People are Abominable

I am in a particularly virulent mood. I cannot look on a human aspect without an absolute, boiling disgust quivering across my form. I barely know how to equate this with my political tendencies - it is a fairly conservative view, to declare that men are inherently wicked and do not deserve trust. More than this, that they must be governed with perspicacity, lest they gain sufficient freedom to bring their baleful nature to its black denouement.

Yet this is not how I view man. I have immense belief in man's potential, and do not think mankind wicked by nature. What I do think is that man has been led from the path of virtue by a wicked system, a system designed to breed competition and greed. I have always despised competition; games such as chess are invariably toxic to my mood - one either loses and feels inadequate, or wins and feels guilty. This is precisely why arrogance is such an abhorrent trait. To say that one is great at something is a relative statement, implying the inferiority of one's coevals. Any truly virtuous person would never brandish such a statement to begin with. It is only the wicked who see competition as so important, and see the diminution of another's confidence as perfectly acceptable. This is also why the value of British understatement is, well, understated. There is something caring in the way one might wish to inflate another's confidence, whilst also feigning utter uninterest in one's own deficiencies.

All sports to me are disgusting. The idea of a team churns my stomach like some industrial vat. What I do enjoy are video games, particularly when there is no winner and no loser. To win or to lose is such a bizarre, yet brutal, notion. Absolutes are best avoided.

One idea I have always found odd is that of nationalism. The idea is that one must be proud of one's nation, for what reason we do not know, but pride we must nurture. First, I detest unjustified emotion - it is the most hollow parody of care imaginable. Secondly, as I mentioned earlier, praise is relative, and to bruit one's own abilities is to soil another's. There is to me something supercilious in this absolute desire to be the best, to win, to defeat others. This is a sadistic notion. In nationalism we see the sublimation of the malice in competition.

Furthermore, nationalism has no rational basis, as far as my senses can perceive. Comedy often reveals hidden inconsistencies in the absurdity of its comparisons - George Carlin said of nationalism that:

I could never understand ethnic or national pride. Because to me, pride should be reserved for something you achieve or attain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth. Being Irish isn’t a skill, it’s a fucking genetic accident. You wouldn’t say “I’m proud to be 5’11”. I’m proud to have a predisposition for colon cancer.” So why the fuck would you be proud to be Irish, or proud to be Italian, or American or anything?

I think this is the key. National pride reduces the individual to a triviality. It is the abnegation of the responsibility we all bear - to be kind to others, and to be virtuous. 'Pride should be reserved for something you achieve or attain on your own.' Why am I to be proud of the sixty million others who happen to fall into some arbitrary, geographical boundaries? Pride should be something that is earned by the display of immense virtue, not by geographical proximity. This reduces achievement itself. There is something grudging and spiteful in nationalism. Think of the Olympics. 'This person won a gold medal!' 'They're not British. Not interested.' This kind of petty, spiteful idiocy is so entrenched that its deracination is probably impossible. More than this, to contradict its progression is considered tremendously infra dig.

That most sanguine of philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote of nationalism that:

The cheapest form of pride however is national pride. For it betrays in the one thus afflicted the lack of individual qualities of which he could be proud, while he would not otherwise reach for what he shares with so many millions. He who possesses significant personal merits will rather recognise the defects of his own nation, as he has them constantly before his eyes, most clearly. But that poor beggar who has nothing in the world of which he can be proud, latches onto the last means of being proud, the nation to which he belongs. Thus he recovers and is now in gratitude ready to defend with hands and feet all errors and follies which are its own.

I think there is truth in this too. Then nationalism is a solace for those who do not wish to perfect the soul, who do not wish to improve humanity. It is a lazy path to contentment, vicariously sapping others' abilities. It is parasitical. The irony in nationalism is that it is the abjuration of responsibilities which would be a legitimate source for pride, which really would improve people's lives. To say one is proud that this country produced The Beatles is not as beneficial as to say one wishes to achieve something similar. In fact, to claim the achievements of The Beatles as one's own does precisely the converse - it eliminates the need to achieve this for oneself. I scarcely need to add that I find this negation in nationalism quite deleterious.

That was a fairly lengthy excursion into a fairly unrelated topic. I had not even considered nationalism as I sat down to write this, my mind being absorbed in more quotidian nonsense. However, what I intended to lament was perhaps more important, perhaps more lodged in the gullet of modern civilisation. It is that all can be reduced to greed. Invoke any single action anyone has ever taken, and now consider what personal motives they had. As an example, I am writing this blog with the vague hope it might improve my idiosyncratic writing style. Additionally, this is probably CV-fodder for the future. If this happened to be a blog with more than 2 readers per calendar month, I might also be accused of having commercial ambitions.

Perhaps some self-service is not wicked, but this is not the point I wish to make. The point I wish to make is that it is perfectly easy to look on the world and see only grim rapacity. This sphere becomes a stage for Plutus and his multifarious guises. All becomes hostile, and nobody cares for another. I do try to resist this conviction's reification in my mind, but I fear it to be true. Even love is a biological impulse, with self-service convolving round its entire being. Then, if this is true, what is the world but a desolate landscape of hostility? People care for others insofar as it might cause benefits to redound on themselves. You may notice this has engendered a kind of systemic paranoia in my mind. I cannot look without shivering despair on a world in which all emotion is expedient. Broadly speaking, all interaction you experience with others, dear reader, will fall under one of two gross categories. First, there are those who interact with you out of friendship or familial relation. These people gain some degree of satisfaction from the traits you offer. Second, there are those who are paid to care about you. This is altogether more invidious. Yet both are self-serving.

I do not know what I mean to conclude from all this. Self-serving must be tolerated if one is to remain sane in society. Yet when one marks its presence, it becomes impossible to regard the world as anything other than alien, atomic and strewn with malevolent robots who respect one only when one nourishes them.

'This is all very righteous, are you suggesting you are not greedy and self-serving?' I hear you snarl. Of course I do not suggest that I am free from mankind's horrific bonds, and this is what makes such truths doubly degrading. I, supposedly free, observe iniquity in my contemporaries and shudder as I realise those same iniquities are buried in my core too. Then I consider the immense reconfiguration everything would have to undergo to rectify this, and I am seized by dejection.

Some wanker is hammering on something upstairs, and I really do wish they would fuck in an offward direction. I will remember to exact my revenge in blog post form. Anyway, congratulations if you made it this far, I scarcely did.

There's Not a Joy the World Can Give by Lord Byron

There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away
When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay;
'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so fast,
But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past.

Then the few whose spirits float above the wreck of happiness
Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt, or ocean of excess:
The magnet of their course is gone, or only points in vain
The shore to which their shivered sail shall never stretch again.

Then the mortal coldness of the soul like death itself comes down;
It cannot feel for others' woes, it dare not dream its own;
That heavy chill has frozen o'er the fountain of our tears,
And though the eye may sparkle still, 'tis where the ice appears.

Though wit may flash from fluent lips, and mirth distract the breast,
Through midnight hours that yield no more their former hope of rest,
'Tis but as ivy-leaves around the ruined turret wreath -
All green and wildly fresh without, but worn and grey beneath.

Oh, could I feel as I have felt, or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene;
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,
So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me.

I've been perched above the keyboard for some time, like a kind of domesticated vulture which has been told to write minutes for a business meeting. 'Where the fuck do I begin with this?' it would think in its vulturine tongue, claws lacerating the cheap plastic keys. The Tower of Babel would rise between it and the screen, precluding all expression on this decidedly English keyboard. For how might a vulture express itself if it cannot command a language common with its recipients? Indeed, how might it express itself if it cannot command a language common with its own heart? Words, for all their power, are blunt instruments, representing only vaguely what one might wish to say at any given point. It takes an incredible manipulator of these blunt objects to make something at all incisive. I can't make anything except rock soup at the moment. What I can do is read poems other people have written and hope that they approximate my thoughts. Then I post them on my moaning, anile blog and scavenge from the corpses. In this respect, the vulture is awakened to one of the secrets of life; I think it is important to learn from the lives of dusty, dead people. For one thing, they are usually far more interesting than shiny, non-dead people, who largely seem to lurch through life with their massive, cruciferous skulls filled with quotidian wank. 'Bread,' they say, 'need bread so don't die,' heaving their unwilling cadaver to the local supermarket (a word which warrants neither the root 'super' nor 'market'). All people seem to strive to perfect is the somatic, the material, the pointless. This is the capitalist delusion. But no more talk of capitalism here! 

What can I say of this poem? It describes my thoughts at present. In fact, I have always suspected that all people live the double life presented in stanza four, but I of course cannot be certain. It's perfectly possible to be affable and kind when one is flayed inside. Indeed it is not just possible but predictable. Look at people as you walk in public - there is usually something degraded in their aspects, some kernel of woe. I cannot stand this delirious notion that everybody is oh so happy. Of course this cannot be true, but what is so maddening is that people portray themselves as such. Anybody who is truly happy is ignorant to the black truth of the world.

This is why I begrudge animals their passivity, their galvanic responses to all of life's stimuli. By dispensing with this nonsense of rationality, they live in the present. More than this - they can only live in the present. There is nothing to suggest that an earwig has a conception of its mortality, or its ageing, or its evanescence. We live in the past, the present and the future, and thereby do not live at all. The blank walls of infinity which compass our brief spans somehow suffocate what we do have until we have nothing at all. Man treats himself so seriously - I sit here typing at a keyboard, a colossal shrew in a rotating chair. The vulture I discussed earlier, perhaps. What kind of perverse world is this? I'm sat in a library with solemn faces, Easter Island moai, strewn round me at indeterminate points, tapping plastic nodules on a plastic oblong. Their craggy features peer down on the buttons, to make sure order is maintained in the World of the Keys. This is our significance. We are a strange sect of button-tappers, bedizened in the most gaudy, modern clothing imaginable. Our god is Solemnity and our purpose is self-denial to the end. I do hope I'm not going mad. Yet there is something utterly bizarre in this entire experience. The concept of a library is the most ordered, artificial, sterile conceit. What is there here but dullness and waiting? Really, these people look as if they have been exhumed out of formaldehyde. 'The mortal coldness of the soul' descended on these people in the womb, I fear. Conceived in the freezer aisle, perhaps. People are dull and this is all. We should all be either screaming or laughing. Instead, we sit, composed like dead things, propped up with brittle bones through, in many cases, regrettable items of clothing. This is humanity today - domesticated and dull. I cannot bring myself to be excited at humankind - it really does tire me. Yet, like a hopeful fool, I return to it, arms wider, only to be rebuffed with improved vitality. I do wonder sometimes if it is I that is dull, and all the world is riotously interesting.

I don't know what happened in that last paragraph. I feel as if my brain has wept characters onto a page. I didn't even particularly discuss the poem. This is the first time I've ever composed a blog post in a library, and my misanthropic tendencies have made a grand appearance. Yet this is how I feel. 

They Can Take My Sunrise, but They'll Never Take My Insanity

I think there is something quite steadying about the sunrise. There is a brief, primeval moment every morning when all things are silent and the world itself seems to be an aching parody of its own construction. For a moment, all else is subjugated under its umber majesty. All wickedness and greed is illuminated for the day. There is something deeply important in all this, but it is difficult to entirely apprehend. I think perhaps it is that this sunrise could be anybody's - Homer's, Virgil's, Shakespeare's; there is, in something so decidedly non-human, a humanism and connection with all mankind. It is the only time I am truly hopeful. Something both so fleeting and universal seems too profound to ignore. There is the brief misapprehension in the beholder of this mute spectacle that everything is possible and all is life. All nature is sublimated in some benign warmth, as if everything has been designed to be looked upon only in the morning.

Besides all this, the sunrise itself is rather beautiful. Clouds huddle around the horizon, billowing like torrents of whipped cream. A flamelike glow begins to imbue the air itself with divinity, and presages the arrival of the protagonist in this ignored play. The clouds commingle with the flames, that they might subdue their grandeur, and a colossal elemental fugue holds sway over all things for mere minutes. Groundlings are irradiated with grace as the two abstracts coil round one another in monstrous counterpoint. Neither faction wins, but why should one? This is, after all, a grossly human concept. There is something beautiful in the indifference of nature - man's indifference, on the other hand, is not indifference at all, rather a languid mask on hostility or emotional ignorance.

Then, like an ethereal monarch addressing a mumbling crowd, the sun rears up and all is serene. Some unearthly ataraxy extinguishes all rebellion. A brief few minutes follow, where the sun makes its address, and all things make sense. The world, the obdurate world filled with so much misery, is heaved together in one reluctant lurch, and sits in harmony for a while, until its dull components find an excuse to slip out of the nearest exit and go back to their toil. The sun is pulled from its bed, as with an impossible vacuum, and time resumes.

I enjoy all of this. Presently, however, I feel like I might weep. There is some dreadful machinery gnashing away at galvanised steel, screaming imprecations with its industrial larynx. I find nothing beautiful here, but more than this there is some kind of idiotic, human ignorance towards this grand spectacle unravelling behind it - it is the indifference I mentioned earlier. Worse still than this, the human indifference in the pursuit of money - building grotesque crypts for monetary gain - has blocked my view of the sunrise. All near me is grey, reconstituted sludge: Lovecraftian horrors frozen into place by chemicals. This was almost intolerable, but I still had the sunrise to look on. I had a view, above a car park, of fields rolling into the distance, sealed at the edges with grand hills. There was some vicarious freedom in this. I used to be able to observe the sunrise, imbibe its stillness, forget the quotidian, demotic nonsense man buries himself in. It was only for a short moment, but it was enough. Now it is as if the economic system itself is resolved to destroy me. I'm locked in a grey quadrangle, and I feel like screaming with the machinery which made it happen.

The only time I might observe the sun is at midday, when it has reached a far more punitive stature, searing its victims with infernal beams. The day has begun, people are moving around, and I am not interested in this state at all.

There is something wholly transcendent about the sunrise, which I now must cease to observe. People might laugh at ancient civilisations who worshipped the sun as some incredible demiurge which brought prosperity, but I think this is preferable by far to what we have today. Besides, if we actually looked on the sunrise, we might come to a similar conclusion. But no - we are far too busy for such trivialities! Money must be made! This is the most delirious notion man has yet created, an endless hurricane of prosperity which will make us happy, won't it? We may mock belief, but all we believe in today is money. The desk is the prayer mat and the central bank is the pulpit. We're baptised in an illusion of wealth, that we might gain a taste for it. Then crowd the earth with dull buildings, nothing else is important. For me the occlusion of the sunrise has been the occlusion of the soul.

The Religiosity of Economics

It's Sunday as I type this. Foul machines churn away outside my window with a disgusting arrogation. There is the insistence that everyone should listen to this grinding, whirring field of dissonance at all times. There is, in the brazenness with which this crap is presented to me, the firm insistence that capitalism is the moral superior in this world.

Some wretched building is being constructed. I can only assume it is incomplete, as it resembles some Eastern European abandoned tenement. The thing is hideous. All buildings are now built with cost as the limiting factor. Nothing beautiful is built. Think of all the economically inadvisable buildings religion has brought us. Now do the same for capitalism. I think what I am saying is that capitalism doesn't even have the self-respect religion has. There is no joy in capitalism, no effort is made beyond that which is absolutely necessary, and there is no charm in anything built under its black pennons. The grey edifice I mention is being built like a kids' puzzle, massive ashen ramparts sealed into place with inert sludge. Even bricks are too indulgent for this beast.

As a child there was always a terrible fear for me that my Kinder Surprise might in fact be a wicked surprise - the charge within might simply be a solid lump of plastic, a one-piece toy. This, to the curious, growing mind, is of no use at all. They could just as easily have printed a plastic middle finger for me to play with. The same may soon be true of buildings - lowered into place by a huge crane and opened immediately.

I think what I'm aiming to illustrate is that the anodyne, banal efficiency of capitalism is sapping the joy from everything. Nothing can be done anymore to amaze or subjugate the senses. I do seriously believe that the quality of literature has been inversely proportional to the scale of capitalism over the years. All is done for money now - in my opinion the last true repository for matchless art was the Romantic Era, but the Romantic artist is absolutely incompatible with the modern age. The concept of the individual as key in the construction of art is nonsense nowadays, for the only things that will be written are those which please the masses. Do not mistake my meaning - many of the Romantics were wildly successful, but society has changed since that time. A kind of apathy permeates everything at present, a dull philosophy of expedience holds sway in the construction of all things. Marx writes of the economic base determining the superstructure, and he is of course correct to do so. I used to think the idea fanciful, a grand conclusion tailored to his argument, but of course this is true. If the study of economics has taught me one thing, it is that economics is utterly corrosive, and necessarily corrupts all thought. And all things in this sphere are reduced to a horrendous self-interest, the concept of rationality barely supporting that of kindness. Labour is a factor of production in the same way as land or machinery, a homogenised input. This is as humbling as religion, in fact it is more so. Religion at least values each person as beautiful and divine, if in subjection to a higher being. Capitalism keeps the subjection and disposes with the exaltation. This is servility. This is the distillation of the religious impulse. This is the desolation of the soul.

Then, is being shackled to economic facts, impelled to construct hideous buildings of a Sunday, any better than being forced to attend church on a Sunday? I think it is worse. Even the church cannot quash rebellion in the mind, yet capitalism requires far more interaction. To undermine religion it is enough to simply stop believing; one might stop believing in capitalism but it will not wither away. One must pretend to love the machine, one must pretend to praise one's chains. And there can be no sedition when one's physical movements contradict one's thoughts. Soon the worm of resistance is crushed. And not just crushed, but inverted on its host. How much pretending can one take part in before one is believing?

On Meritocracy

Meritocracy has assumed an almost axiomatic stature in liberal democracy. The idea goes that those who are the most competent, wise and intelligent should have the most power. This sounds fairly unobjectionable, as these are the people who are best placed to improve society, and they should make more reasoned decisions than their gibbering coevals. Furthermore, advocates would say that the people who benefit society the most should receive the most remuneration. This also seems fair.

However, despite all this, and it may be due to my two-day abstention from sleep, I sense something quite repulsive in this doctrine. Those who uphold the virtues of a meritocratic system, and this seems to be most people in the 'public sphere', often brandish meritocracy as a weapon against birthrights - republicans tell us the royals are a load of useless fools, many others campaign against hereditary peerships and such. All of this is on the basis that your place in life should not be informed by mere accident of birth. You may already see the irony here - meritocracy values qualities which only occur through accidents of birth. In other words, the whole concept of meritocracy whiffs of the desire to realign birthrights that they might benefit those who so piously declare meritocracy's sanctity - namely, intellectuals. I have always housed, in the recesses of my mind, the unwelcome thought that politics might merely be a stage for greed - each side calling for a realignment of wealth in their favour. I have the same worry about meritocracy.

I do not suppose I would have embarked upon this blog post had I not had a practical interaction with this theory just now. The story is not a story at all, and so I will summarise: I have found I cannot look on cleaners without execrable pangs of empathy coiling round the throat. The idea that somebody can be consigned to a life of drudgery - most toil is drudgery, but relative drudgery even - on the basis that their genes were organised in a way so as to preclude more respectable work (or, more likely, that they have been deprived of all opportunity, but let us leave this for the moment) stirs in me a grand sense of injustice. I feel a ridiculous need to apologise, or to vow avengement, or to help them clean, yet none of these options uproots the system. I don't think my response is necessarily a common one, however. How often might one observe the rubbishing of someone who works at McDonald's or Burger King? A great deal of people seem to maintain a wicked, spiteful superiority on the whole matter. 'I was born more intelligent, more beautiful, more virtuous than you!' they seem to warble. How abominable. If the same person were to boast their vast inheritance, they would certainly be met with great odium. Accidents of birth are quite fine to broach if they are personal characteristics, and I think this is explained in part by the fact that intelligence can always be dismissed as hard work. Deeming a person lazy is far more acceptable than to deem them dimwitted. This, in turn, is acceptable because work is so deified and lionised in this perverse world of ours.

I'm not at all sure where I am going with this. I'm placing my thoughts upon the dais of bland, syntactic sterility, that I might engender some tranquility in this fucking mind of mine. The conscience is a terrible, but of course necessary, thing. The agony of the critic is that things are rarely amenable to change. To be against capitalism in this world is almost to be against humanity itself; it is so stained into everything around us that to question it requires a Herculean lurch in the mind. I feel bound by a punitive indolence at all times, and the horrors which flit before my eyes with such desolating energy remind me only of my powerlessness.

The fact of the world is that there are people who clean bins for forty hours per week, and simultaneously there are people who have so much money that they could drop £50 with every step and never notice. Under meritocracy, this is all quite fine. I recognise that incentives must be maintained, and we do need the boons the elite shower on the rabble, but I cannot support a system where such ferocious inequality is not only countenanced but actively encouraged. It is a function of the system, not a terrible aberration in its development. People accept things as 'the way the world works', but why? This is a gross abnegation of responsibility. It might be the way the world works, but that doesn't mean it should be. We look on the animal kingdom with horror at its indifference to life, but capitalism achieves much the same thing, if in a far more insidious way. We like to think of ourselves as quite separate from the barbarism of beasts, and you might call someone an animal if they were grotesque in their behaviour, but markets perfectly emulate the savagery of the animal kingdom (indeed, Keynes talked about 'animal spirits' as key in economic behaviour).

That's all. I think I've got that out of my system. What I cannot get out of my system is the guilt and empathy at others' woes and the simultaneous plaint over my own.

Hypochonder by Goethe

Der Teufel hol das Menschengeschlecht!
Man möchte rasend werden!
Da nehm ich mir so eifrig vor:
Will niemand weiter sehen,
Will all das Volk Gott und sich selbst
Und dem Teufel überlassen!
Und kaum seh ich ein Menschengesicht,
So hab ichs wieder lieb.


Prose translation:

Spleen
Devil take the human race! It's enough to drive one crazy! I keep making such firm resolutions to stop seeing people altogether and consign the whole nation to God and itself and the devil! And then I have only to catch sight of a human face and I love it again.

*

Isn't it incredible how a poem written in a language of which one has a poor understanding can be so melodious? This said, I do wish I could understand this without the notes - I can't imagine reading a translation of Byron or Shakespeare and receiving even a tenth of its magniloquence. There's also, as I'm about to explain, a weird sense of paranoia surrounding translations, at least for me there is. Even if the poet himself were to translate it, passion is such an evanescent thing that the translation would probably seem anaemic in comparison. This must be magnified hugely when translated by someone who did not even pen the piece to begin with. 

For example, I am not sure why my copy of this poem translates 'Hypochonder' to 'Spleen' - my German is remarkably bad but translation websites accord with what one might naturally assume and translate it to 'Hypochondriac' instead. I therefore hope the translator of my edition is not merely positing the words he feels are most conducive to the tone of each poem (n.b. 'splenetic', the adjective form of 'spleen', is one of the most entertaining words in existence. It explodes out of the mouth like some sort of incisor-punctured cherry tomato, laving acidic juices against the recipient's heretofore untomatoed countenance. Or, if you like, it unfurls like a colossal worm, cascades from the larynx like pestilence from Death's unholy maws and molests one's interlocutor. I'm all for plurality of description.) 

I do try not to type arrant bollocks, I really do. I know the success:fail ratio in this is pretty unflattering, but it's in my in-tray. Well then, solemnity mode activated: I am of the opinion that misanthropy, as expressed in this poem, is terribly misunderstood. Misanthropists are assumed to be base, maleficent, and overridingly pessimistic. I argue the opposite - misanthropists are frustrated optimists, they are so hopeful that their hopes cannot but be crushed. Misanthropists feel more keenly than most the wickedness of Man, and come to hate what they cannot alter. In short, misanthropy requires of its holder, more often than not, a great expectation of men; indeed, it is paradoxically those who are satisfied with mankind who debase it with their low estimation of its potential. Expressing satisfaction with man's monstrosities is certainly more wicked than to think man can do infinitely better. It is they who are pessimistic, it is they who wish to see humankind crushed under the weight of its own incompetence. It requires a horrendous individual to look on the atrocities mankind commits with such grim regularity and maintain no contempt for it. One might argue that mankind also does nice things, an argument I would refute on factual grounds but also on logical grounds - this is like saying, 'Yes, it is true that Ian from next door murdered my dog, but he is not evil! He sent me an elaborate Christmas card the very same year.' I say it takes a weak fool, and even an evil fool, not to condemn evil where it is reposed.

Surely this can be the only explanation of the sentiment of this poem. There is an instinctive love of mankind but also a resignation at its actions. A hopeless, despairing misanthropist as popularly perceived would not have this instinctive love of humanity, rather a sterile and irrational hatred to mankind's entire being. One must remember: misanthropy is, at its core, an unwelcome paradox. It is hate founded in love. It is the act of gazing with utter despair on the desecration of something profound and delicate; baying hopelessly at a swelling edifice of hate, ignorance and cauterising turpitude which compasses with malignance the sacrosanct. Misanthropy is the hallmark of the troubled soul.

I am supposed to be writing an essay on public expenditure. Though public expenditure is one of my heart's ferocious passions, and indeed I am known for my propensity to discuss, in violent terms, public expenditure in my sleep, I oddly find this more interesting. This blank, infinite, indifferent box of nothingness into which I am burying words which will certainly not be read is more interesting than public expenditure. I know - crazy talk... public expenditure is commonly held to be the most interesting topic humankind has contrived, yet I am a man of radical views and I will assert my unpopular opinion to the last. I will even go so far as to say, at the risk of inciting a riot, that public expenditure is overrated. It has become a concern for the masses, and is totally exhausted as a lode for refined enjoyment. Frankly I have stopped caring about public expenditure, and I urge you, against your heart's judgement, to join me in my disaffection. It simply will not be as fashionable in five years as it appears today. And, with this vaticination, I leave you gaunt and harrowed, like the stump of a felled tree. Avaunt!