Studying an arts subject to degree level can damage one's sanity. One of the advantages of higher education is supposed to be the ability it gives one to think in novel ways and to challenge convention. It hasn't done that to me. Instead, by presenting such a wide range of things that people bother to concern themselves with; and indeed, devote their lives to, it has more or less destroyed any hope I once had of making the world less awful. Prior to coming to university, my politics were extraordinarily liberal. In a sense they still are, but in a strangely paradoxical way university has beaten out of me any resolve I once had to do anything about them. Somehow, in its attempt to make me think more, and to do so in an analytical and fair minded manner, it has ended up destroying my desire to understand the world and change it into a more rational place. I can no longer bear to think or to take responsibility for any of my views. My politics have always run in an anarchistic vein. It is very clear to me that the only way of organising anything is by allowing people to feel, and to act upon a sense of respect, and (to use a word so amorphous as to be almost meaningless) love, for each other. I still think that there is something good in people and that they can be motivated by something other than the desire for power or wealth, but it seems that the world is corrupted and complicated to such an extent that pulling down all the obfuscating rubbish that infects every area of society simply is not possible now. I have come to realise the scale of the task that confronts anyone wishing to challenge the way in which society is set up. There are simply so many people that disagree with the fundamentals of what I believe in and who have constructed complex edifices built upon such foundations. I once believed that the greatest writers and thinkers were immune to the commercialisation and the obsession with pleasure which consumes us; now I realise that many of them are as weak, or weaker than, myself. People who are more industrious and more clever than me work to maintain capitalism every day; I have always known that they are the enemy. But writers and intellectuals of genius also work to further the system, and apologise for it in their work, though often under the guise of shameful self-indulgence. These people, often as neurotic and self-hating as myself, are impossible to demonise as enemies in the same way. Perhaps I - or we, as humans - have the power to fight evil, cancerous corporations but any such attack has to involve academia; and my degree has taught me that those who should be - and need to be - at the forefront of any revolution, are obsessed with issues relevant only to themselves and minority groups. We read feminist, postcolonialist, Anglo-Irish and homosexual literature - and the list continues, tediously. I have learned to respect, in some sense, and to understand people who devote their careers advancing feminism, gay-rights, and a thousand other issues. But they are all irrelevant compared to the larger issues - that our society runs on third world slave labour and exploitative money-lending to countries in which millions die every year. Indeed, rather than emancipating women economically, it would perhaps be better if we were all imprisoned in the home so that we could not contribute to an economy that is destroying the rest of the world. I cannot help but feel that many of the so-called 'liberal' revolutions in particular areas actually only involve groups gaining economic power; these are revolutions brought about by self-interest, and in that they are bound up inextricably with empowerment within a disgusting economic model, they are of very little worth. A thousand minority issues should be dealt with, eventually. But I am sure that our society is too evil for people to be bothering to explore issues like - at the more respectable end of the spectrum, feminism and at the most laughable end, animal rights and such nonsense. When our hands cease to be covered in the blood of black people we murder every day through our economic policies, then we will have earned the right to care about things like literature and the parochial, neurotic details it tends to deal with. But for now, there are children dying of starvation. To use a cliché I defy you to cringe at, one will have died in the time it takes you to read this sentence. And there are people with greater rhetorical ability than me who devote their lives to bickering about the fine points of art. They could be saving lives. I know all this but it doesn't help. The world is full of people who are more capable than me who will ensure that the system carries on moving. I once thought that the world was simple, changeable place. I still think it is simple, fundamentally, and that there are very few basic concepts that define how people should behave towards each other. They include, particularly, kindness and respect. But I can't fight any more, or allow myself to think in such ways. My mind is awash with a sea of disconnected details; post-modern fracturing has destroyed coherent morality and replaced it with the void into which we are all falling, grapsing at pretty shiny things and petty bits of power and social status to try to slow our fall into absolute nothingness. Corporations on the one hand, and neurotic academics with no sense of priority on the other, have created an Orwellian self-perpetuating and meaningless world where somehow the pursuit of understanding into the niceties of racial diversity or awareness can use up resources that could be used to stop black babies actually dying this very second, as indeed they are. A world where people are allowed to spend their careers moving money around understanding diversity while third-world black children, potentially gay children, female children - children belonging to almost any minority you can imagine, die of starvation, or of shitting their guts out because of chronic diarrhoea. There's nothing inherently good about knowledge. Knowledge is good to the extent that it is put to good use. Most of the knowledge that is found, thought up, analysed and regurgitated back and forth in academic institutions is of little help in dealing with the important issues facing the world at the moment. All these people, at any rate, are much too strong to fight. There is no alternative to capitalism; it breeds out of the very self-obsession that fuels much of academia that I have experienced. Sciences are probably even worse than arts; the space program is obviously pretty disgusting when one imagines how many lives could be saved by using the funds it uses up to do some good in the world. The world is completely destroyed. It is mad and will never be saved. It is clearly going to continue destroying itself as people scrabble for money and shiny things to surround themselves with, and as people make it more complicated and more pointless. But really, if people all just stopped and tried to feel some human love towards each other and paid attention to all the people our country urinates on relentlessly, then there would be no need for all the byzantine machinations of their theories. I'm going to try to do some good in the world; but I'm sure capitalism has won. I hope any capitalists reading this can try to understand the sort of pain they put people like me through every day; people who cannot cope in the cruel world they have created. I'll try to get a job soon, and I'll try to get one which doesn't consist in fuelling people's self-satisfaction - a hard task in our society. But I'm not going to think any more, because you've won, you vile, avaricious people. I'll join you. Fine. Apathy is sanity. Everyone knows that. You can respond to Oliver's thoughts by filling in the form at the bottom of the page.
Could you be a student diarist?
If you hail from North Yorkshire or are studying in the county and think you could squeeze out a few hundred words about once a month (more if you want to!) get in touch with us by emailing [email protected] |  | Sita
This was amazing and inspirational. You have put my feelings and thought's into fine tuned sentences. Now the next step is to make this a reality. S.
I feel much like you do. Learning about the world has left me hopeless and alienated. |
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