The fundamental difference in this, between people like The Viking and people like me is that he feels he lives in a safe, fair place, where everything is orderly and above board, and good is rewarded, bad punished. For myself, i feel profoundily ill at ease in the world of human society. i see it as The Matrix, a lie, a system rigged to punish original thought and integrity, and to reward stupidity and servility. My whole life’s experience has led me here; whether that qualifies me to see clearly, or merely explains why i’m wrong, i myself cannot judge. We all think we’re right, of course.
My parents were ill-meaning buffoons. My first memory of school is, age about 5, being run into by a girl in the playground; we both fell down, she started crying; a teacher came over, pointed at me and shouted accusingly, “I saw what you did!” And so on. At every stage of education, my teachers have largely been dysfunctional morons. i did badly at school, my brain not really waking up till i was 19. i found university to be largely a self-serving system of bullshit, in which patronising lifers stifled any real thought or learning, encouraging servility either in the overt form of Literary Theory or, slightly more subtly, giving bad marks to anything that deviated too far from the official line. The exceptions had either been sacked or relegated to tiny offices and treated like scum.
i’ve been unemployed for two years, and temped - mainly at minimum wage data entry - for another three. i’ve been rejected for about 250 jobs.
Looking at myself from the outside, how could such a temp not distrust authority? 95% of the ‘authority figures’ i’ve met were fakes. i’m not enough of a Gnostic to hate the physical world; but the world of human society seems almost purposefully designed as a prison.-Elberry
