I am a shadow of my former self: it is though a puppet master has taken control of the shell of my body and made immaterial the wishes of the brain.
This is classic dualism, mind and machine separated at some point in the past, and existing independently. I know what I am supposed to feel, and the body carries out the correct movements, in the correct sequence, but there is little or no emotion behind them.
I expend a ridiculous amount of energy making sure that I transform internal states into expected visual ones - smiles of recognition, nods of affirmation when speaking to someone, even the falsehood that I am pleased to hear from people when I pick up the phone.
With practice, I am able to fake passion and interest and enthusiasm - but it comes at the price of genuine passion, interest and enthusiasm being increasingly less likely to be experienced. Only the true disenlightened can ever hope to lie to the self; only the disciple who has reached the end of the Western alphabet.
I am a child of my generation, submerged in the political dialogue which tells us unsurprisingly that the Prime Minister is a demanding individual who expects a lot from the people whom he works alongside; which holds that the cut of a politician's suit is of more significance than his manifesto; that being able to say the right thing - or doing the wrong thing and making an apology which is insincere in its sincerity - carries greater weight than any action.
These inversions are treated as the norm. Who, then, should be surprised that the normal course of behaviour is to imitate that which prevails and behave as a shadow - distant from nature, isolated from stimuli, cherishing the gesture over the rush of energy which contorts the body into the gesture?
This is the new conditioned autism, the path which is invariably reached when the whip that cracks is devoid of either whip or crack.... the 27th letter of the alphabet is autism, designed.
