Conservative Thinker Does Something Unconservative

By Sid Lukkassen

My life and my publications have shown how important it is to be open to people of every political persuasion. Everyone knows that my work breaks taboos: Avondland en Identiteit, for example, addressed polyamory. In Levenslust en doodsdrift I examined the sexual rights of autistic people. I also wrote about the life of the flamboyant author Theo Kars. In short, anyone familiar with my work knows that this is precisely its strength. As the recently deceased Flemish popular philosopher Francis van den Eynde said: “Since reading Avondland en Identiteit, I can see that light is shining over the Netherlands again—and it is not a puritanical book!”

You have to delve very deeply into society, and examine its “fringe” elements in particular, to understand the times in their entirety. My work belongs to this endeavour, as does my project Wees Afgrondelijk—my ambition to explore a wide range of practitioners of the art of living. My article on the Marquis de Sade fits into it, but so, for example, does my conversation with Theo de Wit about Carl Schmitt, as well as my conversation with the life coach Guido Fox. It was also a motivation for entering the “Sex and Sublimation” essay competition.

Authenticity is a humanist value that is disappearing under pressure from social media, “woke” censorship and filter bubbles. I continue to value opening myself to people of other political persuasions. In my life I have found that you can also experience productive forces with someone whose ideology is diametrically opposed to your own political background. In search of that energy, and on a female friend’s advice, I arranged to meet Jini. Of course not to make a “real” porn film, but to meet Jini, talk about her motives for the project and then discover, step by step, how far we would want to go with it. KIRAC’s Kata Sinha acknowledged this explicitly when she told me I was one of the few who had seen through the project’s presentation. I saw it as two actors considering a film project together. First you do a try-out to discover whether you become attuned to one another; if you do not, you do not pursue the project.

Indeed, I assumed I would have a one-to-one introductory conversation with Jini. When I arrived, there turned out to be a whole team around her. Still, I am a philosopher; my relationship of many years had ended, and I had just left Brussels—you are single, and you are curious about how it makes you feel. If you enter a project like this, which can potentially cause so much stress if it is not managed properly, it is extremely important that you are attuned to one another as a real team. I did not feel that mutual trust.

Although I had misgivings and made them known, the makers still wanted to go ahead with publishing the film. The product of my despair became the instrument of their hope. Announcements about me appeared without my being consulted. From that point on I felt ambushed by the reports, on top of serious personal setbacks such as my operation and my grandmother’s death. This caused a series of persistent stress-related symptoms, forcing me to withdraw from the project for health reasons.

Did I make a mistake? It was an impulsive act; perhaps I should not have done it. But a word now to my critics—have you not always preached this? The Netherlands’ progressive liberal media are suddenly puritanical, hounding someone who impulsively found himself in a project. The people now distancing themselves from me are precisely those who condone prostitution, divorce, abortion and pornography, among other things. They are prepared to transform themselves in order to oppose me. The film—which I have not watched for health reasons—thus becomes a clownish distorting mirror revealing a system that subversively feeds on the energy of those who resist it.

I find it bizarre that KIRAC is publishing the film without my consent. At the same time, I see how counterproductive it is to argue with them about it. That is because I understand the drive to create. If I want to publish a book, I would not let myself be stopped; indeed, opposition would only make me more fanatical.

And that teaches me a great deal about myself. My strongest motivation is the drive to create. I would have risen much higher in politics if I had kept my mouth shut and remained colourless. Ultimately, however, financial gain and political status are not my motives. What drives me is the urge to create. With Wees Afgrondelijk I want to add a side aisle to the cathedral of my work.

The setbacks that recently thundered over me had dried up that creative energy; I hoped positive contact with Jini might rekindle it. In the words of my friend Remco Valkman: “It is fine that this happened. At least now a choice has emerged in political terms. Between grey mice whose every action and omission is guided solely by their careers, and an authentic, curious, creative individual, with all his strengths and vulnerabilities.”

As so often, life in this case is more clownish than comedy. Rumours about the film prompted the publisher De Blauwe Tijger to decide it no longer wanted to publish my book Wees Afgrondelijk. It is beyond irony—to be cancelled by a publisher closely monitored by the NCTV, the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism: a book whose subtitle is “the essence of being a bad person”. And if the framing now becomes “conservative thinker does something unconservative”, I once again recall the words of the late Francis van den Eynde.

Is this film the end of my career? Absolutely not. Look at politics: the leaders of the VVD, D66, CDA and CU can no longer stand one another, yet they are condemned to form a coalition together. All the problems that preceded the coronavirus crisis—the housing shortage, nitrogen regulations, immigration, energy bills—have only become more pressing. Added to these are the polarisation and division of a vaccination and QR-code society. This system is a time bomb, and my analyses will prove increasingly relevant as time passes. The commotion about this film merely shows how the media system strains at the seams to divert attention from essentials to side issues. “Bread and circuses”, as Guido Fox put it.

What this commotion also illustrates is the power of the absolute now. And that we humans have come to live in a mediatised reality of an “eternal present”. So when Jini posts a photograph announcing pornography, everyone accepts it as the absolute end, the irrevocable conclusion of an “intellectual career”. In the longer term, things are more nuanced, if only because the atmosphere and context of the recording are not pornographic, but instead concern a search for mutual acceptance and an authentic intimate connection.

The value of this commotion is that it shows how the most subtle emotions—precisely those that make life worth living—are buried beneath the outrage of an eternal present, in which everything appears to coincide definitively and for ever, while of course nothing is less definitive than outrage and the frenzy of the day.

The master has failed more times than the novice has ever tried.