It was, I considered thoughtfully, a very handy thing to have a notion of some sort of inferior or generally blame-worthy person around because then if you happen to be feeling any sort of legitimate mental or emotional pain you could then transform this intrapersonal pain into interpersonal toxicity and pass it on very smartly by saying something nasty to them and making them feel bad instead of you. Or you could do something nasty to them instead, if that happened to be your bag. This cunning and fool-proof device has served mankind very well down through the long, lonely millennia, I considered wisely. Why break with tradition? If something isn’t broken then why try to fix it?

The only problem was, I was now all alone. There was no one else left to blame! All the others had perished in the Enantiodromia War, which had raged for centuries. Now there was only me, and my emotional pain was great. My emotional pain was great indeed. The only solution open to me – I realized – was for me to nominate myself as an inferior or generally blame-worthy person and say nasty things to myself, and also possibly escalate matters to outright bullying and abuse later on if the need arose. Which it probably would. With hindsight, of course, I can see that this was not my only option – I could have, if I had thought of it, gone down an entirely different road and created a subservient slave race of robots for me to rule over and treat appallingly badly. I never thought of that, and it would have been a neat and elegant solution. The robots wouldn’t even have minded – I could have programmed them to think that they deserved it. They would have welcomed my abuse… Anyway, things are what they are and instead I rushed into the option of blaming and persecuting myself as much as I was able. Can you believe such stupidity – and yet that’s just the type of useless dumb fuck-witted bastard I am!

I never fail to be amazed at how it is that I always rush in to doing the wrong thing. How do I manage it? I have such an infallible instinct for screwing up. Such colossal stupidity is entirely beyond my ability to understand – I must be some kind of freak of nature in that regard, I think. I’m am clearly a total freak. It shouldn’t even be possible that someone could be as stupidly self-sabotaging as I am. By all the laws of logic and good sense it should not be possible. I raged at myself for an eternity. I laid into myself with a vengeance. I laid into myself with the force of a whole galaxy of exploding stars but even that wasn’t enough. It was nowhere near enough.

Then I had an inspiration – I created a prison planet and subdivided myself into 8 billion human beings, each one of them unaware of anything apart from the crummy fictional identity which I had provided them with. I then proceeded to afflict myself – which is to say, the 8 billion human beings – to a fully-fledged, no-holds-barred trashy consumerist culture in which they were all bombarded 24/7 with subliminal messages making them feel insecure and inadequate and lots of other messages telling them that they would feel so much better about themselves if they bought all of the tawdry and useless products that were being thrown at them from every angle. In order to be able to keep up buying these useless pernicious products these unfortunate beings were obliged to work their lives away in hideously meaningless jobs, making money for the parasitic elite, who were narcissistic psychopaths of the very worst kind…

My plan worked perfectly – it was a stroke of genius. Absolute genius. It was flawless. Then it hit me. I realized with horror just what I had done. I realized that I had gone too far – I had done something truly unforgivable. I had committed an unimaginably perverse act. The realization had come too late however – there was absolutely nothing I could do about it!