Mettray

Adjust to the prevailing values of society, and people will be happier, less threatened, they won’t suffer as outsiders.” The emissary’s song is so beguiling:
Happiness is security.
Security is the absence of pain and suffering.
To avoid suffering, you must play the game, join the team, adjust. You have your models, heroines, and heroes. Made in Hollywood, Moscow, Washington, (Ottawa?), Peking, and Rome.
There’s nothing to it.
Now do it.
No!
Their rewards have too many strings with nooses attached; the more they let you have, the deeper your investment, the more they can take away - and they will, at the first sign of deviation. Why give them the satisfaction, or the power?
I cannot believe in both them and in me, they won’t allow it. So I choose me. Their direction of life is a failure. Now it’s my turn, and they’ll never have it back.
I choose to deviate.
For what rewards? What about security? Am I strong enough? I don’t know. I know this: security is an illusion, a sneaky trick, an aspirin always just out of reach.
I am a deviate. As an outsider I suffer, and will always suffer, the indecent pressing of the majority. Having rejected its models as impossible to emulate in real life, and having found or invented none of my own, I have nothing to hold onto, nothing in fact to lose. I am nowhere, balancing (at best) on grains of quicksand.
I can imagine nothing in this universe more dangerous, or more beautiful.
I am blessed. Michael Riordon, “Blessed are the deviates: a post-therapy check-up on my ex-psychiatrist.” The Body Politic Issue 21, December 1975.