Nation of cripples
On Sundays I go to Leamington Spa, perhaps to imbibe the occultic residues from Aleister Crowley and Nick Land—the former being born there, the latter having lived there. There is a rumour these psychic energies are stored in the balls—but I haven’t felt a twitch yet. However, one thing I noticed on my LS sojourns was the situation in the station platform café. It’s tended by two women of oriental extraction who only play classical music and treat me with exquisite courtesie (per Chaucer). They clearly recognise that I am a civilised gentleman of distinction. It’s not sexual, they’re quite old and I only find white women attractive anyway—and I’m quite convinced the “yellow fever” merely expresses the desire to sleep with children and a hatred of your mother (from a European perspective).
Anyway, one thing I have observed in the café is that to enter and exit you must push a button—the doors, as with all station doors, are designed with wheelchair-users in mind. There’s no dual mechanism, the mechanical device that opens and closes the doors keeps them “under pressure”—so you have to hit the button, you can’t just push them like a normal door. Now, I worked this out very quickly but most people never do. They try to push their way into the café and find the doors just won’t open—so there’s a Charlie Chaplin moment where they’re pushing and pushing, the door is opening slightly, then they stop and wonder what has happened.
The button is huge, not really hidden, and yet mostly they’re non-plussed—it’s just not intuitive. The oriental ladies spend a good portion of the day saying, “Sir, sir, sir, prease sir, phress button, phress button,” in slightly heliumish raised voices. They have to do it for practically every customer—and it’s against their nature, they’re so delicate that they can barely shout (pressed jasmine on white ivory).
I have never seen a person in a wheelchair on the platform or in the café. I’m not even sure they can get to the platform level, since the steps are formidable in steepness—though maybe there’s a lift. So, basically, in a very minor way, life for everyone else has been crippled to serve people who just aren’t there most of the time. It’s the tyranny of the minority, the crippled and deformed minority. Everyone else is inconvenienced to facilitate this “kindness”—you could probably add up the minutes lost in this procedure and put an economic value on it (time spent for customers getting in, time wasted with the staff saying, “Press the button,” every other minute); it would add up to quite a lot but it’s not really the point, it’s the way the whole enterprise makes life just that much worse for everyone.
It’s also stupid in a way because the doors are not heavy and could easily be held for someone in a wheelchair—it’s really predicated on a wheelchair-user who is single; i.e. it’s meant to make them as autonomous as possible—although common sense would dictate there would almost always be someone to open the door, not least the staff (who instead do the opposite, in effect; really, they shouldn’t be shouting at every able-bodied customer to “hit the button”, they should be there to open the door for the odd wheelchair).
Basically, society is organised to facilitate the crippled, the maimed, and the deformed—and it drags everyone down. This is one tiny example but there are dozens like it—of much more economic and social consequence—that are facilitated by this system. In fact, the system actually produces crippled people—that’s what trans is in a way; it’s high-status to be a woman (itself a defective condition, as most religions and sensible people hold) and so you maim yourself to do it (and perhaps then reverse maim yourself to undo the process—so acquiring double double victim points). And you can literally cripple yourself if, say, you’re a woman indoctrinated into playing a more masculine sport or into joining the marines or into being a weightlifter. So we really are a nation of cripples—if not a civilisation of cripples, whether psychic or physical.
It strikes me that it happens because many people cannot take self-directed action; if you just let them make “autonomous” decisions they sort of just rotate around and around on the spot and then maim themselves in the hope that someone will come down and tell them to stop and then show them something non-self-destructive to do. The position is feminine: left to their own devices, women will maim themselves and people around them (e.g. their children in divorce cases) as they seek a man to come down and say, “Okay, time to stop this nonsense.”
Apparently, it’s not just women that are like this but also quite a slice of the population as well—left to their own devices they self-harm until they seriously wound themselves (in line with liberal principles, nobody will interfere). I wouldn’t go so far as to advocate the Hitler option, the gas chamber—however, we almost live in the mirror image of the Hitlerian society where it is high-status to be a deformed cripple and, in fact, the system is set up to let you cripple yourself.