Liberalism’s next frontier

Related to the subject of how freedom in the absence of truth inevitably turns demonic, director Nick Cassavetes, son of John Cassavetes and Gena Roland, has made a movie about adult incest and says he supports adult incest if that’s what people want. Of course he presents his position in orthodox liberal terms of freedom of choice and non-judgmentalism. And what would any liberal have to say against it?

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Gintas writes:

Just as the acceptance of homosexuality has ruined shows of affection among men, acceptance of incest will ruin shows of affection within families. If there are any families left, that is.

David B. writes:

A few years ago, I wrote to you about my liberal acquaintance Professor F., who was fanatically in favor of “gays” being married. When I told him it would inevitably lead to incestuous marriage, he replied, “It will never happen. People will not be allowed to marry if they are related.”

But of course as we have seen so many times with liberalism, there is no such thing as “It will never happen.”

How long will it be before Nick Cassavetes makes a film about a love affair between a 50-year old man and his 20-year old daughter?

LA replies:

There would be nothing fundamentally new about such a movie, since his present movie is about incest between an adult brother and sister. What would be new would be … ugh, I don’t want to say it. But the logic is clear: Whatever thing, activity, or area of life the human mind can think of where there is arguably an absence of total freedom or equality (or, more simply, of equal freedom), you can be absolutely sure that liberal society will at some point demand equal freedom with regard to that thing, activity, or area of life. Any area of life of which that demand has not yet been made is simply an unprincipled exception which liberalism has not yet gotten around to targeting. There is no stopping liberalism, until it reaches its ideal:

a world of liberated, equal human selves, with no God above them and no country or culture around them, free to interact on a basis of total freedom and equality with all other human selves on earth.

And of course that would include every variety of incest and of homosexuality, so long as it’s between theoretically consenting persons.

Terry Morris writes:

David B.’s comments put me in mind of an episode of Jerry Springer or some show like that I happened on as I was flipping through the channels one day while on deployment at Travis Air Force Base in the early Nineties.

The show was about a “couple” who’d been living together for some time before learning (from the girl’s mother, as I recall) that they were actually father and daughter. As the story went, he had had an affair with the girl’s mother some twenty years earlier, then disappeared after getting her pregnant. He wound up picking his own daughter up in a bar twenty years later when he returned from his disappearance.

The sickest part of the thing was that neither of them seemed to be the least bit interested in breaking the thing off after learning the truth of their relationship. They just kept saying that they were “in love” and could therefore live with it. It was really bizarre. And quite disturbing.

September 30

Daniel M. writes:

Excellent post about the coming acceptance of incest. It reminds me of another point I have been making for a few years now.

What it immediately brought to mind is not only the coming acceptance of incest, but also the coming acceptance of pedophilia. If we take the liberals’ arguments for gay marriage and the sexual revolution at face value (they were “born that way,” etc.), there is no justification for having laws against either of these things. Incest will be the first taboo to fall, and although I think the justification of pedophilia may take a few years or decades longer but bet me—it will happen within my life time (I am 30 years old).

A female reader in England writes:

There is actually a term for this sort of thing:

Genetic sexual attraction (GSA) is a term that describes the phenomenon of sexual attraction between close relatives, such as siblings, first and second cousins or a parent and offspring, who first meet as adults…. The term was popularized in the U.S. in the late 1980s by Barbara Gonyo, the founder of Truth Seekers In Adoption, a Chicago-based support group for adoptees and their new-found relatives…. Genetic sexual attraction is presumed to occur as a consequence of genetic relatives meeting as adults, typically as a consequence of adoption. Although this is a rare consequence of adoptive reunions, the large number of adoptive reunions in recent years means that a larger number of people are affected.[3] If a sexual relationship is entered, it is known as incest…. GSA is rare between people raised together in early childhood due to a reverse sexual imprinting known as the Westermarck effect, which desensitizes them to later close sexual attraction; it is hypothesized that this effect evolved to prevent inbreeding. [LA replies: Sorry for the off-topic remark: You see, a random accidental genetic mutation occurred in some people which made them not have sexual attraction toward their people with whom they were raised, and the people who had this genetic mutation survived longer and had more offspring than the people who didn’t, and so that genetic mutation spread through the human population and became a dominant trait.]

If the above paragraph from Wikipedia is true, then we are in trouble as families become more and more fluid.

There was a documentary about this made by the BBC (who else?) some time ago called “Brothers and Sisters in Love.”

Is this phenomenon not actually just another form of self-worship expressed on an unconscious level? And since self-worship is the essence of liberalism, should we be surprised if this sort of thing is going to be more and more prominent?

Michael writes:

Wondering if Nick is a victim of incest.

LA replies:

He says that he has not practiced incest himself, and thinks its “weird,” but that he supports other people doing it if they want to. Again, this is just standard liberalism. I have my values and preferences, but I don’t believe in imposing my views on others.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 29, 2012 01:20 PM | Send