When “sanity” is anything but sane?

When you realize you’re hopelessly trapped?

When your mother is dying and your soul has been stolen?

What to do?

When you think about it, society is really a machine that uses us.  I’m not sure who invented it or who controls it (no one?), but we are mere cogs in this giant machine.  And the reason we don’t respect human rights is because all we care about is the machine.  If it says that these 300 people need to be fired, they get fired. It doesn’t matter what it does to their lives because the interest of the machine is what’s most important.

I guess it is run by people.  Let me clarify that, it’s run by a few people.  Several thousand at most.  And I think the point of the machine is to make their lives better. The lives of the few that run it.  As for everyone else, it’s purpose is to provide us with just enough that we don’t revolt.  That’s right, it gives the people the absolute minimum that it takes to keep us pacified and never an inch more. The selfish bastards who run the show have no interest in us other than as instruments of cheap labor. All they really care about is themselves and their families.  We’re so hopelessly oppressed we’ve forgotten that we are oppressed. But we are, and we’ll never be free as long as we buy into their crap. All this consumerism, and nationalism, and religion, it’s all bullshit. All are modes of oppression. We are not free people, for  ”slavery is determined neither by obedience nor by hardness of labor but by the status of being a mere instrument, and the reduction of man to the state of a thing.”

I’m a human being, not a cog in your goddamn machine.

My life has value. My autonomy matters. I’ll never find what I need in a store.

I wish we lived in a world that produced abundant free food by itself.

I wish we lived in a world where you can litter because everything biodegrades.

I wished we lived in a world of infinite beauty and mystery, and peace.

A world that cleans its own pollution, and where my body heals itself.

A world without factories or weapons of  war.

A world without chains.

Oh wait, we do.

I used to think spring was my favorite season, but as this fall approaches I find myself feeling, well, it’s the feeling of going home after playing outside as a kid.  A warm cozy feeling of being at home.  Perhaps it’s because so many of my trips were in the fall.  It’s a calm, beautiful, peaceful season.  I’m looking forward to this fall.  I don’t really know why, but it just feels good.

There was a silence that seemed to stretch into some long hall of near-Buddhist emptiness—George recognized a glimpse, at last!, into the Void all his acidhead friends had tried to describe— and then he remembered this was not the trip Hagbard was pushing him toward. But the silence lingered as a quietness of spirit, a calm in the tornado of those last few days, and George found himself ruminating with total dispassion, without hope or dread or smugness or guilt; if not totally without ego, or in full darshana, at least without the inflamed and voracious ego that usually either leaped forward or shrunk back from naked fact. He contemplated his memories and was unmoved, objective, at peace. He thought of blacks and women and of their subtle revenges against their Masters, acts of sabotage that could not be recognized clearly as such because they took the form of acts of obedience; he thought of the Shoshone Indians and their crude joke, so similar to the jokes of oppressed peoples everywhere; he saw, suddenly, the meaning of Mardi Gras and the Feast of Fools and the Saturnalia and the Christmas Office Party and all the other limited, permissible, structured occasions on which Freud’s Return of the Repressed was allowed; he remembered all the times he had gotten his own back against a professor, a high school principal, a bureaucrat, or, further back, his own parents, by waiting for the occasion when, by doing exactly what he was told, he could produce some form of minor catastrophe. He saw a world of robots, marching rigidly in the paths laid down for them from above, and each robot partly alive, partly human, waiting its chance to drop its own monkey wrench into the machinery. He saw, finally! why everything in the world seemed to work wrong and the Situation Normal was All Fucked Up. “Hagbard,” he said slowly. “I think I get it. Genesis is exactly backwards. Our troubles started from obedience, not disobedience. And humanity is not yet created.”

And as far as I was concerned, hindering something meant–had always meant–going after it with everything you got, fighting and kicking, stomping and gouging, and cussing it when everything else went sour.  And being just as strong in the hassle as you got it in you to be.  Now that’s real logical, don’t you think?  That’s real simple.  If You Wants to Win, You Does Your Best.  Why, a body could paint that on a plaque and hang it up over his bedstead.  He could live by it.  It could be like one of the Ten Commandments for success. “If You Wants to Win You Does Your Best.” Solid and certain as a rock; one rule I was gut-sure I could bank on.

Yet it took nothing more than my kid brother coming to spend a month with us to show me that there are other ways of winning–like winning by giving in, by being soft, by not gritting you goddamn teeth and getting your best hold … winning by not, for damned sure, being one of the Ten Toughest Hombres west of the Rockies.  And show me as well that there’s times when the only way you can win is by being weak, by losing, by doing your worst instead of your best.

And learning that come near to doing me in.

-Hank Stamper

In fact, whenever I discuss philosophy or listen to others doing so, I enjoy it enormously, quite apart from thinking it’s doing me good. But when I hear other kinds of discussion, especially the talk of rich businessmen like you, I get bored and feel sorry for you and your friends, because you think you’re doing somerhing important , when you’re not. Perhaps you regard me as a failure, and I think you’re right. But I don’t think you’re a failure, I know you are.

-Apollodorus