People say that I’m a malignant narcissist but I don’t think that’s very fair. I don’t think that’s very nice of them. I’m not a bad guy, I don’t think. Not too bad, anyway. People should try to be more understanding. People say, people say. What do they know anyway? We are all so great at making out that we know what we’re doing, it’s a real gift. It’s the only gift we need in order to get by in life, it seems. It’s the only gift we need in this type of world that we have made for ourselves, anyway. The gift to pretend and not know that we are pretending. What a sublime and miraculous ability that is, and we use it so easily. What a bizarre world we have created for ourselves this way. It’s actually a world in which the most dishonest of us will thrive at the expense of those less able to lie; those of us who are – we might say – handicapped in this department. The inability to deceive ourselves holds us back. It holds us back immensely, I would say. Needless to say, the average person in the street doesn’t appreciate this point, and that’s putting it mildly. We call the ability to deceive ourselves ‘confidence’ and we think that that it’s a great thing altogether. The passport to success, confidence is. Everybody loves a confident person – we want to be near them, we want to hang around with them in the hope that somehow their confidence will rub off onto us. Then we will have the passport to success too. What confidence really means of course is that we can lie to ourselves as much as we want to without ever having to own up to what we’re doing. Without having to know anything about it. That’s the magic right there – it’s as simple as that. We are free to come out with whatever shit we want and as far as we’re concerned we’re speaking God’s Own Truth. Wouldn’t that make you confident? I’d say it would. You can go as far as you like on this ticket. The sky is the limit – if you believe your own bullshit, then everyone else will too! Wasn’t this always the way? Of course it was. And if you don’t have this undoubted gift, this most magnificent of gifts, then bang goes your confidence and then all the others will smell it off you and be repelled. They will be invisibly repelled by reverse magnetism; they will be repelled without fully realising that they are. There is no worse taint than the taint of low self-confidence, as we all know. Suppose it spreads, after all? Suppose it’s catching? Suppose it can leap from me to you like lightning and strike you down where you stand? Suppose it infects you and then one day you start realising that your bullshit is bullshit? That’ll put a halt to your gallop fine fast I can tell you. Then your friends will start to get uncomfortable in your presence. They’ll start to edge away, bit by bit, so as to get out of range of the filthy taint. There’s nothing more repellent to a company of bright shiny egos is the ego that has been infected with self-doubt. Never doubt your own pestilential bullshit my friends – there’s good advice for you. There’s a bit of good solid advice for sure. The best advice in town. Never doubt your own offensively crass bullshit lest the rot set in to your very core and you can no longer be part of society. You will then have to retreat to the shadows and dwell there as best as you can. Mocked and humiliated by the others, made to feel bad about yourself by the others, and then left to stew in your own wretched juices. And that’s far from being a cheerful situation, let me tell you! Far from cheerful, far from cheerful. The others – the ones who have no difficulty at all in believing in their own pathological lies – will make you feel very bad about yourself indeed. You’ll feel bad about yourself because you can’t be like them. Because you’re missing out, because you’ve been excluded, ostracised by all and sundry and treated as if you didn’t exist. The curse resides in you and the others recognise it. Their fear of the curse is great indeed and can you blame them?