Creativity or moral progress are not to be found in the places inhabited by smug drudges who have schooled their brains to satisfy their task-masters, limited and maimed their intelligence to complete the tasks that others set for them.

Moral progress requires dissatisfaction and discomfort--an ache of conscience to see unnecessary suffering.  Curiosity means not being satisfied with what others have done, not leaving things to someone else.

But the world I live in is one where mindless, smug drudges are on the rise.

And they represent a true force for evil, for decline, and increased misery.  The kind of world they are creating is not one I would ever choose to live in.  But I will not be complacent and I will not pretend that the crap they are selling is gold.

If words are the only tool I have, then I shall use them.  And if I express rage, discuss, anger, despair, and sadness, as well as contempt, so much the better.  These are not the emotions of the smug conformist, the sell-out, the well-paid informer for the secret police.  And if the informers who toady up to the powers that be dislike these emotions, so much the better...... They can say it is in poor taste; and I shall become a connoisseur of poor taste, a devotee of poor taste, a fan of poor taste, the best friend of poor taste.  Childish, they may say---and I shall giggle with delight.  Their dislike and distaste cannot equal my enormous appetite for speaking the truth with as little indirection as possible.  Even, you can say, in as unacademic a way as can be imagined; for academia is the realm of truth writ small and the original home of indirect expression---though, I can hear proud voices mentioning a few, very few, exceptions.........

(I am thinking, I suppose, of the danger of translating a philosopher----not from one language to another, but from one time period to another, the danger, .e.g., of making Socrates not a pagan, or of making surprising ideas less so, warping and shrinking them to fit our concerns, and our easy solutions, rubbing off all of the rough edges.  I will be a man of rough edges, not an advertising slogan that slides off the tongue like melted butter, and most assuredly not a "presentation" projected via my laptop, something which is as unoffensive as possible.  I want to be a stone that remains in the shoe until the problem is solved.  And if it is never solved, I shall continue to rub the skin, continue to be abrasive.  Just as I remain a problem to myself, every day, so I shall be for anyone willing to listen something incomplete and unsatisfied by the banalities which replace effortful thought.)

Given the way things are, one could only be truthful and just and honest if one were "uncouth"----considering all the lies that are concealed in the most banal of ordinary transactions.  All personal relationships are based on an enormous underground structure of falsity and injustice.

(I feel that my prose has become Nietzschean.   So much the better---if that is true.  I may have to try on a few more styles before I reach the point I really am aiming at.)