Birth

All men and women born on planet Earth are born with original slack. At birth, in fact, slack is just about the only thing you actually have. Yet, already wired into your brain-pan are the tools the conspiracy will use to warp your fragile forming mind.

Despite what some so-called religions would have you believe, the human mind is not a thinking-machine designed for intelligence and given free will by God. In fact, it’s an evolutionary mess, roughly thrown together by the forces of natural selection to do anything it needs to do to reproduce.

At birth, you have potential. Your mind could take on any one of billions of different configurations. It could fly like a golf ball to unimaginable heights of creativity and deduction. It could be the next Plato, a new Einstein, Michelangelo, Copernicus, Rev Mickey Finn, or Genghis Kahn.

And yet, you’ll end up as a worthless cog in the conspiracy machine, toiling so you can afford to travel to work, eat, save for your retirement. Playing your tiny part in the huge practically all-encompassing global conspiracy apparatus, because it seems like the right thing to do.

Well, it would seem like it, wouldn’t it?

While your mind has potential at birth, it is not a blank state. No creature in the world is born as a tabula rasa. Your brain at birth is built from drives, reflexes, autogenetic instincts and unconscious knee-jerk heuristics all built not because they’re good, or true, or beautiful, but because they helped your mega-great grandfather and mega-great grandmother get it on in their own million-year antiquated version of the proto-conspiracy. And they just did it by copying everyone else.

To become something other than the relentlessly inbreeding abjectly conformist, thought-free, unrealized waste of bone you are you’d have to fight these inbuilt reactions, the docile obedient mind-lock that exists in every single one of us at the time we are born. And chances are, you’re programmed not to.

Programmed by your genes, and the raw-materials delivered to you down the placenta to your willing, gaping, forming body. Spiritless, standardized, involuntary molecular-chemical processes build you to want things. To need things. A conspiracy-crack-baby born addicted to the drives of your own base emotions. You are a crying, mewling, hopeless, child-mortality figure waiting to happen. You’re born knowing that your only hope is to impress these people. Gurgle! Act Cute! Do whatever makes them smile, pay attention to you. Feed you.

It’s worse than being a blank-slate. The odds are actually stacked against you from the start. You see a nipple, you suck on it. You feel something in your hand, you grasp it. You associate something with a smile, a touch, a cessation of pain and it becomes your new mantra, your Pavlovian-trained meta-instinct.

While most of all, you are primed to copy things, not just things but ideas, thoughts, behaviours, dogmas, convictions, opinions. You are a meme-sponge, and because of the accident of your birth you are a sponge in the sewer, soaking up sickly conspiracy-infected purified brain-piss and noxious, foul, treacherous mental-crap.

Oh yes, like Larkin said* “They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they don’t mean to, but they’re unwitting co-conspirators of a gigantic code of normality, dupes of a vast and profound global brain-warp determined to rob the world of variety, colour, vision and slack.”

Of course, it isn’t just your mum and dad. Not even just your family and their friends. It’s all the slackless, mindbogglingly bland, psychologically disfigured barely post-neanderthal dupes and gloorps you come into contact with. You god-parents, your aunts, your dad’s shiftless waster hippie friends, your mum’s shopping buddies. ALL of them conspirators, ALL of them poisoning your thought-glands, ALL of them bending your will to that of the conspiracy for their own sakes, or worse, because it seems right.

As a baby you learn different coloured screams for when you needed changing, or you needed burping, or you needed food. You and your carer make up this code as you go along, by trying to guess what each other means, what will make you shut up, what will make her feed you or whatever. If it works, you do it again, and again.

That’s how your imbecilic brain works. You copy what you saw work before, what you tried successfully last time. You avoid the things that get you slapped down, or burped till you’re sick. You might think you’re smart, but all you’re really doing is copying smart people. You might think you’re artistic, creative and graceful but really you’re just a big fraud, a plagiarizing clueless robot, imitating your way to conspiracy success.

I say “conspiracy success” advisedly, because your birth-brain is so utterly clueless, so completely devoid of anything besides your cloning instinct, it has no idea what “Success” might mean past getting that shit out of your nappy, or getting another mouthful of gruel. No, to decide what “Success” or “Failure” mean, you take the usual dumbass shortcut and you just copy what everyone else thinks it means.

Substitute “Right and wrong”; “Blue and red”; “sane and insane”; “Cool and Square”; “Logical and Illogical”; and “Painful and Pleasuring”. It’s still true. You have no idea, so you just go along with everybody else. You probably think that that’s the right thing to do, even now, but you’re so screwed up that you don’t even know what right means! You just listen, like a gramophone-entranced puppy, and believe what they say. Which is what they were told. And, in turn, what they were told.

So who told your mega-grandparents? It’s the conspiracy that told them! A combination of their own peril, misconceptions, self-serving lies, dumb-conclusions and faulty proto-logic. They are its dupes, and they convinced the other dupes and you just went and believed it! After all, it seemed “right.”

By their definition of “right”

In the midst of this terrible fate, you have only one thing going for you, and right there from birth you have a lifetime’s supply if it. It could save you and you have enough to give it away! You won’t, of course, but you could.

All men and women born on planet Earth are born with original slack. And you had it in buckets.

* - Or would have done if he was more concerned with truth than poetry

On To Chapter Two