This book was a hoot to write. Don’t worry; the others are much worse.
Introduction
What has sanity ever done for you? What has it ever done to you or about you? Why does it seem to follow you around? What does it have to do with you? It’s believed to exist. That seems to be its excuse, what’s yours?
Human language has one ongoing justification – It represents an attempt to understand what you or somebody else is talking about. It might work; nobody’s too sure, and it’s too easy to disprove.
If you’re talking about meanings, a simple word like “I” might mean something. Do you have any rational idea what that word means? Can you put it into words? Should you? Would you?
If these were rhetorical questions, you’d have an easy, self-serving, and hideously glib answer handy. You may not. You may not want to answer at all. You may actually be sane, just mercifully unaware of it.
One thing for sure – The description of “I” may not be too accurate. Sanity has an inexcusable tendency to relate to reality. That’s hardly helpful. Consider reality. How much of it do you want to relate to at all?
Reality is often tactless. It doesn’t seem to care. What if you suddenly became fascinating, and it didn’t notice? As you can see, a relationship with reality can be a problem.
More to the point, it’s a problem you may have to solve or even live with occasionally. Inconsiderate, isn’t it? Somebody’s version of sanity insists you should, especially when it’s the last thing you want to do.
This book is dedicated to the noble proposition that all you have to do is look sane. Better still, it’s all about how to do that and take a lot of cheap shots at everything. There are practical examples and everything!
To quote the political mystics and the finance sector and other rather tatty furniture, “So there!”
Civilization and Servileization
There is a lost civilization on Earth, and some idiot keeps finding it. You couldn’t ask for a more lost civilization. Obviously, it’s trying very hard not to bother anyone.
All that dogma, disorganization, pedantry and total lack of objectivity are perfectly capable of staying lost for billions of years. Why intrude? They seem fully occupied. It’d be impolite. Yet someone insists that they’re essential. The world (and you) must be buried in futile nitpicking at all costs, it seems.
Even more helpfully, the world is blessed with equally avoidable cliché aspirations. You can be a two-dimensional version of somebody else at huge expense, if you try. It’s the main reason for suburbia.
You can spend your entire life trying to be a 12-frame shot from a 60fps movie, mainly because that was the only image that penetrated what you unwisely call your brain. You can live like a furniture warehouse while you’re at it.
You whimsical overachieving bastard, you.
To add to the glitz, you must be part of a hierarchy. Chickens have pecking orders, and they’re doing fine, thanks for asking. Some level of servility is involved, of course.
You have the right to grovel to some mindless spud-faced cretin like your life depended on it. It might, if you’re enthusiastic enough. You may trundle obscenely from one place of rampant hysterical imbecility to another, from one farcical unrewarding career interlude to the next.
Eventually you’ll be saluting chicken feces. You will have attained a level of civilization which has made you an existential nonentity. You’ll have a degree in servileization, too, invaluable in your efforts at non-existence as an actual person.
The world will be your coffin. You will achieve the conformist Nirvana of never having been yourself in any context at any time.
You will then claim to be sane and able to prove it.
Point made?
