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SOMETIME IN JANUARY 1996 "This, what it is, I do not yet know. A collection of accumulated knowledge, ideas, memories, fact, surmise... who knows. Anyway, what I once considered private, seems to be public. Late the next night and I've just woken up to this most unsatisfying thought... One has to be a bastard to exist in this world full of them, but then I've always had the suspicion I took myself too seriously until I found myself too serious to take. Tonight is a horrible day. I have discovered the true meaning of two words: power and greed; power is in sex, also in drugs. Power is the feeling when something immense happens in return for little efforts, i.e. an assassin firing a gun or a junky shooting up, etc. The participant gets off on the execution just as much as the end result. Greed comes dressed in a velvet glove, greed is not the want to possess everything, greed is simply wanting more than the person next to you". LATER "Cruelty occurs when people lose touch with the real world. In the nineties this is partly due to the fact that we are distanced from reality by a life we do not lead, therefore we are also distanced from one another. We experience the world through television and use drugs to enjoy social communication. We use machines instead of our bodies and when our bodies fail us, machines keep us alive. When we do not feel life, we do not feel what it is to be alive. We do not feel compassion, our neighbor is invisible. When he suffers, we turn the television off or simply register a blank. Existence is a bubble we feel will never burst. We can't decide how to vote because we need a new party. We've abandoned our world in favor of ourselves. We cover the ground in broken glass, then take off our shoes; we need to look again. Unemployment is the final insult to the individual, mass production was the first. Our education system is wrong, it takes no note of the subtleties of human nature, it places more importance on the memory of an individual than how memorable an individual is. It does not nurture talent, but rewards those who obey and allows them entrance to an exclusive club. This is wrong. The best are wasted. This is why society is disintegrating. Can't you see the spelling doesn't matter, because we are not saying anything anymore. It's called the power of silence, the right to which we lost in 1995." © Bernard Sumner, Raise the Pressure.
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