“What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.” Jacques Lacan
Before, during and after his heinous crime, Axel Rudakubana clearly displayed symptoms associated with the psychopathy spectrum. The symptoms must have been noticed by parents and professionals, and they must have aroused some suspicions. Forty years ago, Rudakubana would have been at least eligible – if not guaranteed a placement – for time-limited confinement in a secure ‘assessment centre’ awaiting diagnosis and a recommended treatment programme. In the 1980s I worked with a dangerous youngster and his darkly obsessed family in such a centre. In this case, as in many others, all professionals agreed that earlier therapeutic and medical intervention would have produced better results.
In 2019, after years of budget cuts, only 14 such centres – renamed Secure Children’s Homes – remained in the UK. Some of these homes are failing inspections, there’s a long waiting list, and children are referred only as a last resort after numerous failed interventions by the social services and the criminal justice system. Glancing briefly through the official literature, it’s quite noticeable that the cost of running such places features heavily in the analyses. Those who believe the myth that taxes and borrowing fund public spending will be quite easily convinced that the government simply can’t afford adequate services for young people with mental health issues, some of which, as we have just seen, can be deadly.
As the children’s mental health crisis deepens, we are forced to live under the neoliberal cult of austerity, the objective of which is to run down public services ready for privatisation. It is aided and abetted by the postmodernist cult of moral relativism and the new left cult of minimal intervention and anti-psychiatry. This toxic combination of institutionalised parsimony, negligence and naivety demonises any form of moral, scientific or political authority – no matter how humane, advanced and rational – as an existential threat to the freedom of the individual. It also conveniently supplies the neoliberal politicians and financiers with yet another excuse for cost-cutting. Individual freedom is a great thing, no doubt. By the way, it’s also quite cheap to run, and neoliberals are convinced it can be cheaper still, at least where public money is involved.
Each cult in the symbolically inefficent trio is now a veteran in the art of concocting excuses for itself and the other two tacit partners. The new three-headed master currently exerts its negative consequentialist power over all of us – I command that everyone shall be free from authority no matter what the real costs. Apart from the authority of the market, of course. The master is playing with children’s lives, both the tiny and often remediable minority suffering from the more dangerous forms of mental illness and their innocent victims. The current Anglo-American, late liberal way of life is, in the term used by ultra-realists, zemiogenic.
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