‘Evil will always triumph because good is dumb.’ ~ Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
I work in mental health; I wish I could say it was rewarding but it’s mostly depressing. You soon learn that the mad person is, like everything else, just another commodity: a diagnosis for the psychiatrist, a case for the care coordinator, something to be managed by the support worker and a profit-maker for Big Pharma. They are permitted to be many things but themselves.
I look around at the alternatives and feel equally depressed.
Low pay, high rent, increasing food/fuel/living costs amid lack of opportunity.
Neoliberalism: the commodification of everything rigged to benefit a select few, satisfied with a world devolved into a cesspool of banality marching us all towards extinction.
And I’m supposed to see a point to all this.
I walk through the towns and cities, supermarkets and shops; everything looks the same – repetitiously insipid, empty.
People are like zombies feeding on iPhone drivel, everyone’s shooting up social media, our cultural landscape homogenised into soul-sucking conformity:
a post-resistance era where the consumer has become the consumed.
Suicide is no mystery to me.
I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would want to continue in this world.
Politics has been corporatised, music is corporatised, journalism is corporatised, literature is corporatised and art is corporatised.
My mind is mostly in a fog. I’m happiest when I’m alone; I feel less alone when I’m alone, particularly when I walk in the woods and tune in to the sound of a breeze through the firs.
Beware the wellness industry
psychology
is a tool of oppression.
Let me live as a recluse among the trees
and away from all this stupidity
let birdsong cure my despair.
We are permitted only one opinion: on Ukraine, on trans, on immigration and so on … and yet we are ‘free’??
Society is more psychotic than the mad person.
We live in a corrupt system rigged to favour a privileged few, of which war is integral to its design to fill our insatiable need to consume.
We marinate in propaganda to feed the rich. We are so fucking gullible.
What is it all for?
Does the blandness of our cultural landscape nourish the soul? Does our abject conformity as consumers (Smartphones, social media etc.) make us happier or better people? Does all the shit food we eat make us healthier?
Endless wars, environmental destruction, deforestation, pollution of land and sea: all just so we can feel empty in an increasingly vapid world.
Society is more psychotic than the mad person.
November 2022
© Percival Alexander