A definition of freedom: Negative reviews, a prison world, collectivism and the right of an individual to remain outside, alone, unhappy, but free.

Article by: Mark.A Pritchard (aka Rorshach1004/SwindonPoet)

Date: 29th October 2015



It can be tiring, frustrating, depressing and soul destroying when you read and review a book (or movie) that isn’t very good.

People don’t want to hear ‘negative’ comments about something that they like, so what you are doing is spending your time writing reviews that will be ignored. People will see it as a ‘negative’ review, and will not bother to read the entire article, and they certainly won’t comment or leave you any feedback on it. However, if you go over the top with mad praise about something, you’ll get a big audience and receive plenty of positive feedback, some probably coming from the creator/writer himself.

Here’s the deal, as I see it. In 2015 we live in a world of media choices where people choose only to consume the media that conforms to their particular world-view. Liberal types read liberal media. Conservative types read conservative media, and ‘geek’ types read media that offers them a little cocoon of unreality where they can hide within a soft feminist, identity politics obsessed, cultural Marxist, neo-liberal world of get-along-gang unreality.

So when somebody like myself comes along and starts to slag off their beloved unreality texts, they do what you might expect them to do. They ignore my words, and stay within the confines of their familiar reservations, where they don’t have to think about anything that makes them feel uncomfortable with the comic book ‘geek’ culture programming products that they are consuming.

I’m not complaining about this situation, I just want to state on the record that I’m very much aware of what is going on. I expect to be ignored, and I also expect to have the occasional pat on the head when I go overboard and heap praise on something. That’s just how it works today in 2015 where the consumer self-censors his own thought processess.

You don’t need Internet police or censorship to stop 'difficult' people like myself. Comic book fans do the work of the censors for them. Anything outside of their neo-liberal, progressive, corporate/statist consensus world-view is disregarded as the ravings of a madman, as something coming from a crazy person who is taking the fun out of comics, taking things too seriously, or just somebody who has too much time on his hands. If that doesn’t work then they can always fall back on their beloved identity politics and call me racist, or sexist, either category will do. My opinionated words challenge the established comic book order, and so of course, they must be ignored.

What I want to do here is to offer up some words of encouragement for sidelined people, like myself, that might be reading this little article.

Keep on writing, keep on doing what you are doing. I don’t have to agree with a single word that you say, but we need disagreeable, individualistic people more than any other time right now.

We need the nutters, we need the moaners and complainers, and we need the wacky and the strange. We need the anti-social outsiders to mock and insult the socio-political norms of our times.

Humanity is sleepwalking into a world of soft state collectivism, and the people are happily imprisoning themselves within a cage of their own making.

In other words, and this is me talking about myself now: I know that I am outside, and I choose to remain here, outside. I can see the cages, the bars, and I can see the people happily existing within them. I see families building the prisons, and I see well-intentioned mothers and fathers encouraging their children to reinforce the gates and bars. The people look so happy living within their own self built prisons, and if that’s where they are happiest, then who am I to demand that they free themselves?

If they want to live in jail, then they are free to live in jail.

I myself though chose to stay here, alone, outside of the prison, and although it can be a bit depressing and soul-destroying at times, there’s nowhere that I’d rather be. To quote from ‘A Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley: ‘ All right then, said the savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’ And this, my collectivist friends, is the very definition of being free.