The Non-Conformist's Bible

I have the greatest admiration and respect for those few, rare souls who are somehow able to free themselves intellectually, but more especially emotionally, from their surrounding, invasive, and demanding culture. I may even say that it actually excites me almost beyond words to meet and converse with such people. Alas, though, this experience has been mine only too seldom in my lifetime. Many of those few I have actually met who would aspire to this high title of 'genius' or 'non-conformist' have, upon, closer inspection, proven only to have been fraudulent deceits, thus earning only my distasteful scorn.

For those people who are still the mental slaves of their cultures, but who (as in many of the young) still show some youthful strength, idealism, and hope of liberation, I find myself frequently feeling a mixture of pity and an urgent yearning hope that they might succeed in breaking and destroying their mental shackles.

For those who have patently given up the struggle, and hasten to conform themselves in every way possible to their peer culture--that culture with which they unquestioningly and exclusively identify themselves--for those, I say, who are now and likely ever will remain only mindless, safe, obedient, unquestioning drones, I can only feel the lowest form of contempt and disgust, and only the fact that they, too--even they--are still human beings also capable of SUFFERING prevents me from treating them exactly as their behaviour merits: as expendable, interchangeable drones in the human hive. Only the hope that--difficult as it may be for me to imagine at present--they may in some future age exercise that flabby muscle called a 'brain' beyond the automatic and instinctive reactions, and thus expand and redeem themselves, prevents me from this reaction.

26 August, 1994.