden is anyone who inhibits another’s ability to thrive or his perception that he is thriving. In a very general sense, we are all lifelong dependents to some degree, unless you grow your own crops, pave your own street, and reproduce asexually. We are not, though, all necessarily lifelong burdens. Elon Musk has 14 acknowledged children by four different women; each of those people is a dependent, but none of them are, in a material sense, burdens. Musk can pretty much do what he wants whenever he wants despite the monetary demands of his brood, and this would be true even if each of the baker’s dozen plus kids were retarded.
I imagine they would enjoy a similar lifestyle to the man in the above video.
Most of us, presumably, lack Musk’s resources, and thus, it’s worth looking at the idea of what raising an intellectually disabled child would represent to a couple. In the first place, it’s fairly likely that an ID child will be a significant dependent for longer and more comprehensively than a child with normal development. That said, about 85% of ID people are of the mild type, meaning that they can be employed (about 44% have jobs) live on their own or in a group setting, or with moderate family support (filling out legal documents, handling medical information, etc.) Only about 15% of the intellectually disabled are of the moderate or severe type requiring dedicated personal care.
Sometimes the tests give a false positive, and your boy actually has moderate to severe Edinburghianism.
But are these people burdens? In a material sense, yes. Having an intellectually disabled child means having restrictions on your time and resources that other adults will not have. Your energy will be focused on taking care of another person such that your own goals and comfort are inhibited. You probably won’t be able to live as you do in your dreams if you have to care for a kid with Down’s Syndrome, and there’s not really any way around that, save for pruning the child like a weed from your own body. You’ll be freer for doing so.
Of course, there’s not really any promise that you won’t end up with exactly the same sorts of burdens from otherwise healthy children. You can do everything right and still spend your adult years dealing with a son’s drug addiction, a daughter’s mental illness, or the diagnosis of some terrible disease in a child that eats a hole right through your soul as you watch them suffer. The same could happen with the adults in your life- wives and husbands and parents, etc.- any of whom could upend your existence with a single disaster. Childless Nietzsche, who waxed poetically on the evils of weakness, spent the last decade of his life a mentally broken invalid, more of a dependent than the vast majority of Down’s Syndrome cases.
I thought the Jim Carrey biopic was pretty respectful, all things considered.
But to keep the focus on kids, why not, in light of all that, do all you can to seemingly mitigate a guaranteed future burden to free up resources for ordinary dependents? Why not prevent the suffering of someone with a less-than-sound mind? There’s a sort of logic to it, but it leads to unseemly places- in fact, precisely where we in the modern West find ourselves. The minute you begin thinking of children as investments, cutting potential losses in light of likely future value, a creeping realization seeps into the dark parts of the heart. The truth is that, in nearly all cases, all children are both dependents and burdens, and once you accept the principle that the inconvenient ones can be dispensed with, you quickly move on to the notion that, well, they’re all pretty inconvenient. The story of the West’s (and other places’) cratered birthrate is no more complicated than that.
Sometimes the test comes back with a false positive that’s actually Juggalitis.
Scores of ink, real and digital, has been spilled around the “natalism” debate. People posit this or that social, political, and economic change that would result in a healthy birthrate. Once the immigrants are gone and the jobs are open and the housing prices drop, then I can have kids. Maybe, but people in homogeneous neighborhoods with money and status and everything are just as barren as anyone else. Nowhere has simply giving people money and support helped. There’s no material solution because it’s a spiritual problem.
Children are, everywhere and always, a sacrifice. They represent the surrender of the ego, of living for oneself, of the willing acceptance of burdens. A society that embraces the ethic of sacrifice is fertile in every sense. One that rejects it withers and dies like the fig tree of the parable. You know a people, like a man, by its fruits, and ours are few by every measure. Abandoning the least among us to death does not eliminate them, but simply creates a new bottom layer of unwanted intrusion on our hedonism. There’s no end to it, and the proof is all around us.
As I noted, many of my readers are not Christian and will no doubt scoff at all of this, pointing out that before the spread of Christianity, our based pagan ancestors practiced all manner of infanticide. Look at the Spartans, the Romans. Yes, look at them. The Spartans eugenicided themselves into matriarchy and irrelevance; the Romans authored their own great replacement. Augustus tried to pay Romans to have children, and the scheme worked as poorly then as it does now. They were, all of them, replaced by Christians, in part due to the simple expedient of Christians not leaving their infant daughters to die in the gutter. People willing to suffer material privation to bring children into the world will inevitably replace those who aren’t, and that ethic of sacrifice is one that must be cultivated through action.
But mere hedonism doesn’t explain the hatred. If it did, it would be enough to simply ignore the prospect of raising a kid with ID. Many people I saw online expressed a deep loathing for retarded people inexplicable on its own terms, and I suspect there is more to it than a surface-level reaction to the mentally disabled. There’s an insecurity, a fear born of a recognition of a viscerally unsettling kinship, that manifests as a kind of abuse.
Remember, a burden is someone who inhibits someone’s ability to thrive or his perception that he is thriving. Suppose you’re a young man who’s done everything right. You are educated, law-abiding, a useful member of society with a claim on the respect of your fellow citizens. The last thing you suspect is that you are an encumbrance on anyone. But you’re quite wrong. Someone else, somewhere, someone with power and influence, has performed some calculations, and has come to some conclusions about you that you’ll probably find unwelcome. You expect the sort of life that will result in sub-optimal outcomes for this more structurally elite person. You want money and a house and a career and a bunch of other things that would shave down the slice of the pie he enjoys, and he’s therefore decided that your future will need to be terminated to create space for him to thrive. You protest that you’re not a burden, but you forget that it’s all relative, and that to be a burden you need be nothing else but an obstacle to the wish-fulfillment of another more powerful than you. He’s made the oh-so-hard decision to abort you. You’re the retard.
What do you get from not murdering the intellectually disabled in utero? Love. The amount of love in the world increases every time someone sacrifices for another. We’re not talking about distant strangers here, love directed at humanity in the abstract. This is your own flesh and blood, your own race, your own neighbor and countryman. People are probably rolling their eyes at this, but nothing will save the West but heroic sacrifice based on exactly that kind of love, and if you’re willing to kill your own children because they’re inconvenient, you’re no better than the bloodthirsty foreigners doing the same in your midst.
They’re actually pretty based.
If this seems personal, it is. A few years ago, I wrote an essay about my encounter with an intellectually disabled man who lived near my mom, and what happened to him, “Kenny Was a Friend to All.” Kenny’s father loved him. A whole community loved him. He made the world a better place, better than anyone who might have hated him. When my wife and I finally had kids after years of trying, we were of an age where it was a possibility that one of our daughters might have been born ID. It never even came up between us and to my recollection we never bothered with the testing. I’ve worked with ID people for years during my time in the hospitality industry, and I’ve never known them as anything but content with their lot, pleasant, and generally loved by others in the workplace. But more than anything, I just really hate abuse directed at inoffensive disabled people. If you’re going to kill them, could you at least spare that much cruelty?
Bro tested positive… for GAINZ! Better form than Mark Steubing, too. EDIT: Now Crystal Steubing. Don’t look; trust me.
I understand that all of this, sadly, will be controversial, and perhaps lose me some followers, but I really believe it needs to be said. I’m comforted by the knowledge that I’m not the only one writing about it, but I’d do it even if I was. All over Europe, and perhaps soon in the US, violence has erupted on the part of people fed up with their governments treating them as so many obstacles to managerial happiness. Such a movement can begin in anger, but to have any longevity, it will have to be sustained by exactly the love I wrote about here. In the end, everyone sacrifices, either themselves, or others. Sacrifice of self is the foundation of community. Sacrifice of others is its death. As I write this, powerful people mean to do to you what too many urge be done to the disabled, for precisely the same reason. Reject this ethic comprehensively. More than your own life is at stake.
DURRR! This is how the system sees you DURRR! They think you’re expendable biomass they can dispense with when you cause them problems DURRR! Purge this notion from your soul before it’s too late DURRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
I think most frustrated non-woke people who use the r word would NEVER use it towards a person who had any real developmental difficulties. We are talking about people who have an impaired, delayed, developmentally insignificant moral framework. Their thinking, philosophy of life, moral center, and sense of their appropriate place in the world (which is to say, NOT the center of it) has been slowed down to such an extent that they seem incapable of progressing to becoming a fully actuated, morally mature, spiritually thoughtful person who is trying to do more good in the world than evil. The lack of self-reflection indicates a retarded sense of who they should be and as a result, they can never really become an adult.
Children, raising children, committing oneself to family life, is a way of the cross. It is my life for yours every day for the rest of your life. And finding joy in the sacrifice is a tiny way of understanding the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf.
"Augustus tried to pay Romans to have children, and the scheme worked as poorly then as it does now. They were, all of them, replaced by Christians, in part due to the simple expedient of Christians not leaving their infant daughters to die in the gutter. People willing to suffer material privation to bring children into the world will inevitably replace those who aren’t, and that ethic of sacrifice is one that must be cultivated through action."
You got me, changed my mind. Thx.