So instead of smashing my head against the wall directly, which is resulting in nothing but clouds of blood in the water, let’s consider the big picture from some alternative angles.

“Fascism should more appropriate be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
–attributed to Benito Mussolini, was also is credited with coining the word Fascism in the first place.

Being proud of myself for conceptualizing my homeland as the Empire … was trivial and vain, because it’s not just any old imperial Empire, and the quote makes that abundantly clear. The power of the state and the power of the corporations is now merged. The trend is toward expanding the entanglement and making the two variants of power indistinguishable.

Call it feudalism, call it ‘democracy’ or capitalism, call it fascist by it’s proper name, call it an oligarchy as I am fond of doing … it amounts to the preservation of the pyramid as shown by whatever means necessary.

I have always been a peasant, I have always been a prole. In the days when I was an esteemed professor, it seemed for a time that maybe I was in danger of becoming a vassal. The last time I ran into a friend and former teacher who had known me for decades, she said, upon hearing about me buying a house and a car–“Oh yes I see. You’ve become middle class”.

Despite her fine mind and all her insight into me, she was mistaken. Even if I worried for a moment that she might be right, subsequent events made sure that my cream would not rise and that my handle on the first ascending rung was destined to slip away.

The way my society would see it, I became a failure. But in my heart I’m alright with all of it, and even soothed to a point. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Or to put it in less flowery terms, what would it say about the true condition of that soul, had I succeeded in the usual way inside a fascist empire?

I did always see professoring as nothing better than the best available compromise between sleeping in the park with my ideals intact, and succeeding by the standards of darkness and corruption.

I’m a shades of grey person, and this is not a shades of grey theory of my life. I’m aware of that.

Partly that’s why inquiring into my real origin story, and trying to suss out who I am really on some macro level is toxic for my mind and body right now.