Wotcher glorious humans.
This is a piece I’ve had whirling around my little head for some time, but didn’t commit to writing, for a few reasons.
One of them being: I like writing and publishing happy things, and it doesn’t feel nice writing and publishing unpleasant things.
If there were a single ‘point’ to this piece it would be that: unpleasantness is, unfortunately, part and parcel of life. Being blind to it harms more than helps.
My partner told me that she has never watched The Matrix, that iconic formerly-cult and now culturally ubiquitous classic of modern cinema.
We simply had to watch it together.
The protagonist, Neo, is ‘woken up’ from his insertion into the matrix, the sum total of all of the socially accepted narratives and fantasies that make up our reality: a cable is ripped from the base of his skull and several others pop from his body, before he is ejected from a womblike pod, butt-naked.
It’s a harrowing watch, jarring and slimy, repulsive.
Suffer an analogy with me.
In adult life, we must all at some point suffer a slimy ejection from our comfortable and insulated cocoon of assumptions about the world, suffering a horrid realisation about the dark motivations of people, the superficiality of their character, the underhanded measures taken for self-aggrandisement and power, and the lurid lengths to which they will go to strangle the success of others.
People lie, they cheat, they connive, they cause innocent people serious harm for their own expedience, they fabricate, they pretend, they accuse, they work the system, they manipulate people, they manipulate children, and they manipulate reality for their own selfish benefit.
Reading these words, how do you feel, in yourself?
Writing them makes me feel squeamish, it feels unpleasant, I feel resistance.
This ejection for me happened not wearing a suit in finance, not wearing an apron in hospitality, not wearing pink shorts lugging around materials and erecting tents, but wearing a lanyard declaring my suitability for working with children.
Such roles mostly attract people who work in the best interest of children, people so selfless and patient and generally inspirational that you cannot help but beam being around them, shining from their reflection.
Like all jobs to varying degrees, it also attracts parasitical power-hungry work-shy types, who work in the best interest of themselves, even if (or especially when) the wellbeing of those around them suffers.
The sorts of people who work in the best interest of their community are often like prey: too innocent and naïve and well-meaning to imagine malign actors being in such roles, conniving and conspiring, sacrificing the health of the vulnerable and innocent for selfish gratification.
These predatory types smell the well-meaning optimists a mile off, manipulating them with superficial smiles and sick notes, bullying them directly if they can get away with it, steadily isolating them, using the niceness and goodwill of their prey against them.
This rude awakening inspires feelings like our protagonist suffered: a repulsion, a nakedness, an initial want to return to the safe and blissfully unaware confines of a cocoon of optimistic assumption.
Such actors exist in every sphere of life, no doubt, and we hope to avoid contact with them, but hoping won’t make them disappear. You cannot un-see something. Should you be touched by malevolence, you won’t forget it in a hurry.
I am, by nature, quite a happy person, and trying to cultivate optimal happiness in myself and others is part of my life’s path.
The world I want to experience is a happy one, which thankfully, it overwhelmingly is, and that is the world I want to portray to others, and create with others.
Also, happy is the self I want to portray to and model in the world: a happy person.
It makes me squeamish to admit the existence of another side to the world, one in which malign Machiavellian actors abound, working to satisfy their own selfish wants and dark impulses.
My squeamishness does not help matters, however. It is childish. Romanticising the world in adult life is dangerously deluded.
(For clarity, here, I have laid dubious claim to the title ‘adult’.)
This is where the matrix analogy breaks down: one cannot ‘do a Neo’, grab a gun and mow down the malign agents of the matrix.
Well, literally one can, but I recommend one shouldn’t. We ain’t in ‘Murica.
Even in a figurative sense, trying to ‘take down’ these types is fraught with difficulty. Dare you try to rout out a reptile directly, it will result in a death struggle.
We are lucky to live on Guernsey, especially in a time where corruption and malignancy is uncommon enough to be plausibly denied, where people can refuse to admit that this side of the world exists, and still survive.
But inspire envy or anger in some commissar or manager or manipulator’s sphere of control, threaten someone’s fief, or show yourself to be too innocent or well-meaning, you are going to find yourself in trouble.
To think and behave as if this isn’t the case is wishful thinking, something I suffered from for a long time, and it is ultimately harmful.
I will return to writing chirpy little ditties (like this one from Sark) next blog.
Until then, stay chirp – but wary, too 🙂
The Works and Chirps of a Guernseyman 