Captivity

Now that I'm done school, I'm getting this sense that I will someday (hopefully quite soon) live in a way that reflects my convictions. The more time passes, the more distance I feel between myself and this culture. I turn on the TV and the advertisements make me feel ill. I walk down the street and I can't think of anything but how wrong our way of life is.

I was in the local mall yesterday. They've done big renovations since I was last in there, and I wanted to see what it was like inside. I looked around a lot of the stores and noticed the music they were all playing. I could think only of the insanity of it all. Department stores with literal boatloads of useless crap. All this shit that's made to break in a year or two, thus necessitating continual re-purchasing. Then they have the happy music to numb the mind; the last thing they want is for people to realise that they're children in adult bodies being made yet more dependent by increased convenience, lower prices, and planned obsolescence.

I was walking through the toy isle in Zellers (I have a bitter love for inspecting department store skateboards), thinking about raising children in this society. That's when I felt it underneath everything--underneath all the nausea, all the anger, all the disgust--that I simply can't live like that. If there's one thing that strikes me as even worse than having to live amidst all this, it's the notion of bringing someone else into it, the notion of perpetuating the cycle by breeding in captivity.

Now, having written that, I think about how most people would respond to the last sentence in the previous paragraph. "Breeding in captivity." I can only imagine the religious fervour with which most people would rebuke me for such a comment. Religious fervour, which is to say that they would rebuke me simply because they have been trained to. They would rebuke me in accordance with the dogma we have all been fed and forced to follow. They would not respond to my words as something they have mulled over, given some time, and then come to disagree with; but as something that they automatically, immediately shrink from. Then I try to imagine what a presenter on CNN (or yet worse, FOX) would say.

Oh, how I would be chastised.

Then I think about Soren Kierkegaard, about his suggestion that anyone speaking the truth cannot expect the crowd, the public, to agree with him. I think of his suggestion that ostracism is, in fact, a good sign. I think of that, and I feel enheartened; and enheartened, I continue.

"They would not respond to my words as something they have mulled over, given some time, and then come to disagree with; but as something that they automatically, immediately shrink from." They would tell me that we are free, not captive. To this, I would reply with a question: if we are so free, why do most people find it so offensive and so impossible to consider the idea-- the mere idea-- that we are not free?