A is not A,' Hagbard explained with that tiresome patience of his. 'Once you accept A is A, you're hooked. Literally hooked, addicted to the System.' I caught the references to Aristotle, the old man of the tribe with his unfortunate epistemological paresis, and also to that feisty little lady I always imagine is really the lost Anastasia, but I still didn't grok. \r\n \r\n'What do you mean?' I asked, grabbing a wet handkerchief as some of the teargas started to drift to our end of the park. \r\n \r\n'Chairman Mao didn't say half of it,' Hagbard replied holding a handkerchief to his own face. His words came through muffled: 'It isn't only political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. So does a whole definition of reality. A set. And the action that has to happen on that particular set and on none other.' \r\n \r\n'Don't be so bloody patronizing,' I objected, looking around a corner in time and realizing this was the night I would be Maced. 'That's just Marx: the ideology of the ruling class becomes the ideology of the whole society.' \r\n \r\n'Not the ideology. The Reality.' He lowered his handkerchief. 'This was a public park until they changed the definition. Now, the guns have changed the Reality. It isn't a public park. There's more than one kind of magic.' \r\n \r\n'Just like the Enclosure Acts,' I said hollowly. 'One day the land belonged to the people. The next day it belonged to the landlords.' \r\n \r\n'And like the Narcotics Acts,' he added. 'A hundred thousand harmless junkies became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress, in nineteen twenty-seven. Ten years later, in thirty-seven, all the potheads in the country became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. And they really were criminals, when the papers were signed. The guns prove it. Walk away from those guns, waving a joint, and refuse to halt when they tell you. Their Imagination will become your Reality in a second.

• society
• time
• power
• will
• reality
• imagination
• criminals
• ideology
• public
• patience
• definition
• other
• the spectacle
• magick

It isn't only political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. So does a whole definition of reality. A set. And the action that has to happen on that particular set and on none other.'\r\n \r\n'Don't be so bloody patronizing,' I objected, looking around a corner in time and realizing this was the night I would be Maced. 'That's just Marx: the ideology of the ruling class becomes the ideology of the whole society.'\r\n \r\n'Not the ideology. The Reality.' He lowered his handkerchief. 'This was a public park until they changed the definition. Now, the guns have changed the Reality. It isn't a public park. There's more than one kind of magic.'\r\n \r\n'Just like the Enclosure Acts,' I said hollowly. 'One day the land belonged to the people. The next day it belonged to the landlords.'\r\n \r\n'And like the Narcotics Acts,' he added. 'A hundred thousand harmless junkies became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress, in nineteen twenty-seven. Ten years later, in thirty-seven, all the potheads in the country became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. And they really were criminals, when the papers were signed. The guns prove it. Walk away from those guns, waving a joint, and refuse to halt when they tell you. Their Imagination will become your Reality in a second.

• anarchy
• crime
• government
• ideology
• magick
• power
• public
• reality
• society
• time
• will
• imagination
• criminals
• definition

If you accustom yourself to this view of life you will regulate your expectations accordingly, and cease to look upon all its disagreeable incidents, great and small, its sufferings, its worries, its misery, as anything unusual or irregular; nay, you will find that everything is as it should be, in a world where each of us pays the penalty of existence in his own peculiar way.  Amongst the evils of a penal colony is the society of those who form it; and if the reader is worthy of better company, he will need no words from me to remind him of what he has to put up with at present .  If he has a soul above the common, or if he is a man of genius, he will occasionally feel like some noble prisoner of state, condemned to work in the gallery with common criminals; and he will follow his example and try to isolate himself.'  

• existential
• society
• suffering
• soul
• life
• work
• will
• existence
• criminals
• expectations

The prison administrators are sometimes surprised that one convict or another can have lived quietly for several years, a model of good behaviour, even being made a head prisoner for good conduct, when suddenly for no apparent reason whatever - as if the devil had got into him - he starts to behave waywardly, to go on binges, get mixed up in brawls, and sometimes even takes the risk of committing a criminal offence: he is openly disrespectful to a senior official, or he commits murder or rape, etc.  The administrators view him with astonishment.  But all the while the cause of this sudden outburst in the man of whom one least expected it is nothing more than an anguished, convulsive manifestation of the man's personality, his instinctive anguish and anguished longing for himself, his desire to declare himself and his humiliated personality, a desire which appears suddenly and which sometimes ends in anger, in frenzied rage, in insanity, fits, convulsions.  So, perhaps, a man who has been buried alive in his coffin and who has woken up in it hammers on its lid and struggles to throw it open, although of course his reason tells him that all his efforts will be in vain.  But this is not a matter of reason; rather it is one of convulsions.

• crime
• criminals
• humanity
• prison
• psychology
• behavior
• personality
• desire
• negative emotions
• reason
• the devil
• will
• insanity
• murder
• anger
• rape
• model
• matter