World: I quit.

Pause.

Me: Fair enough.

Long pause.

M: So … I guess that you have something to tell me.

W: Why?

M: Well… you didn’t have come to see me to say you’re not coming to see me. You could have just not showed up.

So I have a sense that you want to say something to me. Or perhaps you want me to say something to you.

W: I’m still depressed. More depressed.

M: hmmm.

W: I think you are just using me.

M: what… uhm, in what way?

W: That stupid blog of yours. You just pick out the bits you want from our talks to serve your own agenda. And anyway, what about client confidentiality? You are not meant to say anything that could identify your clients.

M: I’m sorry. I … I was trying to help people.

W: You were trying to help people …?

M: Yes..

W: By sharing our sessions …?

M: Yes…..

W: Well there's grandiosity right there. The evidence suggests it didn't work.

M: Sorry.

W: The evidence suggests a good number of people very much believe they already know quite enough … hence they will continue to destroy economy, hope and life in the name of ‘safety’… so I quit.

M: There are lots of people who don’t want to destroy the economy.

W: Not enough. If the majority are stupid enough to destroy so much to control a virus which more than 99.95% of people survive – and which presents an infinitesimal risk to those under 70 – why should I help you to stop them?

M: Perhaps they are not stupid. Perhaps they just believe that The Authorities know best?

W: Perhaps, but they should know better. In June 2017 in Grenfell Tower, London, UK, more than seventy people were killed by a protocol designed to keep people safe. The Commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, who had previously been the Director of Safety and Assurance, stated in her evidence to the Inquiry that that she wouldn't change anything the London Fire Brigade did on that night. If an over-promoted idiot like Dany Cotton is allowed to retire early with a full pension after presiding over, and then defending, such an appalling and preventable loss of life we should all know better than to trust “authorities” who claim to be “protecting people.”

M: Perhaps she…

W: Forget her. She is not worth spitting on. She is just a particularly egregious example of the stupidity of prioritizing protocol over real information available in real time in the real world. It was the most terrible and tragic warning, and it has been ignored, like so many other warnings before. Now, in 2020, “authorities” all over the world are “protecting people” by bankrupting businesses, imprisoning students and the elderly, criminalizing free association, imposing arbitrary un-scientific limits on socializing and driving hundreds of people into suicidal despair.

M: You are very angry.

W: Yes. I am very angry. Here I am providing all you people need for a rewarding and healthy life and you are throwing it away. You are arrogant, idiotic, know-nothings. You start a perfectly decent process of rational, scientific enquiry then you ignore centuries-worth of experience-based learning and in no time at all you imagine you understand reality. You imagine you can control a virus. You persistently pursue idiotic debt-fuelled economic growth to the point that there is no exit other than economic collapse. You willingly foster absurd and dangerous political and religious ideologies. And you imagine your selves to be “sapiens.”

Those of you who really struggle to achieve a sensible, functional balanced view of reality are sidelined by a grotesquely dysfunctional education system and the mindless cult of ambition and celebrity.

You make me sick.

Pause.

M: I don’t know what to say.

W: There is nothing to say. I am sorry for the sane minority, but the mindless majority deserve all the poverty and chaos and guilt they are cooking up for themselves.

M: Isn’t there some Bible story about this...? Like God threatened to destroy somewhere (was it Sodom or Gomorrah?) and someone (Lot?) pleaded with him not to do it if he could find one righteous man?

W: I don't know. I’m not God. And I’m not planning on destroying anything. I am just witnessing mankind setting fire to their own houses and killing each other in the name of safety.

M: Is that a bit melodramatic? Or do you mean it?

W: Not all humans are stupid.

There are those who know, and know that they know. You should look for them and listen to them.

There are those who know, and don’t know that they know. They need to wake up.

There are those who don’t know, and know that they don’t know. They need to keep searching.

Then there are those who don’t know, and don’t know they don’t know. They are a public menace and they form a huge part of the political and bureaucratic classes all over the world. They are the members of SAGE, they are what Naseem Taleb called, “Intellectuals yet Idiots”. They are a plague upon the face of the earth and their Patron Devil is Tony Blair.

M: Blair? What has he got to do with it?

W: Not a lot. But amongst his many, many sins, he did his little vainglorious bit to set up this catastrophe. It was he who in 1999 vowed to send 50% of British kids to university, failing to understand that a massive expansion in university places required an increase in the number of academics and quality cannot be magically summoned out of thin air. So huge numbers of second- and third-rate post-grads suddenly got to be tutors and lecturers, debasing the quality of academic debate more or less overnight. And now they are professors, still unaware of their own dangerous mediocrity, and I presume some of them, incapable of doing any real worthwhile research, have wangled themselves a sinecure on SAGE.

M: Is there anything I can do to help you?

W: I doubt it. I’ll calm down in the end. It’s just I have been here so many times. Great cultures and civilisations are built up at great cost – none of them perfect, but each one striving to create beauty and goodness by their own lights – and time and time again they fall, undone by laziness, stupidity, cupidity and well-intentioned idiocy.

Pause.

M: Well - you did have something to tell me.

W: I guess so.

Pause.

W: Thank you for trying to help, but don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. You try to help yourself now.

M: Thank you. Goodbye.

W: Good luck.