‘Monsters’ are not born, monsters are made, constructed by a society that corrupts people into acting in inhumane, evil ways (in the ‘nature vs nurture’ debate, I am firmly on the side of ‘nurture’). We, I believe, are all born the same, but as we grow older and experience life, we tend to go one of two ways…

1) Conform, unquestionably, to the existing systems
OR
2) REBEL.

On the latter, sometimes, when the volume of oppression gets too much, that can lead people to act in ‘evil’ ways, as they find themselves caught up in the collateral of a sick society…

They might find themselves at the top of a water tower armed with a high-powered rifle, firing indiscriminately at the ants crawling around below. Or running amok in the streets with a handgun. Or lobbing a grenade at the forty-car motorcade of the president (externalising the hate).

Or, they might find themselves on a street corner, homeless, hungry, and wild-eyed, punching themselves in the face or sticking wires through the flesh of their arms, fraught with angst over the powerlessness that comes with being a human being (internalising the hate).

Overwhelmingly, people do internalise it all, a deep-rooted feeling of perceived injustice fuelling the ‘epidemic’ of mental ill health in the world- people are filled with angst and they don’t know where to put it all…

Turning to substances in an attempt to block it out,
being diagnosed with depression or anxiety,
working their way through the DSM-5.

‘100mg sertraline once a day for the rest of your life, doctors orders.’

We are given medication so that we can keep contributing to the very thing that triggered our need for medication in the first place- society and its systems of oppression (systems of depression).

When it is externalised though, the reason for the crime often gets ignored.

‘Lock ’em up and throw away the key.’

When it is society to blame, prisons, which are supported by the state, are hardly going to rehabilitate prisoners ‘properly’, for that would mean dismantling the system, the very system that pays their wages. It’s just not going to happen. It would be like working at Mcdonald’s and telling customers as you’re handing them their burgers that they’re filling their bodies with shit.*

*(They are, but you wouldn’t tell them that, otherwise you would be out of a job).

People are not delusional (unless you’re the government in which case, delusion central), and realise that, for an overhaul of the system to take place, every power structure within it would have to be dismantled, and that is just not realistic when democracy itself is arguably a myth.

People who speak out get shot down (sometimes literally, just look at Alexei Navalny in Russia), and ostracised for daring to speak the truth…

For the rare of the rare people who externalise the sense of injustice yet don’t turn to crime, their ‘hate’ often takes the form of activism, for which you have to be incredibly tough-skinned.

‘Tough-skinned’ because you are advocating for everything that everyone else has spent their whole lives being told is ‘just the way things should be done’, thus firmly placing you as an ‘outcast’ in society, a ‘snowflake.’

Society hates snowflakes.

Society hates you.

Ironically though, the people who are brandished as ‘snowflakes’ (the word of the moment that the right likes to use against the left because HOW DARE they have morals), are the toughest people around…

The reality is that it’s far more difficult to stand up for what you believe in, in the face of everyone and everything around you believing something different, than it is to blindly go along with the ‘in’ thing, in a state of mass hypnosis…

An extract from David Wojnarowicz’s memoir, ‘Close To The Knives’ (below) sums up the division between conforming and rebelling perfectly…

‘We are born into a pre-invented existence within a tribal nation of zombies. Some of the tribes are in the business of sucker-punching people’s psyches in the form of maintaining the day-to-day job of government- they sell the masses a pile of green-tainted meat; ie., a corrupted and false history as well as a corrupted and false future, and although that meat stinks of rot, this particular tribe extols these foul emissions as if they were virtues made of glorious sensitivities. ‘Raise Ole Glory’ while we do it to them again…’

Then there are other tribes that work hand in hand with the government, offering slices of meat in the form of doubletalk; or hope- hope as a chain of submission.

Like puppets on a string, they blindly conform, blinkers on to the fact that they are upholding the systems of oppression. Oblivious (or ignorant, even worse), to the fact that they are just as much to blame as the oppressors- stopping at nothing to get what they want…

Then there are the tribes that suckle at the breast of telecommunications every evening after work and are fatally lulled into society’s deep sleep.

People in this tribe experience waking nightmares, day after day, but they’ve either bought the con of language from the tribe that offers hope, or they’re too exhausted and/or fearful to break through the illusion and examine the structures of the world, and therefore they keep going along with it, getting sucked into society and its systems of oppression.

Then finally, there are tribes that experience the X-ray of civilisation every time they leave the house or turn on the TV or radio or pick up a newspaper.

Civil war and a national trial for the ‘leaders’ of this country, as well as certain individuals in organised religions, is the soundtrack that plays and replays in the heads of members of that tribe. And questions of:

‘Why just help maintain the structure you’re surrounded by; why try and struggle and survive in it? Why not just drop everything and go out and do things that are raw and without boundaries and laws and deal with survival on a real level, not one surrounded by all these fucking illusions?’

If the other tribes want to hand them the illusion of hope in the form of the leash, like all stray dogs with intelligence from experience, people in this tribe know how to turn the leash into a rope to exit the jail windows, or how to turn the leash into a noose to hang the jailers.

Hang the jailers.

Stop the hatred.

End the bigotry.

To me, it’s as black and white as this (^), but, to a lot of people, not so much…

‘If it’s not happening to us then it’s not happening at all.’

^ The most dangerous sentiment we have whereby we say and do nothing unless it directly affects us…

• I’m straight, so why do I care about people being publicly executed in the Middle East for being gay?
• I’m a man, so why do I care about women’s (lack of) rights, not least women who aren’t even from my country? ‘Out of sight out of mind ‘n all that.’ Their lack of access to education, the very real prospect they face of being exiled from the population simply for daring to have aspirations beyond forced marriage at 13, ‘and you’re telling me this… because?’
• I’m a politician, so why do I care about… literally anythinG?

But, unfortunately for those who govern society, people do still care.

Tell me I’m ‘too sensitive’, and all I hear is, ‘you’re a threat to the system.’