Red Pill

My doctors were fundamentally servants of the status quo. Their work was predicated on the assumption that the world is bearable, and anyone who finds it otherwise should be coaxed or medicated into acceptance. But what if it isn’t? What if the reasonable reaction is endless horrified screaming?

I THINK IT IS POSSIBLE to track the onset of middle age exactly. It is the moment when you examine your life and instead of a field of possibility opening out, an increase in scope, you have a sense of waking from sleep or being washed up onshore, newly conscious of your surroundings. So this is where I am, you say to yourself. This is what I have become. It is when you first understand that your condition—physically, intellectually, socially, financially—is not absolutely mutable, that what has already happened will, to a great extent, determine the rest of the story. What you have done cannot be undone, and much of what you have been putting off for “later” will never get done at all. In short, your time is a finite and dwindling resource. From this moment on, whatever you are doing, whatever joy or intensity or whirl of pleasure you may experience, you will never shake the almost-imperceptible sensation that you are traveling on a gentle downward slope into darkness.

Now what I think of when I think of my “self” is the atrocious waste of my years.

Plot is the artificial reduction of life’s complexity and randomness. It is a way to give aesthetic form to reality.

What if the Reasonable Reaction to the World is Endless Horrified Screaming?

Maybe I am one of the last people in history who will feel the things I do. Maybe everything I hoped about the world, and hoped to bring about in it, is doomed to fail. Instead of learning useful things, I have filled my brain with obsolete philosophies, ideas with no more purchase or veracity than the four humors or spontaneous generations. I could say I regret it all, the useless information, but what would be the point? It’s too late now. These are the elements that make me who I am.

Alone, we are food for the wolves. That’s how they want us. Isolated. Prey. So we must find each other. We must remember that we do not exist alone.

Systems, however metaphysical or abstract, are never innocent.

Le seul mot d'ordre politique qui m'ait un jour ému était: Ne travaillez jamais, et ma tentative d'appliquer ce principe s'était heurtée aux obstacles prévisibles. Le problème, c'est que le dehors n'existe pas, que le marginalisé n'a nulle part ou aller.

Everything he said sounded like a dare, an outrage that was taken back as soon as it came out of his mouth. I meant it, I didn't mean it. Sorry, not sorry.

You do strike me more as the secular type. A believer in progress, religion of the liberals.