This is an excerpt from my book Brighter Future, available here.

Love, thine enemy

Another seemingly small thing is dignity. We’ve all got to let everyone have their dignity. It was hard coming from a place where controlling other people was a normal and even approved of us all being controlled. A place where a tiny number of people who owned everything got to say what happened to everybody else. The deal was, if you were nobody, and usually a man, you would still have one place that you were in control. Your home. When the original research was done on what was called brain washing, the techniques for breaking people’s will and bending them to what you wanted to happen the researcher came up with a list of about ten things. Breaking the will often didn’t involve physical violence, just undermining, destroying confidence, isolation creating an extremely strong dependence on the breaker.

Do you recognise it, yet?

The entire owning system is built on this. Its victims so blinded to it that they can’t see the harm it’s doing to them. Look at the objective world carefully you can see very clearly that the systems are failing, food will soon be expensive and maybe even hard to come by and the mad dependence on fossil fuels is unsustainable. So why was nothing done? The abusers trapped you, convinced you a bunch of trivial nonsense they had manufactured was what was more than contemptible rubbish, and then left you there. You could see there were problems, but you wouldn’t believe in them.

Believing that the world is different from the actual harsh reality is a fool’s game. It’ll kill you and all the things you love eventually. But slowly, ever so slowly, and you won’t see death until its skull face looks back at you from a mirror and you realise whose face it is.

The worst part, the most painful part, is that the trap is made with love. When they break you and stop all the questions, the thinking, they make you love and trust them. You start saying we when it should be they. You think your owners care about you and will help you if you are in trouble. You fool. There are thousands of you, all interchangeable, and they will replace you faster than the time it takes the door to close on you when you leave.

Your love for them is your enemy if you want to survive. They’ve told you not to believe there’s an extinction level event coming, or to welcome it because of some idiot religious fervour they beat into you when you were too young and dependent to realise what it really meant. Your heart, the blood rose, you are hypnotised by its thorns. You can’t lift your head and see what they’ve done to you, the tracery of your own suffering is so fascinating. All the endless trivia they surround you with is designed to keep your neck down, eyes on the floor, breathing the heady fragrance of the rose, feeling the sharpness of its thorns and being held by the slow drip of your blood.

I can’t help you. If you can’t see I can’t help you. If your feelings have been numbed, I can’t help you. If you don’t understand what empathy is because everything’s been turned into a spectacle, I can’t help you.

I want to, but I can’t.

Of course, in the great scheme of things, they are also entitled to your love. Just like they are entitled to everything. Things that were everybody’s were nobody’s so they could take them from us all and make them theirs. It was a magic trick. The idea of owning a piece of land or a technology is ridiculous. You can have this thing you need if you pay rent. When it goes back to the very beginning it was nobody’s and it was shared. Then it belonged to the people who lived there. Then it became the ruling family that could stop you using it. Then it was passed down from thug to idiot to rake until we get to today. This is not an equitable situation.

The violence is often done, by you, to yourself. They convince you that you deserve to be hurt because you are valueless without their condescension. If you are a planet, they are the sun. The traces of what you were, what you could have been, mean nothing beyond your slavery. All you are is something that they can buy.

The king, then? Who is that? The person with the best gang two hundred or more years ago. The person who wasn’t afraid to do whatever was necessary to get hold of the land and keep your ancestors working on it. They’re so special, you must love them. You must look up to them and do what they say. After all, the whole world is theirs, and you pay them rent. If air wasn’t so abundant you would have to pay for that too.

Many years ago, if you lived near corporate buildings, you’d be expected to pay remittance for the light that passed over their yards. Nothing is given, your gratitude is both expected and necessary if you want to survive. Be grateful for your betters, because without them you wouldn’t know what to do. Even if what you would do otherwise is grow a bit of food, raise some healthy and happy kids, and not work yourself to death. Be grateful they feel able to interfere in your life, to act like you’re a child in need of guidance. They know better about how you should live your life than you do. How they know this is never explained.

The biggest con of all is letting you pretend to be free. You can do whatever you like if what you do is within their boundaries. You want to grow your own food, build houses where they’re needed, make sure everyone is well looked after? Did you get permission? Did you check that your betters don’t think you should be doing something else?

Have you noticed that your betters don’t seem to work very hard, even though they tell you that you should be? Have you noticed that if there are any rewards going around you won’t get one, but they might even if they did nothing? You’re supposed to work hard, they need incentives you pay for to get them going? It’s a good game, being an owner. A good, rigged, game.

You can always go somewhere else, get a better job, or whatever. You’re free. But not. How is it freedom if you can’t eat? How is it freedom if illness will starve you? How is it freedom if they can lecture you and recommend a diet of oats because you’ve become poor?

So white, the lords of the universe, but the universe doesn’t care. That annoys them more than anything.