the social being

i am a lifelong nonconformist. as a kid i was even rebellious; fortunately, i was too smart not to see how dangerous this could become.

but eventually i came not to despise the existence of social conditioning in itself. just as there are conditions for me which render life infinitely more bearable, though idiosyncratic ones, i realize that it is as if all these others were one single being that sought to harmonize itself in the same way that i try to maintain my own environment. if i prefer silence, it prefers noise. if i choose my own path, it takes the path of the majority or least resistance. it doesn't, after all, require very much camouflage on my part; & in the place where i live, there isn't even hazard in slight nonconformity. sometimes i feel sad that the great social being cannot manage to preserve itself, over the long run, but will eventually fall apart--if it doesn't destroy all life on the planet first--: it's not aware of its actions like i am, nor of the farther reaches of causality. i say then, that i don't know where the social being came from, & maybe because it is so much larger than me, i am not in a good position to judge if this is part of its normal cycle, to be created & then to be destroyed, or part of an evolution into something that will become stable in time, one or more cycles hence.

i pretend at times that i can tell.