The World's Your Oyster?

Although I have implied it in previous posts, I’ve not actually specifically stated that we live in an Upside Down World. What I mean by this is that, for example, our history is the history of the decline of humanity, not of its progress, that what we consider genius is sickness, and the most able people are not in academic institutions, but living life in normal society and likely to have been classed as non-academic etc., etc… Rather than going for one long post on the subject, I intend to back it up with many instances of this upside down-ness as I run across them in daily life.

This is the first of them:

The World’s Your Oyster?

The following scene from the film The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings trilogy) came to mind the other day. In it, Eowyn, King Theoden’s niece, when preparing to go to Helm’s Deep, tells Aragorn that she fears neither pain nor death. Aragorn asks her what she does fear, and she replies: “A cage. To stay behind bars until old age and use accept them.”

In modern society people do not share Eowyn’s fear. Quite the reverse. People are so used to living in cages that they no longer recognize that they are imprisoned – nor that their cage gets tinier by the year. Take, for example, travel.

When I traveled abroad in 2002, I was somewhat relieved to escape – but only just – the new “anti-terrorist” airport security measures. Even then, air travel had become much more restricted than a decade previously, while today, to say that foreign travel has become a nightmare is an understatement.

Travel used to be SO easy. For example, in the early 1980s I was on holiday in Canada. I lost both my passport and my airline ticket. No problem. A new airline ticket was issued, no questions asked, and I got through UK passport control without my passport. Now when I travel abroad, I am extremely nervous about losing tickets/passport - I know I would not get off anything like so lightly again. In fact, in those halcyon days, if one did not have a full passport, one could obtain a 6-month British Visitor’s Passport over the counter at any post office. The nightmare of requiring and obtaining biometric passports was still to come. Yet even in the early 1900s, travel was even easier than 30 or 40 years ago. Poor folks were regularly traveling between Britain and America by boat, for example.

(Of course, one might argue that travel, being more difficult, does not imply that one is losing one’s freedom. Not true. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. That some governments prefer to put obstacles in the way of travel rather than refusing to issue passports to their citizens produces the same effect i.e. a loss of freedom.)

It is a recognized phenomenon that severe psychological problems arise as a result of living in captivity i.e. in a cage or prison. So why are people in this society just accepting their loss of freedom? Actually, one has to look at it from the opposite perspective. It is BECAUSE people’s minds have become so dysfunctional that they accept, in fact, need, these bars. As I have suggested in other posts, people have become addicted to power, resulting in a society in which autism is endemic. I have also suggested in earlier posts that even though it may not seem so, we live in the best of all possible worlds. Thus, while loss of freedom damages a healthy mind, the simple truth is that a person who is autistic cannot cope with freedom and needs a restricted environment in order to be able to function. Thus loss of freedom has, as it were, become “a necessary evil”.