Hold My Hat A Second, Let’s Talk

 
Commentary

“You can fool people some of the time but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”  Abraham Lincoln

“So now you see the light stand up for your rights.” – Bob Marley

Maybe someone’s trying to tell us something?


The problem with being a crazy person is that it makes you pay attention to the small but audible voice deep down inside you screaming from the top of its lungs.

“They’re lying to us… don’t listen to them it’s bullshit!” 

If the world is a product of our collective imagination then really, all you need to do is stop in a Morrisons car park for 30 seconds and take look around you to realise that we are truly, deeply unwell and entrenched in some sort of denial about it. 

Such is the curse of the crazy person.  I jokingly mentioned to the guys at Ransom Note that they should get me to write a conspiracy column because I’m “well tinfoil hat” and I would “significantly raise their profile…” The common joke being that we, the lunatic contingent, have shares in Bacofoil and are just waiting for the cultural zeitgeist to peak so that we can cash in and go laughing all the way to the bank with our fractional reserve notes that are, in reality, worth absolutely nothing. I jokingly asked whether they thought my request to write was the result of a mild synchronistic clairvoyance, or if I’d just hacked their phones to eavesdrop on the world dominating explorations into handbag house records? I didn’t get an answer but ideally both of these topics are valid for exploration over the coming months, that is, if this ever makes into the magazine. 

The real problem however, is that there is a fairly sizeable herd of Elephants living in our front room… it’s the thing that you’re having to crane your neck around in order to get a decent view of Eastenders. Which, by the way, is one of, if not the major culprit of the mindless derision of culture. The vast majority of these things have already been branded as ’paranoid’ even though I would prefer to brand them as ‘paying attention’. The fact alone that the word ‘conspiracy’ has been so exquisitely stigmatized to be associated with the words ‘crazy’ and ‘theory’ should in and of itself be a signifier that there might be something untoward going on. 

An interesting part of the etymological baggage that the word conspiracy carries stems from its Latin roots: ‘con’ meaning ‘together’ or ‘with’ and ‘spirare’, which means ‘to breath’. So essentially conspiracy theorists are being accused of theorising about people who breathe in unison… it doesn’t even make much sense does it? 

Thus the topic of conspiracy or not to conspiracy begs the question, who has the more twisted world view? A crazy like myself who believes that deep down the vast majority human beings are actually benevolent creatures who have been psychologically, spiritually and emotionally toyed with since the second X met X or X met Y and have thus become somewhat unwell? Or, the person who buys into the notion that human beings are fundamentally flawed as a whole and are thus doomed to be the destroyers of themselves? 

I don’t buy into Darwinism all that much, I never have, especially in its erroneous application to a social context. However, the latter doesn’t make a very viable evolutional model does it? If it were true that we really are by default totally rubbish then wouldn’t we have driven ourselves into the ground long ago? It seems to me much more likely that the powers that shouldn’t be might just know how resilient we are as a whole and have been managing and taking advantage of this fact since time began. 

In light of these introductory ideas I wish to draw our attention back to the herd of elephants in the room. Everyone likes elephants. They’re big, endearing and not renowned for not taking rubbish from people. So, over the next few months, maybe let’s try and open up a discourse that doesn’t resort to invalidating gestures and name calling as we address some of the topics that we really shouldn’t be ignoring. 


 

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