Parents as the (literal) murderers of their children

Ivan and his son, by Ilya Repin

The theme of parents as murderers of their children is recurrent in pessimistic philosophies. There is a good reason for this. To emerge from nothingness and come into the world of becoming, where everything is always transforming and where nothing — except change itself — is stable, for a sentient being, means being exposed to a vast number of inevitable and potential pains, only to die in the end and return to the void from whence one came. In the case of rational and profoundly conscious beings, emerging from nothingness and coming into the world also means having to create and maintain positive values ​​to endure becoming. In a more basic sense, life turns sensitive organisms into addicts through physical pleasures. In creatures endowed with reason and profound consciousness, in addition to the pleasures of the flesh, there are also values ​​invented consciously or unconsciously to keep the despair at bay.

And parents are the ones most directly responsible for our being.

Some see this as an opportunity to militate against all those who bring new life into the world, whether intentionally or not. However, while I generally agree that parents are, in a way, primarily responsible for the pain and death of their children, I do not see them, nor do I treat them, as criminals or monsters thirsting for pain. I see them the same way I see myself: they are troubled, confused beings, with varying degrees of lucidity, driven by a will to live that is not only blind itself, but also blinds everyone from time to time, even the most lucid among us. Parents are indeed the tormentors of their children, but they are also victims, in a great temporal chain that extends to the first common ancestor of all life on Earth. But, of course, none of this turns them into victims, much less heroes.

Ultimately, it's better not to have children. But if you do, treat them with love and affection, don't sacrifice their little bodies and minds on the altar of some personal or cultural project of immortality, in the name of your own ego, in the name of race, country, or faith. It's difficult, of course, but not impossible. Acknowledge your mistakes, acknowledge that you are not perfect, and above all, acknowledge that you did your children absolutely no favors by bringing them into the world of becoming. Furthermore, never, under any circumstances, treat your children as if they owe you something.

This position is very well summarized in a scene from the 1967 film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. In it, the character John Prentice, a doctor who lost his first wife and son, played by Sidney Poitier, says something quite pertinent to his father, a retired postman who opposes his new marriage to a white woman. In expressing his opposition, his father implies that John owes him everything, even reminding John of the thousands of miles he traveled delivering mail to support his family. John replies as follows:

Let me tell you something. I owe you nothing! If you carried that bag a million miles, you did what you're supposed to do, because you brought me into this world. And from that day you owed me everything you could ever do for me like I will owe my son if I ever have another.

That said, let's now talk about parents who are the literal murderers of their own children, since once again such a case is in the spotlight. It's not the first time I've written about parents who kill their children, and unfortunately, it will certainly only be the last if some personal tragedy prevents me from writing. In the text The God of Carnage, I mentioned two cases in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul: one in which the father killed his son and sent an audio message to his ex-wife saying he had done something a little crazy; the other in which the mother recorded a video with her young daughter in the car for her ex-husband, saying she was going to cause an accident and kill them both. In this second case, luckily, no one died, although the woman did indeed deliberately crash the car at high speed with her daughter. The case currently in the spotlight occurred in the state of Goiás, in the town of Itumbiara.

Thales Machado, who worked as a city government secretary, discovered that his wife, who was already in the process of divorcing him, had met with another person. Therefore, he decided to kill his sons, Miguel, 12, and Benício, 8, shooting them in the head and then killing himself, but not before making a pathetic post on social media blaming the mother for the murders, saying that his sons would become angels and go with him to the afterlife. It is hardly surprising that this man was a generic conservative Christian; that is, despite being Catholic, he attended evangelical churches, something that perfectly represents the amorphous amalgam of contemporary religious-political conservatism; a Frankenstein monster with zero respect for the centuries-old historical and doctrinal lines that divide the branches of Christianity.

Although this case exposes the vacuous rot of performative Christian conservatism, this type of barbarity is far from happening only among conservatives. Any progressive who feels like a champion, believing that their side is immune to such monstrosities, should be careful, since Christian conservatives do the same, pointing to cases like that of 9-year-old Rhuan Castro, who was tortured for years and brutally murdered by his mother and her girlfriend in the Federal District in 2019. In my view, practically all political analyses that aim to score a goal in the name of the political or religious ideal of the person analyzing such cases are empty. Filicides have occurred since forever, for the most diverse reasons, but all have at their core a complete disdain for the suffering of lives for which the people who committed filicide are responsible. It wasn't enough that they created lives that would suffer and die, it wasn't enough that they condemned new consciences to life, they also became the direct executioners of the sentence.

Although Brazilian law uses the term “infanticide” to define the homicide of a newborn child by a mother in the postpartum period, applying a lesser penalty than homicide due to the psychological problems that the postpartum period can cause — problems that mitigate the mother's guilt — the more correct term for the act of killing one's own children in general is filicide. The term infanticide outside of our law, incidentally, refers to the murder of children up to one year old by any person, even strangers. The murder of children by parents at any age can be called filicide. Statistically, fathers and mothers commit filicide in the same proportion. However, mothers tend to kill more when the child is under one year old, and fathers tend to kill more as the children grow older. When filicide is committed to hurt the other parent, fathers are the ones who kill most often, although a small percentage of this type of crime is also committed by mothers. The same occurs when filicide is followed by suicide: fathers are the ones who most often commit this type of act.

If it is already a moral problem to create new consciences that will have an expiration date in a world of fleeting joys and pleasures, a world in which pain and death are the only certainties, the situation becomes grotesque when the parents themselves are the literal torturers and executioners of their children, especially young and defenseless children, without the slightest capacity to understand the hell in which they find themselves, nor the end that awaits them. The even more despicable motive, jealousy and the need for revenge, makes the episode that happened in Goiás even more disgusting. To make matters worse, there are thousands of men and even women defending the act, or at least blaming both for the shots fired into the children's heads. In a general sense, all fathers and mothers in the world are indeed responsible for the misfortunes that befall their children, as they are the most immediate causal link to their children's being. Without them, that being would not exist, therefore there would be no possibility for misfortunes to exist. However, in the concrete reality of the actions, the one responsible is the particular monster that appears to destroy them.

In the case of Goiás, that monster was the father. And the greatest victims were the children, who, like their parents, never asked to be born — but once born, as David Benatar argues, those children developed an interest, albeit implicit, in remaining alive, even more so while possessing health and youth. The father took that away from them, even taking away their ability to choose to affirm or deny their will throughout their lives, to use Schopenhauerian terminology. The father did them no favors; on the contrary. Incidentally, regarding the issue of committing filicide with supposedly altruistic objectives, I recall a case that occurred in Rio de Janeiro, in 2003, in which Waldo Wuander killed his wife and two teenage daughters after losing his fortune, supposedly to spare them of a less affluent life, and then committed suicide. Ultimately, the blame for his daughters' poverty would indeed fall on him, but he also did them no favors by taking their lives, since they certainly had an interest in remaining alive, regardless of whether they were rich or not. And if they came to think otherwise in the future, it would be their decision, not his.

Here is part of the poorly written and incoherent message that the murderous father from Goiás wrote before killing himself:

my wife left Itumbiara to meet someone in São Paulo... everyone knows how intense and genuine I am, and I wouldn't be able to live with those memories anymore...

This is something to think about. Children have no sanctity whatsoever in the eyes of these people who so loudly proclaim their need to save them from the clutches of modern immorality and atheism. In their minds, children are mere property to be disposed of. This is ancient. Although they abhorred the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Canaanites, Moabites, and others for the practice of sacrificing children to supernatural forces, the Greeks and Romans commonly practiced infanticide and filicide on a large scale for economic and eugenic reasons, mainly through the practice of abandoning children and exposing them to the elements in the middle of nowhere, considered different from immediate murder, since the latter was considered a barbaric act. Abandonment was even encouraged if the child had some kind of deformity. On this, Aristotle, a philosopher almost transformed into a saint by ignorant Christians who have never read him, wrote the following in Politics, Book VII:

As to the exposure and rearing of children, let there be a law that no deformed child shall live, but that on the ground of an excess in the number of children, if the established customs of the state forbid this (for in our state population has a limit), no child is to be exposed, but when couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation.

The power of life and death was concentrated in the hands of fathers, the absolute heads of the family, and abandoning children to be exposed to the elements and die of hunger, thirst, cold, or attacks by animals, or even by malicious humans, was a daily occurrence in the ancient world. This only came to be considered immoral or criminal towards the end of the first centuries of the Middle Ages, and even then, here and there, exposure of children continued to be practiced and persisted. It persists to this day, in fact. I think perhaps it is this power that comes to mind for fathers and mothers who mistreat their children, whether to hurt them out of pure malice or to (supposedly) educate them. They feel fully entitled to abuse the poor bodies they created and brought into the world in any way they see fit, thinking they have done those creatures a great favor.

Is there anything more to say about such barbarities? Yes, there is, but not by me. My horror begins and ends with the reality that the victims will not even be able to find symbolic justice, since, unlike cases where the parents do not commit suicide, the perpetrator in Goiás took his own life immediately afterward, eliminating any possibility of retribution. Some are content, believing that his soul will suffer, either in future lives or in the eternity of hell, but the reality is that none of that will happen. Thales Machado's consciousness has ceased to exist. From his perspective, it's as if he was never born. We are left here, mouths opened, perplexed, horrified, unable to understand why there is so much senseless pain in the world. That “we” in the last sentence is lyrical, poetic, or whatever you want to call it. It is indeed understandable. But the answer pleases no one, not even those of us who do understand. The world truly is hell — and hell is all there is.

by Fernando Olszewski