I have been asleep for some twenty-four years and, over the last four years, I have been waking up. I would not say that I am entirely awake. On my most optimistic days, I feel that I have left Plato’s cave and am standing in the bright sunlight. I can even taste the clean winds blown in from the sea. On other, more sober, days I think that perhaps I have merely climbed from the lowest cavern to a higher, brighter prison. To exchange one prison for another is not a privilege; it is, after all, worse in some ways to be more aware that you are in a prison. So some men maintain that it is better not to enquire into their condition at all. It is a Western sickness, the examined life. The Africans and Chinese are not troubled by this aspiration to find out, perhaps knowing, through intuition, that we live in cells within cells within cells. It is better to sit in the darkest cell and make yourself comfortable than to climb into a more clinical cell, a place where the bright light will hurt your eyes, and illusions, soft comfort, have grown pale. Bring me a poet with beautiful words, and throw the philosopher, with his truth, down the well; perhaps this was the wisdom of the Athenians, whose citizens plucked the carbuncle Socrates from their company.
What put me to sleep? A divorce. My parents divorced. How does that have a soporific effect? Quite simply, when we humans face events that we do not understand—events that are against nature, as in this case—we construct illusions for protection. There is nothing wrong with a little harshness, with a stern Zen monk beating your wrist with a bamboo cane. That can wake you up. But there is danger when you face too much brutality too soon; we must harden ourselves with little shocks. Our regime, our regime of love, our regime of passive aggressive softness, tells us that all divorces are for the best. It is a more rational solution, they say—always with degrees from the finest universities, and never from a divorced family themselves.
The divorce, like the abortion, is a control method: it splits the psyche and lets the demons, summoned by the complacent secularists who rule us, roar into the gap. They say we are individuals, but a family is an animal; it is not a collection of Lego bricks, you cannot rearrange the parts anyway you want. You do not break a family: there is no such thing as a broken home. The divorce is a vivisection; it is like cutting two legs off a dog and then saying: “Ah, we have liberated you from the oppression of your hind legs.” Our regime has produced hundreds of thousands of amputated people in this way. Watch carefully, as I have said, the enthusiasts for divorce and abortion; rarely have they swallowed their own potion. Their delight is the suffering of those below: naïve women raised on supermarket magazines and schooled in third-rate university courses taught by lecherous Marxists clad in dandruff. A quick inspection of their hard drives reveals eleven-year-olds with their knickers round their ankles. There is a materialist explanation for this, they tell me, though we cannot teach it.
Do not mistake me for a conservative. Their vile children are quick put the boot in: “You come from a broken home,” they sneer; but they polish up nicely in their job interviews, and they never make a fuss—it would interfere with their career, don’t you know? I have seen them, good Catholics all, their dicks squeezed tight before pictures of little girls. They are unimpeachable. The next day they are in the debating hall screaming that girls are sluts and abortion a crime. We are all good people here, our torture is deniable and our underwear is clean. This is the price of light, hence many men prefer to remain in their caves.