SYSTEM SHOCK:

I have had problems with amateur musicians, professional musicians, semi-professional musicians going into MY chosen field, game designers, programmers, moderators, administrators, managers, neoconservatives, neoliberals, debaters, directors, doctors, proctors, actors, teachers and professors, stoners, bloggers, poets, models, feminists, pessimists and optimists.

What is the common denominator?

Might I remind you: I can express these problems entirely in objective terms. I can abstain from subjective statements, expressing each opinion as a fact, expressing each conflict in terms of how it impacts other groups, subverts established ideals, and targets “someone, somewhere,” and if I had to put myself back into the equation, I would be cast as the martyr who has devoted his life to the protection of that same abstract “someone, somewhere”. That “someone” is not simply “my own self”, as I remember him, from just some distant time, holding a grudge. It’s anyone who might endure what I endured OR what I have YET to endure, though what ONE (and not just I) might presume to be unfortunate and worth preventing.

Who am I to speak in such objective terms?

Well: who are YOU to ignore such objective and prevalent facts? Must I be selfish to profess that which is self-evident?

You might try to cast me in this case as though I WERE at the center of this network, as though the World as I Perceive It, in its entirety, truly DID revolve about ME, lending me the most tempting excuse for a narcissism that ARGUABLY (though I should hope it’s not just I who makes the argument) has become prevalent and run amok, contributing to the chaos I describe.

Yet why must *I* be the common denominator? You might attest: “well, CERTAINLY the individual is accorded sufficient dignity and power that he might be held RESPONSIBLE for his position.”

Is he, though?

What if I retorted thus: that ALL my PERSONAL problems with these groups has been in the SUBVERSION of my individuality? Yet it was not that my individuality was simply “refined” through the systematic cleansing of some sort of “objective sin”. Arguably, no such sin is regarded as objective by all parties I have represented. Arguably, each attempt at asserting a unique perspective, in any group, has only ever been the representation (read: “re-presentation”) of a sacred platitude revered by another group. There is no ABSOLUTE STANDARD according to which I have EVER been “wrong”; I simply stand outside of any affiliation, and most of what I profess, for which I am excluded, amounts to little more than an opinion. The only claims to fact I make are contained within this reflection, for this alone can I say for certain: that all of these groups can’t ALL be right, and there exists no evidence that any one of them IS. Yet each of them behaves as though that were the case, either exclusively for itself, or on behalf of its SUPPOSED allies.

So: what is the common evil?

This alone remains: that they are all, definitionally, Groups.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]