I think, therefore I am. I think and act for myself, therefore I am. I think and act for myself in recognising the existence of others with equal capacities as mine and the equal right to exercise them, therefore I am. Except we live in a world hostile to individual freedoms, and therefore to self-actualisation through the development of the capacity to think and act for ourselves, don’t we. You bet we do. So I can have my integrity as an individual or I can have a place in the world, a slot in the corporate heirarchy that passes for a society where people share and cooperate collectively for the common welfare, but by and large I can’t have both. This causes me pain, the pain of an alienation from a society as out of balance as it has its priorities resoundingly ass-backwards. So I’ll resolve that pain by rejecting my individuality and studiously avoiding self-actualisation so that I’m not even functionally capable of telling the difference between freedom and slavery, and bury myself in oblivion, imagining I’m free because the political class have the sense to leave enough of civil society alone for people to go about their daily lives unmolested by the state as long as they leave the various hierarchies of class and social privilege unmolested in turn. I’ll restrict myself to fighting for whatever scraps of privilege I can get from the big party for the super-rich known as western civilisation and defend these conditions until I’m blue in the face because they relieve me of the burden of having to be responsible for the consequences of my actions. I’m just doing my job. I’m just following orders. If you don’t like the global corporate oligarchy, leave the planet. If you think for yourself, the terrorists win. If you keep undermining democracy with dissent we’ll all be living under sharia law before you know it. The imagination is a communist prejudice. We must have oppression or we will have chaos. Embrace your own obliteration; you know it makes sense.

By Ben