And the Cage Shall Keep You Comfortable.

I reached that point again today, as I occasionally do, when I felt I had no option but to give up on trying to co-exist with the culture of middle-ness: Middle England, Middle America, Middle Class... It’s just so riddled with illusion and bigotry, and yet so safe and settled in its certainties.

I heard people having what they were convinced was a meaningful discussion about something, and yet it was obvious that they hadn’t even considered whether the axioms on which their argument was based were even tenable. This is the essence of middle-ness: be happy to live in a cage of someone else’s creation, and never even consider that there might be a door somewhere that could set your mind free.

And then I watched a film in which middle class, middle American parents were earnestly striving to perform the first duty of middle-oriented parents everywhere: indoctrinate your kids in an absolute belief in the cage, and ground them without mercy if they show so much as an inclination to look for the door. And guess who suffers when the kid finds the door anyway: the parents. It’s ironic, heartening, and even amusing when that happens. In this particular film, the kid pursued his own goal and found the door. The voice of a continent was raised in condemnation, as if it had anything to do with them anyway. Partisan judgement is a classic symptom of middle-ness, and one of the things I find most difficult to understand.

And it isn’t only parents who take this duty seriously. The whole culture is complicit, from politicians to educationalists to policeman to the media...

At least I took some small comfort from hearing an American economist admit that the American Dream had never been more than a cruel delusion, since logic dictates that it is simply unattainable in a free market economy. If I might be permitted to dive into the depths of shameful cliché just this once, it was too little, too late. By then I felt thoroughly beleaguered by the sheer lack of imagination and earnest questioning that keeps the human race firmly incarcerated in its gilded cage. Someone, somewhere is enforcing parameters, and we are only allowed to argue within them, not question the reason for their very existence.

Do excuse the rant. I try not to take life too seriously, since I believe it all to be a form of illusion anyway. Sometimes, however, I get sucked in.