Reflections on Servitude

I have just been browsing my collection of notes, as if wishing to confirm my suspicion that I am slowly becoming worse - not better - at writing. It is not so much that my ability to string words together has been vitiated, though in my estimation it certainly has, but more noticeably it has been the absolute torpor of association which has set over everything I have written of late. It is as if I cannot bring myself to make connections, as if connections might be an acceptance of a world I largely detest. I feel more keenly than ever the harsh reality of Byron's words when he wrote: 'As I grow older, the indifference - not to life, for we love it by instinct - but to the stimuli of life, increases.'

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.

The Myth of Specialisation

Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
A poet's free and heavenly mind:
If bright chameleons should devour
Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
As their brother lizards are.
Children of a sunnier star,
Spirits from beyond the moon,
O, refuse the boon!


- Percy Bysshe Shelley, An Exhortation


We are reaching a bottleneck now - indeed, probably have reached it - at which society will cease to progress in any meaningful sense. Our philosophy will not be broadened, our hearts will not be deepened, and our minds will not be expanded. It is not, as many have claimed, that man cannot any longer know everything, but that he must know everything. Although it is perhaps true that knowledge is becoming more specialised, in some sense it has also become more general - though in sooth I do not know how this synchrony has occurred. Today authors must be marketing experts, poets must be orators, mathematicians must be financiers and architects must be risk assessors. Nobody can be alien to the exquisite agony of producing a CV, or surrendering the soul to the torment of a PowerPoint presentation, by which we might share our ridiculous findings with our still more ridiculous peers. All of this is, of course, illusory and nonsensical - as if committing some old rubbish to paper in pursuit of a job could ever say anything of the character. The CV is our modern mode of poetry. Just as poetry encapsulates and consecrates the spirit of the age, so the CV serves to illustrate the deformity that is the modern human - dull and lifeless, bound to the quotidian. Spiteful, adversarial, discriminatory, unfair, drowning in the specific (which is, after all, but an illusion) - in some sense our lives replicate and reflect the horrors of these damnable pieces of paper.

Yet I must go back to the idea of this corrupted specialisation, this generalised specific which infects with bluntness the arrow of human progression. Though I cannot claim to discern the exact origin of this phenomenon, I think it can reasonably be seen as the inevitable consequence of capitalism's endless march towards efficiency. Yet it is now devouring itself, sacrificing purity for profit. And of course, profit is a short-term phenomenon, like a flash of lightning to be captured in an instant, whereas knowledge, philosophy, art - whatever you wish to term it - is immortal, a great river which flows through the human heart. It is this which we persistently deplete in favour of the transient, the mundane. We build empires of dust, and all the while we make funeral pyres of gold. The base of capitalism is rooted in true nothingness, a vale of phantoms. The very core of its philosophy is illusory. This idiocy is allowed to reign because, well, idiocy is the prime comorbidity of power. Capitalism cares for nothing except the temporal and the present; indeed I have long suspected it to be a natural reaction to the prospect of death (though I will only expatiate on this when I have fully considered it). Certainly it entertains the concurrent tropes of life - short-termism and the search for endless progression or meaning. Its theme is essentially tragic, as a person searching in vain for something which was never there. Admittedly, in this sense it perhaps mirrors life itself, but it can offer no revelation, no wit, no charm, no recompense for sorrow. It is a distraction in the face of unknowledge - superficially pleasing but intellectually corrosive. It encourages us to categorise unknowns as if they were known, rather than to see them for the mysteries they are. The ultimate effect of which is, of course, to punch the final seal onto our lack of knowledge, to paste over the human heart with the sickly glaze of contentment. Capitalism cannot understand that love is a hunger, not a glut. It is a febrile agony, not a static appeasement. It is maniacal and unreasoned, not calculated and sterile.

I always find it curious that a thing so necessarily human, so buried in relations between men, can care so little for human beings, can impoverish the vast majority with no ramifications. It is an entirely human phenomenon which seeks to divorce us from all humanity, depriving us both of emotional experience and any true, sublime, unobstructed love. For everything is deceit when money is involved. Everything is bias.

Comedy - A Fragment

Comedy is essential to life - perhaps more essential than art. One will find with any cursory glance at the world that the most brutish, inhumane and unempathic are, whatever their differences, united by an almost inhuman lack of humour.

Comedy is our only way of dealing with such evil as evolution has set no precedent for. It is the only recompense in a blasted world - quite simply it is the tonic which sustains life. Without it, it would be immoral to continue. Comedy is rooted in tragedy - that is its paradox. Just as Byron wrote that,

Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,

So too do those with the most humour understand life's tragedy best - if subconsciously or not. In them is a knowledge and an empathy, a solemnity and reverence for the woe of others, which cannot but manifest itself in wit. They adopt an ironic view of life because cold honesty would be suicide. Comedy is the only force which might slam the book shut, which might restore the contents of Pandora's box.

Paradoxes are by their nature insoluble, and so we live our lives by them. They are the perfect elixir in a world so nonsensical and improbable that our senses cannot fully assay it. They allow us to indulge in the construction of infallible truth, which is in fact unwavering falsity. They allow us to exercise our need to define, to explain, whilst being loose enough that our parochial minds can graft them to a chimerical sphere. They have such an allure because they allow us to tread a line between eternity and desolation, and in this small sense to become transcendent. They are neither vagaries nor edicts, yet something stronger than either, something which strikes us most cleanly through the soul. They have in them the shattering blast of perdition and the soft whisper of a zephyr.

I find it fascinating that one of the prime generators of comedy is the absurd - this cannot be unrelated to absurdism in a philosophical sense. The absurd is hilarious because it is unresolved - it defies our rationality, which we find in some way to be the greatest transgression of all. The bizarre is something we subconsciously descry in the world. This, I am certain, is why so many jokes are made of the most appalling things. The internet is awash with jokes pertaining to Nazism and the Holocaust, neither of which should be remotely funny to the empathic being; it is that they corrupt our view of the world to such an extent that they are laughed off, indeed must be laughed off, for comedy is our only way of dealing with such unique horrors. The intangible grimness of such events is simply beyond our faculties, and cannot be processed in a human way. The laughter produced by such morbid jokes is always nervous - it is the isolation and banishment of something we are powerless to alter, for powerlessness is something that the self-conscious creature cannot brook, something which defies progress and civilisation in one deft move. Comedy is the release valve of the soul. This also explains our ridiculous need to make jokes of the recently dead - our only mode of grief in a godless world.

Flogging a Dead Horse

There is no satisfactory excuse for the great paucity of material populating this blog of late, but mercifully society does not require one of me. Indolence, idiocy and incompetence can all be adduced, and I do enjoy bearing these overlooked virtues, but I feel something else has been at work.

I have borne the suspicion for some time that I am becoming - have become, have always been, the distinction is trivial - immensely boring. Thought to me has been an art precluded for some time. There are two possible causes in my mind; first, that my surroundings, so fresh and gross two years ago with the novelty of university education, have been analysed and considered to such an extent that they no longer stimulate me (indeed, they stimulated me little to begin with); second, there is the more invidious possibility that this is it - I had a brief period of mental fecundity and now I am to endure a slow descent into inescapable dullness. Of course, I most dread the latter, the path most conducive to the prospect of future employment.

An ancillary pain in the arse is the effect this has on my writing - most notably, the absolute destruction of it. It is to be expected that one might have difficulty expressing one's thoughts when one has none to express, after all. This is the first piece of prose I have written in half a year, exempting numerous university essays, in which one's ability to feign interest is examined rigorously. Oddly, however, my ability to write (poor) poetry has remained undefiled.

Of course, this is probably due to the disparate natures of prose and poetry - the former requiring a fairly ordered, sustained stream of thought and the latter requiring an intense burst of verbal facility which transcends all else. Additionally, prose tends to be more governed by that beast rationality, whereas poetry tends to be more governed by emotion. It is only natural to assume that the ability to experience emotion is less affected by a terrible cessation in mental activity. Accordingly, there are great moments in which the ice is riven apart, usurped by its own weight, and something can be fished from out the depths. The fact that these scribblings are so much worse than those which I would choose to read willingly is a necessary part of the thrill at present. But then, if I were to look on anything I'd written and think, 'That's brilliant,' then the quest would probably be over. I think the point is to inherently despise one's output, thereby somehow constructing a bizarre paradox under which one is tricked into writing better (though this technique probably does assume a pre-existing masochism on the part of the writer).

I'm coming to the point now where I'm considering self-publishing these poems on Kindle or whatever blasted platform predominates at the time. I have the constant urge to document my thoughts before I am completely subsumed by illiteracy. As I've mentioned, however, poetry is quite different from prose, and I'm unsure of my views towards allowing others to read it. The prime motivation is preservation rather than communication, and I don't particularly expect any of it to be read. The excessive neuroticism which inheres to the poems is also quite a worry - I've essentially emulated the Romantic poets, whilst renouncing the vestiges of academia and amplifying the despair and anxiety. The end result is something quite bizarre, I fear.

Yet is this not the purpose of poetry and, more generally, writing itself? For those, like me perhaps, who suffer from a tremendous fickleness of thought, writing is one of the few viable modes of self-actualisation. In this quite simple sense it is the pillar which buttresses the awkward, anxious character. I have always found it perfectly impossible to marshal my thoughts in conversation, because a great deal of my faculties are perforce devoted to wrestling an immense self-awareness, and the production of a countervailing but entirely false aloofness. This problem is not present in writing because the audience is intangible and abstract and, furthermore, I am sheltered from its disgusted reactions to my nonsensical asseverations. It is with this nebulous audience in mind that I even consider the possibility of publishing poetry.

Lastly, there is the more general problem of the feculent nature of the poems concerned. Indeed, the word 'poetry' is probably a misnomer in this case. I have the dilemma - do I publish them now, in ignorance of their resounding dullness? Do I wait some years, in the hope that my scant powers have improved? Do I abandon the enterprise altogether? Something grossly arrogant can be perceived in taking the effort to publish anything, but this is not the spirit in which I apprehend the task. If I do eventually unleash my monstrosities, it will be in the knowledge that I am committing some great crime against good taste. But it will, as I have explained, assist in the expression and preservation of my increasingly dull personality, and to this end it may be a necessary evil.

The 'Vampire Thirst' of Economics

Constant capital, the means of production, considered from the standpoint of the creation of surplus-value, only exist to absorb labour... The prolongation of the working-day beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, only acts as a palliative. It quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour.

- Karl Marx

I just read an article by the economist Robert Skidelsky on some of the misapprehensions of modern economics. He describes how students of economics are more calculating than those who study other subjects - a fact I can sadly vouch for. I have found, at this small and parochial university, some of the most Machiavellian and frankly subhuman behaviour emanates from students of this damnable subject (including, to my own horror, myself at times).

This is a mode of study which encourages the economic expedience of personal relations, the futility of kindness, the idiocy of charity, and much more besides. I have found, from all but a limited few, acquaintances for whom my existence is a mere means to an end. I have found a kind of callousness which cares not for all it tramples on, and elevates itself to a deific magnificence. I have found friendship which endures precisely as long as the affair is mutually beneficial. The entire thing oozes greed and avarice.

It is difficult to entirely assay the noxious effects of regarding the world in purely monetary terms - and this is precisely what economics strives to do. In humanity we see only labour, in natural beauty we see only potential production, and in the human heart we see something to suppress, lest it impede our ability to generate money - this fantastic paper! The first thing they graft to the soul of the student of economics is the Midas touch - all such a student gazes upon is rendered in heaps of green paper. People talk to me and it is not words but reams of money which pour from their mouths. Tears roll from faces and glister in a shower of pound coins - shattering upon the ground in the most wasteful fashion. 

Then it is unsurprising that I feel with every breath during my lectures an assault upon the soul itself. This is not exaggeration - the purpose of this subject is not to inform but to destroy humanity, to reave from the heart the weak, economically fruitless instincts such as kindness and empathy. It is to render the world in its own black image, to ravage the beauty to which it cannot ascend. It is purely spiteful and wholly misinformed. Its basic precepts are all delusive, based on the assumption of the primacy of paper. In its bleak, solitary philosophy it creates an artificial wound, an ache for validation in the mundane. In its impersonal insouciance to life, its neglect of the soul, it creates perverse individuals whose desires are entirely irrational. Its currency is anguish and its product is neurosis.

I must quote The Communist Manifesto here, because it is quite perfect in its summary of this phenomenon. The work employs surprisingly abstract allegories and metaphors for such an ostensibly materialist piece of writing (though I do not, in sooth, think this a contradiction); there is something wholly poetic about it. Marx and Engels write:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors', and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. 

And so is the case with economics itself. To allow oneself to become so deluded by hideous lucre is a renunciation of natural instinct. It is to happily graft a dead accretion to the heart - entirely useless, arbitrary, composed of dust. I feel I have repulsed this poisoned chalice thus far, but I cannot say this has been possible without a cost, a cost which may perhaps have been even more injurious to the spirit, for it has required an almost galvanic rejection of expectations, company, and humankind. Yet I would sooner suffer this than be deluded by paper. 

On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year by Lord Byron

'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet, though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!

My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!

The fire that on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze—
A funeral pile.

The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
The exalted portion of the pain
And power of love, I cannot share,
But wear the chain.

But 'tis not thus — and 'tis not here —
Such thoughts should shake my soul, nor now,
Where glory decks the hero's bier,
Or binds his brow.

The sword, the banner and the field,
Glory and Greece, around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
Was not more free.

Awake! (not Greece— she is awake!)
Awake, my spirit! Think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,
And then strike home!

Tread those reviving passions down,
Unworthy manhood!— unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of beauty be.

If thou regret'st thy youth, why live?
The land of honourable death
Is here:— up to the field, and give
Away thy breath!

Seek out— less often sought than found—
A soldier's grave, for thee the best;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest.

Today is Byron's 226th birthday, a fact I was regrettably made to realise whilst filling in the date in an exam. I felt it was so representative of my life as a whole - incessantly teased with hints towards my real interests whilst completing something economics coerces me into. It is strange that most people in this country would consider themselves free when asked - when one really considers the world, it becomes quite clear that the individual under capitalism spends his entire life depleted and tyrannised by the weight of false necessity. Once we accept this as freedom, we will gladly accept the negation of the personality at the hands of others, and I believe this accounts for the preponderance of dull people at large today. The fact that all activity must be committed first for others is unconscionably inimical to the human spirit. 

I have a terrible habit of digressing wildly. The point is that this short poem is, in my opinion, one of the most challenging of Byron's (and also one of his last, if not his last). There is so much going on, and so many countervailing forces that it becomes difficult to discern his true feelings, and this is probably his intention. There is the conflict between youth and age, as must occur at an age such as 36, too old to really be a 'youth' but perhaps too young to really be a respectable adult. He writes of the death of passion and then, later, how adulthood impels him to 'Tread those reviving passions down'. Of course this is how encroaching adulthood feels - one is expected to be solemn and professional in today's world, and the word 'childish' is thoroughly derogatory in nature. There is with age a responsibility which is utterly baleful, and a burgeoning indifference to life's offerings, which Byron explained in a letter to Shelley: 'As I grow older, the indifference--not to life, for we love it by instinct--but to the stimuli of life, increases'. It is interesting to note that Byron died before he saw his 37th birthday, almost as if the emotional death of adulthood was a negation of his entire being, and that he was fated to embody the spirit of youth forevermore.

I cannot stay to chat, because I have another exam tomorrow, the content of which I am certain is relating to economics in some way, but I will use this evening to determine precisely this relationship. And thus we see freedom today - the freedom to be forced by that most vomitworthy thing, 'employment prospects', to do things one does not enjoy. Such is this distorted world. 

In Defence of Life

There is a fantastic sense of ennui to be savoured in the days following Christmas. A great spiritual malaise haunts all things, as if they had lived the previous year only that they might experience the 25th of December. Nothing quite knows how to occupy itself, nor how best to prepare for an impending year of drudgery once again.

Christmas also brings with it the imponderable joy of consuming vast amounts of animal flesh - a habit I abjured a year or so ago, and one which I do not intend to reinstate. The only shame I have of my vegetarianism is that I did not commit to it earlier. This said, the practice of eating corpses lost its charm for me a very long time ago, but I was not in control of my diet until I went to university. The sole benefit of university, as far as I can perceive - the ability to eat as one wishes! Vegetarianism in my parents' house is seen as some regrettable idiosyncrasy, or a meaningless act of defiance. But then, these are probably viable criticisms of much of my behaviour.

I have been considering this post for a few days now, and whether it is at all fitting in a friendly blog to assail the habits of others. Experience has revealed that I nurse an almost physical pain at the recognition that I have deliberately been unkind to another, and a blog post such as this can be interpreted as nothing other than deliberate. Yet I do not think I am attacking people, rather people's habits, and people's habits are often thrust upon them by necessity, or ignorance, or fear. Therefore I cannot intimate that a tenant of a habit is necessarily characterised by it, nor that they should receive praise or punishment for it. The virtue of the idea itself is all that can be assessed, and it is man's task to take up virtuous habits as he descries them. I can say no more than this - I am assessing ideas. If we were to live in a world in which we feared offending others at all times, little would be said, for every argument is multifaceted, and there are a lot of people in this world, each of whom any opinion may offend. Moreover, the problem with this unremitting intolerance to the possibility of offence is that it affords the timid and the unthinking the greatest power. We should not wish to live in a world in which it is possible for someone without a cogent argument to overwhelm somebody with one.

I was watching River Cottage yesterday - a fantastic programme about a man so middle-class that he felt the need to flee to the countryside, in ostensible renunciation of his privilege. I do like Hugh, but it must be rather more simple to adopt the righteous indignation of the eco warrior when one has been to Eton and Oxford, and boasts a double-barrelled name. It is as if he has said, 'OK, I lived the first 20 years of my life in the upper echelons of this corrupt system; but, now that I have nothing more to sap from it, I'm quite happy to live the life of a peasant.' How charming. The whole show is undercut with the sense that he is exorcising some grim eidolons from his soul.

Anyway, this is all ancillary. What irked me was the way in which animals were treated, and the bizarre attitudes evinced herein. First, I am watching in near catalepsy as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall fills his cow's trough with some mixture or other, describing the high quality of the oats and how this is great for the cow, and then proceeds to turn to the camera and say, 'It will make you taste great, too.' There seemed to me in the tone, the angle, the setting, something so cunning, so self-serving, so cruel in the whole thing.

We have this warped conviction that we are in some way being kind to animals by feeding them some Waitrose provender before they're disparted into their constituent viscera (which, by the way, many people seem to refuse to eat, as if innards are somehow more vital, more life-giving to an animal than mere flesh. In this I believe we see an instinctive reluctance to destroy life). This renewed image of the kind farmer has only served to entrench our bloodthirsty tendencies. Yet there is, despite what many may insist, no humane way to kill a creature against its own will. This is a necessarily inhumane enterprise. Indeed, applied to humans, we term it murder. It should not matter that a murderer fed his victim a diet of Terry's Chocolate Oranges and expensive falafel before ending his victim's life - this does nothing to palliate the absolute nature of the offence. Death is irrevocable, and should be met with a commensurate unwillingness to impose it.

And of course there is an absolute ocean of hypocrisy to be addressed here. If I were to feed a friend's dog with some expensive tin of dog food, it would be quite unacceptable if I were to append the phrase, 'This will make you taste delicious.' In fact, it would be so bizarre, so alien to human practice that it would be quite comedic. Yet the horrors we commission against farm animals would be national news stories if committed with such scale and brutality on household pets. It would seem to us to be the most barbaric, medieval, depraved operation in recent history. But who can give a reason as to why a cat's life should be elevated beyond a cow's? This is the arrangement we endorse - we live in a world in which billions of animals live their lives in bondage and are slaughtered for our own gain, whilst simultaneously organisations such as the RSPCA are horrified if a dog is left in a bin. Of course the reason behind this outrage at crimes committed against household pets is that household pets are useful to us whilst alive, and farm animals are useful to use whilst dead. Our morality is clouded by our foul interests - our bloodthirsty mandibles, snapping at everything in their path. For example, a woman in the aforementioned episode of River Cottage tasted a rabbit stew. She was then asked, 'Are you put off by the fact that this was a fluffy bunny?' and she replied with, 'Maybe if it was a fluffy bunny, but this was wild.' Then it is quite fine to kill a rabbit which we would not have seen, but quite perverse to kill a rabbit from whose appearance we gain some enjoyment. Am I losing my grasp on reality? Can this be a world in which death is meted out on the basis of its recipient's degree of fluffiness? Surely death cannot be a matter we can treat with such idiocy. What a foul morality we advocate!

Why must man sire a path of brambles where he treads? Man will destroy whatever he can, until precisely the point at which his own safety is endangered. All beneath this point is despoiled with utter levity. You won't see Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall wrestling an alligator for his pan-fried croc-nuggets. You will, however, see him packaging defenceless animals and sending them to various slaughterhouses with no real trouble. I wither at the absolute greed which infects all of mankind's actions. I'm sure I've mentioned it before - it is our philosophy of expedience! All things appear far more unobjectionable when they are the easiest means to an end from man's blasted perspective, if not overall. I think it is undeniable that far more people would renounce meat if it was an active decision to engage in its consumption, rather than to forgo it. This is to say, people generally nurture the habits their parents inculcate in them, and most people today are brought up to eat rotting cadavers. If it were possible for us to make a reasoned decision upon birth, for ourselves, who would choose to unnecessarily maim and wound for their own pleasure? Only the most devout sadist could bring himself to such a resolution. And I believe the word 'unnecessarily' is of overriding importance here. It does not make one a sadist to eat meat out of necessity - the fact that another creature perished in one's nourishment would be a cause for grief, but who here can judge one creature's life as more important than another's? Who could assuredly wear the mantle of Minos, and then who might do it gladly? Yet to sap life, to debauch beauty, to have the hubris to place one's own pleasure above the lives of others, all when this need not be the case - this is malice.

Then we do not have the divine equipment necessary to judge life, and it is mere arrogance to assert that we do, but what can be derived is that, if one cannot value one life against another, it must be preferable for both lives to continue if it is at all possible. We live in a country in which this is absolutely an accessible outcome - it is merely man's self-service and disregard for life which blights the endeavour. However, mankind believes it can judge the value of a life, through prices. Then in valuing each animal with an arbitrary number, one values none at all. By ascribing a cipher of pure dust to a creature's entire being, one destroys the being immediately. If we were sincere, we might admit that we know this to be true; it is common to express disapproval at the combination of sex and money, for example. It is somehow as if love itself has been destroyed, and we cannot bear the thought. Similarly, to be asked to ascribe a monetary value to one's friends and family would be absolutely unthinkable! In such a moment of judgement, the judged becomes the price, and nothing more.

Furthermore, think of the 'alien invasion' genre of films. The marauding aliens are invariably portrayed as wicked and consumptive - yet what do they commit which man does not commit daily and without remorse? The enslavement and eventual destruction of what we perceive to be inferior species, the destruction of all environments outside our own, the inexorable pursuit of economic gain above all else. Man's gross egotism deems all of this quite fine. It is only when it is committed against man that it becomes immoral! Who can stay sane in a world in which this kind of morality is ascendant? It even bears a personal importance - it suggests that, were each of our own lives to become convenient for man to destroy, it would immediately become moral to do so. Actions need only be inconvenient to man to become immoral actions, and convenient to man to become moral actions. The critic may think this is an exaggeration, but who can give a situation in which this is not the case? Think of the recent badger culls - previously, badgers were protected by law! Indeed, still are! Yet the moment it becomes convenient, economically in this case, the law is disregarded, and it suddenly becomes quite fine to kill badgers with abandon. Yet, to me, life is an absolute, and its destruction should not be countenanced with such indifference. The idea that money can reduce something sacred to vermin is a cause for lament. What avarice!

People say to me of my vegetarianism, 'Oh I couldn't do that, it would be really difficult,' as if I had made the decision that it is more convenient to refuse to eat meat in a meat-eating world. This is the power of this philosophy of expedience - it is entrenched in all minds. The point is that morals should be independent of practicality. Of course, we have precisely the obverse situation in today's barren world, economics sentencing the weak and the capital-deprived to death. The dollar is the judge, lashing its callous outcomes on the very weakest. Animals, lacking the ability to enslave themselves through work as we do, are forced to an even more regrettable end - slaughter. Yet, as with human matters, those with money can always choose to help those without, however economically inconvenient it may be. What is fundamentally right and just, and not what is convenient, should determine morality.

Then why must human life be buttressed by death? What rational person wishes to become a necropolis, a void of life? It seems that life in this world is a parody of itself, intent on the extirpation of other life - it is some kind of antitype against its own being, bent on its own elimination. In such a world, all is hostile. All is negation. Who desires a place in such an arrangement, when they need not do so?