Polite Society
Fuck polite society with a shovel. I'm really quite sick of playing the society game: I do like some of the people in it, but it's tedious and very nearly pointless. Polite society is focused on repression, on the avoidance of conflict at any cost, and on not-so-subtle social power plays and status grabs. In short: deathly boring and sickeningly dishonest.
I much prefer impolite society, the kind where anything goes and everything needs saying, where people flirt and flatter and argue and where anyone can speak freely - though whether anyone listens is another matter entirely. They laugh, cry, swear, praise, fight, make peace, fuck, smile, swear, grin, scowl, show the whole range of human emotions and then some more. They debate. They do things that the politer classes of society would be simply shocked at - and they love it.
This is my world, the world of laughter and tears, of peace and war, of everything in between; the world where people are more honest and true - both to others and to themselves. This is a world of intelligent people who don't give a fuck about being intelligent - or indeed about many social conventions. This is a world that makes polite society faint - delicately and politely, of course - with its wonderful decadence.
Does this world actually exist? In my dreams it does; the closest I've found to it in reality is the internet, one of many reasons I spend more time there than the average person should do - but then again, I'm quite decidedly not average. Given the range of human emotions and human capability to express those emotions, it would certainly be possible - but whether people would want it or not is another thing entirely.
I know I'd want such a world; I neither enjoy nor approve of repression, a common practice in polite society. I approve of honesty, emotional and otherwise, of intelligence, of good humour, of excitement and of what I once heard called "the rawness of life". You know, the things that make people bearable and life worth living at least.
I much prefer impolite society, the kind where anything goes and everything needs saying, where people flirt and flatter and argue and where anyone can speak freely - though whether anyone listens is another matter entirely. They laugh, cry, swear, praise, fight, make peace, fuck, smile, swear, grin, scowl, show the whole range of human emotions and then some more. They debate. They do things that the politer classes of society would be simply shocked at - and they love it.
This is my world, the world of laughter and tears, of peace and war, of everything in between; the world where people are more honest and true - both to others and to themselves. This is a world of intelligent people who don't give a fuck about being intelligent - or indeed about many social conventions. This is a world that makes polite society faint - delicately and politely, of course - with its wonderful decadence.
Does this world actually exist? In my dreams it does; the closest I've found to it in reality is the internet, one of many reasons I spend more time there than the average person should do - but then again, I'm quite decidedly not average. Given the range of human emotions and human capability to express those emotions, it would certainly be possible - but whether people would want it or not is another thing entirely.
I know I'd want such a world; I neither enjoy nor approve of repression, a common practice in polite society. I approve of honesty, emotional and otherwise, of intelligence, of good humour, of excitement and of what I once heard called "the rawness of life". You know, the things that make people bearable and life worth living at least.
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