Report to the Environmental Commission at the United Nations: in February, the children of the favelas in Bogotá occupied the inner city under the leadership of a Maoist professor. Subsequent bombing by the air force did not drive them out. (Apparently, the rebels tore their leader to pieces and ate him.) In April, Malinche, a heretofore unknown movement, mobilized Mexico’s children to storm the capital. To date, the death count is four million. In May, similar events occurred in São Paulo, Rio, Recife, and Belo Horizonte. The children control the entire area between Santos and Campinas. Recife has been leveled. Youth led by mullahs took over the lower course and the delta of the Nile and captured Cairo. The mutilation of all adults (castration and hand amputations) continues unabated. Similar rebellions are happening in Calcutta, Lagos, and Djakarta. Rebels everywhere consist of five- to fourteen-year-old children of both sexes who grew up on and in garbage heaps, and who are armed with razor blades and fish knives. (Girls occasionally carry babies in their arms.) Physically, they are underdeveloped. Their IQ is close to the level of idiocy. They also carry numerous viruses, some of which have yet to be identified. They display derisive contempt toward all adults. We here limit ourselves to phenomenological observations:

Despite being undernourished and diseased, the children are agile. Effortlessly, they climb up the fronts of skyscrapers. And despite their low IQ, they are nimble. They destroy complex systems such as cars with one crushing grip. They live in small gangs. They are sexually precocious and have an active sex life that entirely lacks emotion. They mutilate and murder each other, fight amongst themselves for drugs, and they unify only when seeking to entrap adults. Their outstanding mental abilities are brutality, cunning, distrust, and inventiveness. Their most striking feature is the absence of any stirrings of compassion. Shortly after birth they were ejected from the web of society and grew up parasitically as human waste on inhuman detritus. For them, all cultural information, like any waste product, has become blurred and amorphous. This explains their uniformity throughout the world. They are positioned, like any waste product, at the transition from culture to nature. They live approximately at the same level as the Lower Paleolithic, except that they didn’t, in fact, achieve that level from nature, but from industrial culture. Their habitat, metropolitan garbage, requires hunting methods different from those in the older Stone Age. They do not represent a prehistoric phenomenon, but one that is posthistoric. To recognize them, we therefore need to create new categories that are different from those that are outdated. Only when such new categories have become available will we be able to address the problem described here.

We have indeed tried to develop such categories. We concluded that we have to start with the second law of thermodynamics. From our perspective, waste, that is, the lifeworld of the children, is an environment that is not only hostile to life, but life-endangering. For those of us who inhabit culture, life is a negatively entropic process that stores and processes information, while waste is the opposite of life, an entropic process that deletes information. The children, however, have a concept of life that is contrary to ours. To them it is a process during which information is consumed, that is, eaten and destroyed. At issue here are two dialectically contradictory concepts of life and value systems. We inhabitants of culture put a positive value on producing, building, and creativity, while destruction, annihilation, and dissolution are negative. The children, as inhabitants of waste, think that quite the opposite is true. For us, culture is valuable because it stores information, and waste is a non-value because information is ground up into something amorphous. For the children, culture is value-free (as nature is to us) because it is only the start of consumption, and waste is valuable because information is en-valued, which means it is utilized and worn out. In short, we are in a fight against the second law of thermodynamics, and the children are in harmony with it.

This formulation allows us to appreciate this new life-form of which the children are emblematic. For example, we begin to understand their derisive contempt toward us and culture, and, likewise, the imaginative passion with which the children destroy cultural objects (such as using rubber tires as fuel and broken windows as weapons). This formulation also allows us to see a solution to the problem the children pose. Culture is to the children what nature is to us, that is, the natural resource of raw material that supports waste. Therefore, the children cannot annihilate us without risking perishing themselves for lack of waste. Should they wish to survive (which cannot be assumed given their engagement with entropy), they will have to tolerate us. Their reflections are not dissimilar from those of our economists: just as they must protect nature, the children will have to protect culture from overutilization.

As a result, we should embrace the following symbiosis between the children and ourselves: thanks to our production of culture, we will provide the waste products vital to them, and they will tolerate this. In formulating this suggested resolution, we realize that such a symbiosis has always characterized the succession of generations. Since the dawn of time, older generations have produced culture in order to be tolerated by the youth. Accordingly, we can report to the Committee that nothing new has occurred since February.