I was always the black sheep of the family. In childhood it was harmless, and I was a happy and straightforward boy. But everything changed with puberty. Ego, insecurity and fear came to the fore. I would spend the next 25 years sorting through the disruption caused by those hormones. I never actually defeated them myself; rather, they died down of their own accord. It happened in my late thirties, allowing me to be calm for the first time since age eleven. But in the interim, the tumult forced me to become honest - and it achieved this by causing me great pain.
In my teenage years I revelled in being controversial for the sake of it. I would look for ways to justify an unreasonable opinion, and ways to express a reasonable opinion that were needlessly shocking. I think this was me “testing the boundaries”, being a youthful idiot, and testing my own cleverness. I was quite aware of what I was doing, and enjoyed it. I liked clean, absolute, sweeping statements - because they were clean, absolute and sweeping, but also because they shocked people.
By eighteen, these frivolous tendencies subsided and my thinking became more autistic, rigid and doctrinaire. There was a kind of desperation. I was trying to foment a solid worldview. This was to impress myself and other people, of course, but there was a desire for certainty, for security. The result was demented: complex systems of intellectual wankery.
Extreme black and white prescriptions for society and a very mechanistic view of human nature? Perhaps not surprising in a young man who, while intelligent, was inexperienced, deeply insecure, psychologically under-developed, and not well-educated. I told myself I was a hard realist, and sold myself as such. When a friend reacted to one of my pronouncements with the amazed question “is there a romantic bone in your body…?” I was pleased. No, there is no romance here - only cold rationality, unafraid and unbound.
By my early twenties this autism - not to say absurd vanity - was subsiding. I no longer had a puerile desire to shock, and I was no longer impressed by simplistic statements, and I was aware that cold systemic thinking didn’t really match up with either how life was or how I was.
But another shortcoming still prevailed: I was given to wild ideas and had little regard for actual reality, for the time it would take to observe and gradually “become wise”. I fancied that I was already wise. Also, the messy and tangled observations that seemed to accompany age felt boring to me. I wanted excitement.
At this time I was espousing Terence McKenna-inspired techno-psychedelic utopianism. As the real world broke me, this neon thinking evolved into a bitter, frustrated and sad libertarianism - a wish not for utopia, but just to be left alone with my self-sufficiency.
But I wasn’t self-sufficient. I was living on the dole! I was aware of this contradiction but couldn’t find a way to resolve it, so chose to ignore it.
