It’s the story of an ordinary decent guy who does bad things. Very bad things. It’s the story of an ODG who becomes evil in other words, and there’s a lesson there for all of us! It could happen to any of us. How often have you thought, as you go about your daily business, ‘I could never become evil?’ How often have you said this? There’s a lesson there for all of us if we want to learn it, but I rather suspect that we don’t. We got other things on our mind, you see.
We all sit down to listen at the feet of the great storytelling machine. We’re trapped in those stories, as I’ve told you before. We’ll never escape and we don’t even want to! Those stories define us, they tell us who we are. Wait, hush – the storytelling machine is about to speak! It’s clearing its throat. What’s it going to say? What story is it going to tell us today? Is it going tell us the story of ourselves, the story of who we are, the story of what our lives are all about?
Tell us the story of ourselves, we beg with one voice. We are desperate to hear it, we need to hear it, we’re hungry to hear it. We are wandering in the arid desert of existential despair, crying out in the wilderness, crying out most piteously, crying out for succour, crying out for a word or two, any word, that might help us. We are crying out for belonging. We’re addicted to belonging.
The system is failing us, some voices are saying – someone has to fix it, someone has to make it right again. Someone has to fix this system before it fails us even more. Before it goes into meltdown. The story-telling machine is well into its story by now. The STM is telling us the story of itself – it’s telling us the story of how it tells us the story of who we are. It’s telling us the story of how terribly needy we are, how terribly desperate we are, how terribly hungry we are. It’s telling us the story of how it’s telling us the story of ourselves.
It’s the story of a decent ordinary guy who does bad things. Very bad things. You’ve met the type before – he’s always willing to stop and have a chat, always willing to help out if you need a hand. A regular decent kind of guy. You could meet him anywhere. You’d recognise the type immediately – it could be any one of us. He could be you and he could just as easily be me.
We’re all regular people, aren’t we? Only we could turn evil, just as easily. We could do terrible, unspeakable things. You just wouldn’t know, would you? We are all on thin ice really. I can hear the ice creaking as I walk. I might think that I’m an ordinary decent guy, the type of guy who will always help out if it’s needed, but am I? Do I really know that for sure?
