DARE TO BE BAD
When I was a child, I thought as a child and spake as a child, but then I became a man and put away childish things.
One day in history class, about my 8th year in school, the teacher made a few pronouncements about "communist dictatorships". I raised my hand and asked him a question. The GDR (East Germany as we Westerners have been taught to call it) was a communist country and so how was it that they could describe their country as a democracy? My question was an innocent one because I collected stamps and had a few from the German Democratic Republic. He didn't like my question and as I determined, he didn't like me either.
As I got older I learned about dissidents. They came from the East and were mercilessly critical of communist countries. Then I worked it out. I could not deny the existence of such dissidents but that they were exclusively in the East was very unlikely. I indeed discovered that the West also has an significant share of dissidents. Western dissidents are treated in preemptive ways, all designed to ensure that they are marginalised and ineffective. Sometimes they are killed or tortured, sometimes they are locked up for years and it doesn't take much imagination to consider other types of oppression and such suppression our dissidents experience. The main thing is that Westerners should learn to keep away from dissidents. Citizens learn to avoid them and know that if they express dissident sympathies they will be restrained. We inwardly have come to recognise that our "freedom" is contingent on us not using it.
What is the point of being indignant about the way things are? Scolding the thief for being a thief is silly. In this new age of globalism and post liberalism our own personal dissident hope comes from exploiting the opportunities that arrive in order to derail or deviate our system's workings. Western dissidents should learn how to have fun and how to stir up trouble. It is all right to be bad. What care if no one reads us? What care we if the truth is not recognised ? We do what we do and the rest beyond our control. Making a wise crack about our Western conditions is just as much an act of good citizenship as picking up a candy wrapper that has been thrown on the street. Cats eat birds and evangelicals preach to them and try to convince them to be nice and to not do that. What a waste of time! When you are a naughty dissident you learn to retreat when the cat advances and to advance when he retreats and to exploit the moment when the cat is tired by uniting all your force and attacking him to crush him. Maybe we will win. Maybe we will loose. I don't think things are inevitable but I recognise that dissidents can advance their cause by being daring and audacious.