I wanted to be a perfect little mechanical toy ego so that I could put my name down to go and live in the new Disney Planet that the government has just manufactured. A brand new Disney Planet, straight off the assembly belts, only you had to be a mechanical toy ego in order to be allowed to live in it. ‘Craft us, oh Master’, we cry out, ‘craft us so that we can truly be what you want us to be’. Thus do our prayers ring out, and waft up to the heavens where the gods are said to dwell. Make us into your things, we mutter. Make us into your things… That’s just the world we live in though, so there’s absolutely no point in me or you complaining about it. No point at all.
Do you know that thing where someone else gets the blame for something you did and you don’t say anything at the time and the only emotion you feel is relief? You leave the area as quickly and yet as unobtrusively as you can. Offering up your heartfelt thanks silently to whatever deity might be presiding over your fate on this day. The person you let get the blame gets in an awful lot of trouble and even years later everyone still gives him dirty looks and nasty comments and yet you don’t feel the slightest bit of remorse. ‘That’ll learn you’, you think, and ‘try that for size, sucker!’ ‘Rather you than me, buddy boy’, you say to yourself, still delighted by your good fortune all those years ago in escaping the rap.
I guess we’ve all been there, right? I guess we can all relate to that one – I know I can. Yes indeed. This isn’t what I’d call ‘true evil’ though. It indicates a person with a shocking lack of empathy, a shocking lack of compassion, as well as a shocking lack of personal responsibility, but it’s still not what I would call true evil. True evil is when you manufacture the Disney Planet.
I wanted to be a perfect mechanical toy ego so that I could reap the benefits. Reaping the benefits is what it’s all about and we all know that. I was a prisoner of the Mechanical Universe and I only ever did what it wanted me to do. I never stepped out of line. I had handed over all my responsibility to it, you see. ‘You take it, I don’t want it’, I had famously said, on that most momentous occasion, flamboyantly signing away my birthright to the fast-talking man in the smart suit. The Mechanical Universe tells me what I want in order to save me from the bother of having to find out for myself. The dreadful bother of having to find out for myself.
I was praying out loud to the Great Malignancy ‘Oh Great Master’, I prayed, ‘mould me according to your vile and corrupt will.’ Make me into your thing. Make me into your thing. Make me into your thing. I wanted to be a toy human being so that I could serve the Toy Master. I prayed constantly and fervently that I might be considered worthy of serving him in some small way, in no matter how small a way. Anything at all would do – all I wanted was to be useful. The sweat was pouring off me in rivers as I prayed. I was rattling off invocations nine to the dozen. I was shouting out my prayers. The gods care not about the troubles of mere mortals, so it is said. They are oblivious to our difficulties and why wouldn’t they be? They are gods, after all…
