Reply #59: The white clown.

[otherlander]

The people like to laugh at the white clown on the three-walled television screen. But not you or I. And I know that because I'm depressed I need therapy but there's a fundamental problem that is this: Therapists seem to act as if their job is to calm people's urgency. That's entirely wrong. The urgency must be embraced. In the words of Krishnamurti, it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

A year ago I said that the CIA was kidnapping people and had secret jails. I was called paranoid. Several months later the president admitted that this had been happening. Yesterday I said that weed was only illegal because it let people be jailed and used as prison labor. Everybody laughed.

While the normal people here watch their white clowns, it's the freaks living on the railroad tracks who urgently ask, "Must man leap into the flames of the funeral pyre of his own construction time and again? Is man so like the phoenix?" Because 451 never was about an authoritarian government. They even had elections in the story. It was only about an indifferent society.