Fairy Tale 6 - Aye Den Tee Tee

These days at the village school the pupils are regularly reminded of their inherent value as individuals.   It is emphasised that they should be true to themselves, this being the only way to achieve the health and happiness to which they are entitled.  If they are not true to themselves – if they fail to identify their Inner Me, if they do not reflect carefully and adequately on their needs and wishes, if they do not satisfactorily address their weaknesses and bolster their strengths – then their exam results will be accompanied by a lifetime of feelings of inadequacy and underachievement.

One of the pupils asked the teacher: how can I just be myself?

The teacher was able to provide a long list of support resources, including well-being rituals, self-help manuals, meditative practices, short- medium- and long-term personal development goals, over-elaborate colouring-in books, on-line tutorials, metrics for calibrating your own personal Element, tailored psychometric matrices with motivational nomenclatures and a variety of self-esteem refinement devices.

The pupil went away and spent fucking years giving it all a go.

When she came back she said: I am now finally just being myself and no-one likes me.  In fact, I am roundly disliked.  Is that what was supposed to happen?

The teacher (a new one, obviously) began itemising a list of reasons why the girl must be wrong and simultaneously offering options for a new regime intended to address the self-esteem issues that clearly underlay her belief that she was not liked.

The woman interrupted.

No, she said.  The reality is that you have turned me into a selfish, self-regarding, narcissistic parasite.  You have taught me to feel entitled and to prioritise all my opinions .  You have taught me to be over-bearing, arrogant and dismissive of the concerns of others.

The prescription you offered all those years ago – and which, I see, you are continuing to offer to this day – is a template for turning gentle sociable young animals into predatory consumers.  You took a perfectly lovely young girl and you prepared her for a life as a capitalist drone, willing to undertake an unbroken stream of meaningless tasks in return for the tokens she would need to buy fashionable clothes and amusingly coloured trinkets and to visit novel locations for occasional holidays.

You also taught her that everything that ever happened to her was entirely her fault and her responsibility, thereby neutering at an early stage any possibility of her reaching a conclusion that there might, just might, be something wrong with the system around her.

You stripped her of the idea that she might have things in common with others, that she might have common cause with others, that she might get along with others simply for the joy and love of it rather than solely as a means to an end, solely as some sort of functional exploitation of another flawed human being.  In so doing, you deliberately and systematically undermined the potential for meaningful collaborative action – a choice, on your part, essential to your cause.  If we were to collaborate, we might not only find value in that and choose to consume less; we might also identify the means of our emancipation from this hedonic hell.

I am hated by others because that is what you wanted.  To assuage my pain I buy things, or take pills, or go on holidays.  In hating me, others are goaded into protecting themselves from the risk of themselves being hated, so they desperately try to be an individual, just like everyone else.  You have condemned me – all of us – to the most horrific Catch-22, in which I must be myself to be happy, but in order to be myself I must distance myself from others, the very basis of deep happiness.  You have done so knowingly and with malice aforethought.

I condemn you.

The slack-jawed teacher’s response was drowned by the pupils’ cheers, who carried their new heroine at shoulder height into the street.  No-one seemed to hate her any more, and she wasn’t sure whether she was entirely comfortable with the idea that her destiny now seemed rather less under her control than it had been before, but there was nothing she could do about it, the pendulum had passed its pivot point and would keep swinging in the direction of collectivism and cooperation for a while yet, so her best bet was to relax, enjoy the ride and get along with her new friends as best she could.  She wasn’t quite herself anymore – but then, to be honest, the whole idea of an integrated self that is perceptible from a subjective stance is spurious anyway.