An Individual In Confrontation With The World, Pt. 9

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Night after night Sebastian would watch rich capitalist bastards gloating on TV, after sacking again thousands of people from their companies, only to keep their precious balances right. This always filled Sebastian with silent, powerless rage. This made him glad too that he was unemployed, and out of the rat race, but for how long? Perhaps he too was to be turned soon into another minimum wage slave by the employment officials, and he had a great future ahead of him cleaning up construction sites to survive. Sometimes he thought he would rather blow his brains out with a shotgun than submit to this.

One day chickens would come home to roost, though: it was inevitable one day oppressed masses would start revolting; when the revolution would come along, these members of economical elite would be slaughtered like pigs they were. Or perhaps the growing poverty and inequality would just pave way for populist politicians and totalitarian fascist-type of dictators. Read history: it all had happened before -- early 20th century Russia and Germany... in the third world countries religious fanaticism turning into terrorist violence. Or maybe there would be a nuclear war sparing no one, a merciful coup de grace to let the world out of its misery.

Sebastian firmly thought the whole Western civilisation (so called) was on the brink of collapse. Economy was overboiling, based on the deception of the notion of ever-growing profits. Every thinking person would see through that bullshit of the Orwellian doublespeak favoured by economists and consultants. These days any real alternatives were narrowed down to few: either play along their game, or perish. Those people who were still not outsourced out of their jobs were preached by the high priests of economy, in the names of cost-efficiency and productivity, that they should "work twice as much with a wage twice as small, so they elite could enjoy their own double income, preferably without the disturbing intervention by taxes". Put up or shut up.

Nature was dying as the imminent ecocatastrophe was being sped up by great industry. The ozone layer was evaporating, ice caps melting. The sun would scorch the Earth all the time more ferociously, while all over the world floods and raging storms were punishing people as never earlier before. Only a fool would dig up the earth from beneath his feet, and think he could gather together a bigger pile in front of him that way, but it was obvious we were all aboard a ship of fools whose captain was a power-hungry madman.

Was there anything to be done? At the moment, apathy prevailed. People were so brainwashed and alienated by TV and mass entertainment which kept them content enough. All aesthetics had become pornography. No one would bother to subvert; except only for a small minority of discontent activists who were aware and educated, but perhaps they were only in the minority: on a losing run against the oppressive machinery of establishment and powers-that-be. Party politics had become a joke after politicians had been reduced to marionettes and serfs for economic interests of large companies.

Selfishness ruled everywhere: everyone was only interested to grab more and more money. Egocentric individualism and elbow tactics were favoured by the ME ME ME generation; such noble yesteryear ideas as solidarity or empathy had been ditched, and old communities had broke up.

Life everywhere was a blood-thirsty conflict, a struggle for survival. Violence, both mental and physical made the poor and marginalized to turn against each other. Black-on-black crimes, white-on-white crimes, white-on-black crimes, black-on-white-crimes, everyone-on-everyone crimes. All street kids blinded by their MTV-fed dreams of "bling bling" wanted to become gangstas like Tony Montana in Scarface. When walking on the street, you could get battered to death for no purpose at all except for providing cheap thrills for a bunch of disturbed hoods.

LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES

Sebastian luxuriated in his near-orgastic apocalyptic thoughts: we were all doomed, the rich and poor alike; living on numbered days. Thinking of it was like an orgasm in reverse, and Sebastian was a disaster onanist.