They’re doing this to mock us. They’re laughing at us. This is their idea of a joke.
They’re making a joke of our lives. Our whole lives: for their entertainment.
They’re making a joke of philosophy, which is worse.
They like to watch us run around in so-called freedom. They enjoy our faux-philosophical escapades. They love our position-striking. Our play-acting. Our believing ourselves to be revolutionaries, or whatever.
Our faux despair. Our faux philosophising and faux reading. Our faux everything. They love all that. Our faux-apocalypticism. Our version of desperation. Our cries, our gasps …
They’re allowing us our little rebellion because they think it’s funny. They like to laugh at the flies, because that’s what we are – flies, to them. Flies to ourselves. Buzzing around the corpse of freedom of thought. Of philosophy.
They don’t even have to bother to interrogate us, let alone torture us. Let alone try to rehabilitate to us. To spend time trying to covert us. They don’t need to bother with all that.
It won’t be like O’Brien, torturing poor Winston Smith. Paying Smith all that attention. Spending all that time with Smith. There’s no need for that. They don’t have to bother.
The real kindness would be death – to die. To let us die. To snuff us out. But they’re not going to do that, are they? They’re going to let us live on. As the last philosophers. The las humanities lecturers. The last humans – why not?
Killing us would be a mercy. Letting us kill ourselves would be one, too.
That won’t be allowed. That won’t happen. We have to serve out our sentence. On the Organisational Management campus.
They should just let us just disappear quietly. No one should notice. Let us just slip away. We’ll go out. Discreetly. Without drawing attention to ourselves. Without fuss. That’s how it should be. That’s apt.
The end should be .. disappointing. A fizzling out. Without publicity. Without mourning. Just … a passing over. A going across. A simple … expiration.
They could just have brought in analytic philosophers to replace us one by one. When we retired. When we resigned. There’d be three of us left, then two and then … well, it would be obviously untenable, wouldn’t it?
Work in Progress 