Police & Thieves

 

" There is No “Us” and No “Them” – There’s Just Us. And somehow We’re trying to make this thing work. And it does work.

Say, for instance… most of us here are mostly pretty counter-culture types – y’know, we like our drugs, we like this and that; we like breaking a few rules. 

But we don’t like The Police, in general. 

Who here Loves The Police? 

Hands up.

[ A single person applauds and  -- presumably -- raises their hand ]

Nice one! 

Coz I’m gonna teach you to love the police.

Why Do We Hate The Police? If we want to Change Things – everyone in here, let’s Go Down to The Local Precinct and Join Up. 

Are we gonna do it? 

Who here’s gonna do it with me? 

'Cuz I’m no' gannae Do It..!!

And why? Why are We not doing that?

["Coz they're dumb!"]

Right. So we’re hating these guys who’ve taken on this thing… we’ve chosen the biggest lunkheads in society to protect ourselves from The Fuckers in Rikers Island! 

Because We're scared of Them! 

Y’know, We are scared of Them. We are middle-class, libertarian liberals who are shit-scared of being raped in prison.

So we create The Police. And we get these lunkheads… who will obey what we tell them do to. They’ll actually obey us; those fuckers will do what we tell them. 

And we say to them: “Protect us from those real fuckers; those bikers, and those black guys, and all those awful guys who are gonna come and fuck us up and kill us and steal all our stuff.”

We put The Police there. Right? We put Them There. And We don’t want to go There, because We are smart people; we are cool people. We don’t want to go and hit anyone. We don’t want to go and Enforce The Law – because We don’t really believe in it. But we know some poor bastard has to enforce it.

Why do We hate Those Guys when We put Them There?

Why do we hate ourselves for creating This Society?

Why are so many people in America obsessed with Marilyn Manson; corpses; dead people; misery; John Wayne Gacy… 

John Wayne Gacy’s a fucking prick. 

Y’know, he killed a few people and did some shitty paintings. What’s that? Why should we be engaged with that? And yet that has become.. what, “Apocalypse Culture“?

Where do we go from there, that isn’t that? Where do we go that isn’t playing with our own shite?

The Answer… back to The Individual.

If The Individual doesn’t work – if Patrick McGoohan was wrong; Number 6 was wrong to stand on that beach screaming “I am not a number, I am a free man!” – what do we have left?

Because ultimately the guy who’s not a number and not a free man experiences neurosis, the longer he goes down that path. I’m sure there’s a bunch of people here, like me, who eventually… you’ve worked your way through this stuff; you’ve read the books, you’ve done this shit; you’ve taken the drugs; you’ve been there, you’ve seen it. We’ve all experienced enlightenment in little bits. You know it’s out there; you know this stuff is true : 

The Consensus doesn’t explain our lives. But what does?

Imagine getting rid of the individual. Imagine getting rid of that scaffolding. What do we have left? And here’s what I’m about to offer:

The more I looked into it, the more I began to see that we have these mutants living among us, right now. 

The people from the 21st Century; from the end of the 21st Century are here. But there is no context for them. 

In the same way that – y’know, if you lived in… Tunguska two hundred years ago, and you were an epileptic, you would be a shaman. There was a context for you. In This Society, you’re an epileptic. It’s quite simple; it’s a disease, and nothing you say is of any worth because it’s considered pathology.

If, on the other hand, you look at these people, who are The Mutants… and what do they call it? Multiple Personality Disorder.

This is what lies Beyond The Personality, Beyond The “I”, Beyond The Bullshit.

Because if you take “I” to the limit – and like I said, I’m sure a lot of us here have done this – it becomes…all that happens is that Self Questions Self. 

Endlessly; repetitively. 

“Am I doing this right? 

Is this the right way? 

Should I think about these people like this? 

Should I approach them this way?

Should I involve them this way?” 

Self questions Self, endlessly, and it reaches a peak… it goes nowhere.

On the national scale, that same thing – self questions self; self encounters not-self; equals borders, war, destruction.. that’s where it goes. That’s where it ends. That thing ends in disaster.

It ends in neurosis on a personal level. And it ends in war on the national level.

So I began to think: “What could we replace that with?” And I was looking at these poor MPD fuckers. And I realised they just don’t have a context.

What would happen if we decided to abandon the personality, and replace it with a multiple personality complex? Because as we all know – everyone in here, I’m sure.. I mean, I feel as if I can say this for certain, knowing human beings as they are: 

Sometimes you do things that you don’t want to do. 

Sometimes you do things that are contradictory to what you think. 

Sometimes you fuck yourself up.

Why? Because there’s not one person in here; there’s hundreds.

And if you start giving them names, and you start shuffling them about; if you start playing with them, you become a bigger human being. 

Because you’ve no longer allowed yourself to stop at your boundaries.