I could hear them talking about me. ‘He’s not coping so we’re going to have to step in and do something about it,’ one of them said. I could hear them somewhere in the background, all muffled and crackly, as if they were speaking over some kind of old-fashioned radio communication system. The signal was obviously very degraded, very attenuated, but still plain enough to make out. ‘Robot voices’ I call them – voices that have long since departed from anything even remotely human. ‘He’s not coping so we’re sending someone in,’ the robot voice was saying, and I knew they meant me.
It’s all about the pressure to achieve, when it comes down to it. Always this horrific pressure to achieve. You can feel it in the air – it’s encoded into the various synthetic substrates that we walk upon. It’s encoded into the architecture of our lives. Achieve, achieve, achieve… Achieve or else you’re nothing, achieve or else everyone will laugh in your face. You are literally nothing if you don’t achieve, you’re less than dirt because at least dirt exists.
At least dirt has substance. It has body, texture, coloration of one sort or another. This is not something you can argue with, a message like this. There’s no arguing with it – either you succeed or you don’t succeed and if you don’t succeed then you don’t get to exist. No one’s going to feel sorry for you then. No one’s going to offer you a helping hand. They won’t feel sorry for you – and they won’t offer to help you – because you deserve what’s coming to you. You deserve your fate. It’s your own fault, after all. You’re not worthy of anyone’s consideration. You have no one to blame but yourself, no one to blame but yourself, and that’s important to understand.
This is an evil world we live in, a very evil world. It’s our world, but it’s also a very evil world. There’s no mercy in it, that’s for sure. The Ruler of this world has nothing but contempt for mercy, nothing but contempt for softness of any kind. High up in the sky above us hangs a big rusty machine, the big rusty machine which controls our thoughts. The machine which controls our thoughts makes sure that there can be no mercy in the world, it makes sure that we are every bit as hard as it is. ‘Struggle to succeed’, it tells us, ‘struggle hard to succeed or else you will be known to be weak. You will be known to be weak and then you won’t account for anything…’
When you’re weak then that is of course when all the predators come out to feed on you – and feed on they certainly do! They rejoice in the joy that comes from preying upon the weak, such as yourself. For them – these unlovely predators of our evil world – there is no greater joy than the joy that comes with preying successfully upon the weak. For them, there can never be any greater joy than this. Successful cruelty is the greatest virtue there is in this world of ours – we adore and adulate it. We admire those who exemplify it. That’s just the type of world we live in however. That’s just the type of world we live in and we would be complete and utter fools to deny it.
