The game is totally insane, horribly insane in fact, and none of us would be playing it if we weren’t hoping to get our hands on the legendary bonus payment that comes when you jump through however many thousands of virtual hoops that you have to jump through in order to be fired joyously into the next level of existence, such as is described in all the textbooks and all the glossy promotional material. Then we will be very joyous indeed say the game-makers; all bliss will be ours and we will realise how very lucky we are. We’ll have so much to write about in our gratitude diaries. We will be catapulted into the very highest realms of ecstatic release and spiritual validation and that is nothing to sniff at, believe you me. Reality itself in all its glory will come receive us and everything will be very cool indeed!
So that’s the reason we play the game, insane though it is, horribly insane as it is. The casual observer – if there was such a thing – would no doubt think that we have taken leave of our senses but that’s where they’d be wrong. There is a logic behind our very obvious madness and a very compelling logic it is too. It’s the logic of Satan himself, some would say. It’s Satan’s own logic and what could be more compelling than that? Everyone’s stuck in their own private world, we’re all trapped in our own private universes but there’s a good reason for that, as you might imagine. As you might well imagine. It’s a clever strategy in a world where clever strategies count for everything. So gaudy prizes and prestigious awards are in order for someone. There’s going to be a big bonus in the post for some clever person…
Messages are flashed at us from innumerable subluminal devices every single day of our lives and these messages kick off automatic reflexes that are buried deep within the very core of our being. Each message initiates a pre-programmed response and when circumstances are suitable a coded behavioural sequence operates on override through us, causing us to partake in the general insanity, causing us to enact specific subroutines within the game. This inevitably gets us in deeper trouble than ever which is actually okay (so don’t worry) because there are then new messages that will tell us how to get of the new super-enhanced mess that we are in as a result of mechanically (and stupidly) obeying rules that originate – if the truth were to be known – in the Malign Arsenal of the Great Abuser himself! The GA has plenty of clever tricks up his sleeve; you can be sure that the GA has plenty of tricks up his sleeve and each and every one of them spells your doom! It’s a frantic free-for-all, in other words, only there’s no freedom in it. There’s not even the slightest trace of freedom there, only a deep, brooding, inexhaustible malice. ‘Well, that’s fine then’, says you with your famous smile – ‘I thought for a moment that we might have been in some kind of trouble there.’
We all long for freedom on some level or other, don’t we? Even when we perversely crave the malign attention of the Great Abuser there is still some secret part of us that perpetually yearns for freedom. What a magical word that is – we don’t even know what it properly means or could be but what we do know is that it’s got to be extraordinarily magical. How would we even recognise it if we saw it? How would we recognise it? The scoffers scoff and the cynics come out with their customary cynical comments, but part of you knows better. ‘I was sent into the world without a face,’ you cry out, ‘and the denizens of this loathsome underworld rushed up and painted on a face for me, a crude parody of face, the face of a hideous circus clown, the face of some misbegotten woeful monster…’ Such was ever the way in this, the vilest of all possible underworlds however, as you have no doubt come to realise. Such was ever the way…
