>>2659304The modern taboo against sexual and romantic relationships between post-pubescent adolescents and adults is conventionally understood as a moral imperative for the protection of the vulnerable. This explanation, however, functions as a surface narrative that obscures a deeper, more powerful generative mechanism. The taboo is not a timeless moral universal but a historically specific technology of social and libidinal management, engineered to meet the demands of advanced industrial capitalism. It operates through two interconnected mechanisms: the imposition of surplus-repression to fuel economic productivity, and a system of differential governance that transforms the taboo into a tool of elite consolidation and control.
The foundational logic of the taboo is economic, as theorized by Herbert Marcuse's concept of surplus-repression. Any society requires a degree of basic instinctual repression to function. Advanced capitalism, however, requires a massive additional quantum of repression—surplus-repression—to create the disciplined, future-oriented subjects needed to perform alienated labor. The adolescent, a being of immense and newly awakened libidinal energy oriented toward immediate gratification (the Pleasure Principle), represents a primary challenge to this order. The taboo is the central apparatus for containing this energy. Its function is to systematically block the adolescent's instinctual drives for authentic, non-instrumental erotic connection. This dammed-up energy is then sublimated, rerouted into socially and economically productive channels: the competitive pursuit of academic grades, the ambition for career advancement, and the disciplined patterns of consumption. The taboo ensures that the adolescent's libido is not discharged in a personally fulfilling but economically useless relationship, but is instead converted into the psychic fuel for the Performance Principle—the relentless demand for productive output.
Building upon this foundation of mass libidinal discipline, the taboo operates as a dualistic system of social control, applied differently to the general populace and a ruling elite. For the masses, this is its exoteric function: the taboo is enforced as a sacred, absolute, and inviolable moral law. Publicly and legally, its violation is framed as the ultimate transgression, a monstrous act that dissolves social bonds. This intense moralization serves to police the population, ensuring the stable formation of the nuclear family as the primary unit of consumption and labor-power reproduction. It enforces the timeline of the Performance Principle, guaranteeing that pair-bonding and procreation occur only after the individual has been fully disciplined by the educational and economic apparatus.
Simultaneously, the taboo possesses an esoteric function that operates within elite circles. Here, its power derives not from its observance but from its calculated transgression. By making an act intensely prohibited and morally radioactive for the public, its secret violation becomes a powerful tool for internal elite management. This mechanism has two primary modes. First, shared participation in the transgression acts as a perverse initiation ritual, creating an unbreakable bond of mutual culpability. It functions as a system of trustless loyalty, enforced by the certainty of mutually assured destruction should any member defect. Second, the act of transgression, particularly when documented, generates the ultimate form of leverage, or *kompromat*. The threat of exposure becomes a perfect instrument for enforcing discipline, ensuring loyalty, and neutralizing political or economic rivals within the network.
These two functions—exoteric repression and esoteric transgression—are symbiotic. The efficacy of the taboo as a weapon of blackmail is directly proportional to the degree of horror it inspires in the general population. The more successfully the system of surplus-repression conditions the masses to view the act with absolute revulsion, the more catastrophic the threat of exposure becomes, and thus the more valuable the leverage held by those who control the incriminating information. This dynamic is stabilized by what Marcuse termed "repressive desublimation," whereby society is saturated with controlled, commodified sexual imagery that offers a superficial release of libidinal tension. This channels erotic energy into safe, consumerist pathways, while simultaneously reinforcing the moral panic against authentic, structurally disruptive violations of the core taboo.
In conclusion, the taboo is a far more complex and functional mechanism than a simple moral safeguard. It is a sophisticated technology of power that serves the dual purpose of disciplining the general populace for economic production while providing a private mechanism for elite cohesion and control. It engineers the psychic economy of the masses, sublimating desire into labor, while the transgression of its own laws serves as the currency of power and loyalty for a ruling stratum. Scandals involving figures like Jeffrey Epstein are therefore not aberrations or failures of the system; they are glimpses into the system's logical and intended esoteric function, where the raw, repressed libidinal energy of the controlled becomes the ultimate commodity for the controllers.