copy of a letter
Further to yesterday’s comments about giving up on the belief in society, I should, as usual, insist on the importance of the hypothetical. People have a resistance to accepting the possibility that everyone may be against them, or that their lives may be irrevocably ruined, but it is not a matter of believing that those things are the case, it is only necessary to accept that these thing are possibilities and to stop distorting one’s mind in a decentralised way to avoid noticing the indications that they may, realistically, be the case.
In practice, however, I have certainly found that accepting these things (without giving up) has aroused hostility and opposition.
I had not realised that trying to recover from a bad position, once one has been thrown out by society, makes one a criminal. If you go on trying to do what society has decreed you are to be outcast from, this not only arouses no sympathy (except from the few very exceptional people who are here now) but actually arouses opposition, either covert or overt as vitriolic abuse.
As you know, I was quite identified from an early age with being a respectable and successful middleclass person and I saw no difficulty at all in living within the law and with a fair amount of respect for other people’s territories, physical and psychological. But I found this was not enough to prevent myself from being perceived as a criminal.
And, by the way, perhaps I should repeat that although when I regained my centralisation at the age of 19 I cried for three days for the loss of my destiny, I was not actually giving up and did not actually lose it (as everyone around me would have liked to believe at the time). But, of course, I was not any longer in the market for explaining myself to other people.
