In my life I have seen a lot of difrent ideas play out, a lot of difrent ideologies clash, and hell of a lot of arguing over how things should be. Being an avid reader and a buff of almost any idea, I could get my hands on, making my teenage years fun and exciting. For me, ‘because I said so’ held neither power nor mystery. It was always an admission that someone didn’t understand what they were talking about enough to even begin to be speaking on the subject. Nowhere did I get in more trouble with that than in maths. I loved math as a kid. Math and science for me were the answer to anything and everything. So, when I finally got the opportunity to learn algebra, I was ecstatic. At least I was until my teacher couldn’t tell me why I was wrong on problems I obviously got correct.

“It doesn’t matter that you got the answer rigth, you didn’t show your work, you didn’t do it the rigth way.”

“Why is that important?”

“It just is.”

Oh, I understood that you had to read the equation a certain way; Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally was firmly burned into my little growing brain. But I could do that all in my head, why was a wrong for doing it correctly just because I didn’t write it all out?

I burned-out on math in less than a semester, and no, I was never able to pick it back up.

“Because I said so” robbed me of my beloved science. 

So, I turned my little mind elsewhere. See, I had a problem that no matter what I did, how I thought about it I just couldn’t square. Why was I bullied? Why did people who said one thing always do another? Why didn’t authorities in my life care?

A mind that could have, perhaps should have been focused on Feynman Diagrams, QED, and the ever-expanding fabric of spacetime instead was left with a simple question.

What the hell is going wrong and why is it so fucked up.

Simple.

No matter where I looked, smart people, caring people, loving people, were all trying to force every other human on the planet into doing things ‘the proper way’. Everyone knew the rigth thing to do and knew that if everyone else just did what they were supposed to, everything would be ok.

Religion, Philosophy, Ideology, Governance, Fairness, Justice, and on, and on. Even people who didn’t belive in “black and white’ thinking did this.

What was even stranger to me was this. Even people who seemed to take reality for reality always said things like “This is the world we live in, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” only to follow it up with their own version of ‘if we could just get/make everyone behave like I think they should.” 

Here’s reality.

No matter what your good and pure and just your version of heaven is, it is somone else’s hell.

So let’s stop trying to make a perfict world and concentrate on making a better one, a freer one. One where everyone can self-determine their Utopia and stop trying to force our Utopia upon them.

Death to Hegemony!