I can no longer write as I could in the following piece, which was constructed, as I recall, on a bench somewhere in Bath, itself an unusual setting for me - I cannot usually write amongst humanity. It may have been posted here before, but I shan't go to the effort of actually checking this (I can conceive of few things more tedious than reading my own blog posts).
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I look on these people, sliding along the ground before me, and experience some decoction of utter woe. There is no joy here. People move because it is necessary to their economic fetters. Nobody really gives a fuck about anything that is occurring outside their dull sphere. Indeed, they do not even give a fuck about what is occurring inside their dull sphere, but they pretend to. You can see, as these disposable faces drift past like grey souls on a twilit marsh, complete dejection in every countenance. Then observe the bearings of people's strides - straight lines, no curiosity, no interaction with anything. This is to say, no effort is made to explore or to enjoy. This blasted economic system has crushed the joy out of everything. People have Places To Be, people have Things To Do. It's all terribly austere. Freedom cannot exist under such circumstances. Freedom cannot exist when one is impelled to be in places one despises, to deign to stoop to actions one abominates. Of course, I think we all know this secretly. Yet we deny it at every turn!
Take the vilification of prostitutes. In this phenomenon we see the concentration of mankind's disenfranchisement. It is the offloading of personal despair upon an extraneous proxy. 'Ha, how degrading it is to feign love, to feign attraction, to feign life itself.' Yet this is our common woe! The fact that most of us do not sell sex is neither here nor there - the lion's share of our abilities, our ambitions, our talents, is siphoned off by a malevolent system. We hold the business of prostitution as some base, alien, humbling thing. It is in fact the occupational rarefaction of the condition of the soul under capitalism. We are all prostitutes. I say this with utterly solemnity. That we seem only to recognise physical subjugation, and not its pernicious coevals, says more of our narrowness of mind than the fact itself.
If we are, then, to hurl derision on those paphian entrepreneurs, it must only be in the following sense: it can only be, must only be, as part of a recognition of, and an assault on, our common subjection. If the profession is to be the victim of ridicule, it must only be so in the knowledge that we are not offloading our woe, but embracing it. It must be an exercise in common anguish.
This is a common theme in history. We have always adored the idea that our own insecurities, our own abject melancholia might be mollified by blaming another. Of course this is the whole point of the scapegoat. At present, we blame individual companies for tax evasion - Amazon, Starbucks, Vodafone, the list is too long for this infinite box to house. But what we do not do is question the system which sanctions such injustice. We do not question that our laziness, our ignorance, our own bumbling satisfaction in this economic system has led to this. It is the system which must change. To attack individual companies is brilliant for politicians - they can sit back and claim sanctity. Yet this does absolutely nothing to resolve the failings in the system. It is the annulment of responsibility.
I begin to think about my own childhood, and how I know my town exclusively because I trundled through it as a blithe youth. Were it not for this, I would only know the routes I explored by necessity. Who can make such an acknowledgement and escape without despair? We are born into this world, opportunity abounding at every turn, and freedom is stamped out of us wherever we roam. Wickedly, unnecessarily. I do not jest here - there is something worthy of colossal lamentation in this. 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,' declared Rousseau - the political philosopher subject to the most ridicule and pisstaking imaginable. Yet how is he wrong in his averment? The irony of the world today is that liberty is such an unquestionable axiom that nobody bothers to defend it.
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I look on these people, sliding along the ground before me, and experience some decoction of utter woe. There is no joy here. People move because it is necessary to their economic fetters. Nobody really gives a fuck about anything that is occurring outside their dull sphere. Indeed, they do not even give a fuck about what is occurring inside their dull sphere, but they pretend to. You can see, as these disposable faces drift past like grey souls on a twilit marsh, complete dejection in every countenance. Then observe the bearings of people's strides - straight lines, no curiosity, no interaction with anything. This is to say, no effort is made to explore or to enjoy. This blasted economic system has crushed the joy out of everything. People have Places To Be, people have Things To Do. It's all terribly austere. Freedom cannot exist under such circumstances. Freedom cannot exist when one is impelled to be in places one despises, to deign to stoop to actions one abominates. Of course, I think we all know this secretly. Yet we deny it at every turn!
Take the vilification of prostitutes. In this phenomenon we see the concentration of mankind's disenfranchisement. It is the offloading of personal despair upon an extraneous proxy. 'Ha, how degrading it is to feign love, to feign attraction, to feign life itself.' Yet this is our common woe! The fact that most of us do not sell sex is neither here nor there - the lion's share of our abilities, our ambitions, our talents, is siphoned off by a malevolent system. We hold the business of prostitution as some base, alien, humbling thing. It is in fact the occupational rarefaction of the condition of the soul under capitalism. We are all prostitutes. I say this with utterly solemnity. That we seem only to recognise physical subjugation, and not its pernicious coevals, says more of our narrowness of mind than the fact itself.
If we are, then, to hurl derision on those paphian entrepreneurs, it must only be in the following sense: it can only be, must only be, as part of a recognition of, and an assault on, our common subjection. If the profession is to be the victim of ridicule, it must only be so in the knowledge that we are not offloading our woe, but embracing it. It must be an exercise in common anguish.
This is a common theme in history. We have always adored the idea that our own insecurities, our own abject melancholia might be mollified by blaming another. Of course this is the whole point of the scapegoat. At present, we blame individual companies for tax evasion - Amazon, Starbucks, Vodafone, the list is too long for this infinite box to house. But what we do not do is question the system which sanctions such injustice. We do not question that our laziness, our ignorance, our own bumbling satisfaction in this economic system has led to this. It is the system which must change. To attack individual companies is brilliant for politicians - they can sit back and claim sanctity. Yet this does absolutely nothing to resolve the failings in the system. It is the annulment of responsibility.
I begin to think about my own childhood, and how I know my town exclusively because I trundled through it as a blithe youth. Were it not for this, I would only know the routes I explored by necessity. Who can make such an acknowledgement and escape without despair? We are born into this world, opportunity abounding at every turn, and freedom is stamped out of us wherever we roam. Wickedly, unnecessarily. I do not jest here - there is something worthy of colossal lamentation in this. 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,' declared Rousseau - the political philosopher subject to the most ridicule and pisstaking imaginable. Yet how is he wrong in his averment? The irony of the world today is that liberty is such an unquestionable axiom that nobody bothers to defend it.
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