Trust in the hyperreal
The real and the surreal in this issue have as usual been well aired here. Time to look at the hyperreal.
> The conclusion from their two year consultancy exercise focused on the potential for a relationship of trust to build up. The logic is clear: the more trust children place in particular adults, the greater the potential for abuse of that trust.
The first thing about the hyperreal is that there is no real, no representation. The hyperreal is always bigger, better, more real than reality. The second thing is that trust, as an index of practise, functions like narratives do for the theoretical. Thus 12 years of nu liebore spinning necessarily has entailed 12 years of the progressive corrosion of the concept of trust. Trust is suspect per se - there is effectively no trust, and no-one to trust. Bona fide relationships are thus inevitably untrustworthy. But there is one exception - and it is very necessary for it to be there to prevent the concept of trust disappearing completely from redundancy or neglect, or from being totally meaningless (or only as a gauge of spatio-temporal proximity).
The paedophile, we are told, is an absolute expert in creating trust - in "grooming" children to have a relationship. Totally dedicated, totally irridentist - not even the best physicians can distract the paedophile from his (or her) mission. But the paedophile's relationship is purely for sex, which makes it a minimal sort of relationship - it is difficult to conceive a paedophile appraising a child for his/her wit, intelligence, material success, charm, grace, etc etc. Yet in this hyperreal, the successful paedophile, for all his limitations in relationships in general, is in fact the exemplar of success in relationships, relatively speaking. Within his/her frame of reference, noone does relationships better than the paedophile. Of all relationships that are give and take, his is most weighted towards take, and paid for with apparently the least - the most economically and politically efficient. That makes the paedophile hated and envied, just as success does in other fields, but particularly from the economic and socio-political points of view. His/her tendency to avoid the limelight only compounds that hate and envy.
Ed Balls at the DCSF is an ex hack. As such he knows well how to spin a story. As a cabinet minister his insulation from reality is hermetic, almost perfect. Even his name is more hyperreal than real.