We need to talk about drugs. Of course we do. Even @CommonsSpeaker does. But, unlike me, he’s just picking up traces from the loos near @BorisJohnson’s office.
I’ve been watching Yellow Submarine. And it got me thinking about the state of the world.
A trip … I mean, thread./1.
If you’re sensible, unlike me you’ll have had better things to do than hang out with the crowd who are busy trying to dismantle the foundations of what we’ve fondly thought of as civilised life. /2.
(We’ll be a lot fonder of it once it’s gone. So let’s not overdose on the self-criticism …).
Who are they? Political actors. Massively wealthy, often cynical, self-appointed visionaries. Journalist & academic satraps. Forget voters: the whole point is they should be putty. /3.
Before we go any further, allow me to underline that my experience is there are some very fine people. In politics. Among billionaires. And in journalism & academia. It’s just that they’re losing. And have been for a couple of decades at least. Much worse in the last decade./4.
What is it which unites the wreckers?
I’m naming no names.
But if I say we’ve seen bizarre & erratic thought processes detached from any rational appreciation of external reality, I suspect a few famous faces will come to mind. /5.
It’s hardly controversial to say we’ve experienced aggressive, irritable, panicky, even psychotic behaviour, by numerous prominent figures in public life.
An extreme & unreasonable distrust of others is well-evidenced in the heightened xenophobia of the last years. /6.
In private, it’s routine to be deluged with disorganised thinking, paranoia, mood changes & phantasmagorical beliefs of such a scale & nature its hard to believe the individuals concerned aren’t having visual, auditory & perhaps other as yet unknown kinds of hallucinations./7.
Now I don’t know about you, but if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck … etc., then it doesn’t really matter if it is one.
It might as well be.
(OK, that’s a cat, below, in case you were getting worried). /8.
Since everything I’ve described corresponds to US National Institutes of Health cocaine & LSD symptoms guidance, perhaps I’ve just been unlucky with the particular anarcho-authoritarians I’ve got to know best
Or there’s a pattern here.
Multicoloured & shifting, no doubt./9. End
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