The trouble is, it’s not complicated unless it pays to be perceived as complicated.

It calls to mind a lyric: The trouble is, she’s crazy. The trouble is he drinks.

From that era of Cocobrovaz, Tony Mantegna, the one from Soundbombing before the backpackers started to procreate and fund 401ks. Both can be true. Crazy and drunk. and one night they might be accidental, even if not intending to be homicidal. Same result.

The bureaucratic imposition of simple categorical schemes on the world is a way of managing the fundamental stupidity of such situations. In the hands of social theorists, such simplified schemas can be sources of insight; when enforced through structures of coercion, they tend to have precisely the opposite effect.

David Graeber

Simplicity, as enforced from above as opposed to emanating from nincompoops and dullards living out beige existence, can be a form of violence in its own right. And in the dank undercarriage of a single light bulb hall in a non descript building where the powers that be dictate the terms. It is in these quiet fiefdoms where simplicity that violates, the reductionism in abeyance to absurdity, wreaks bureaucratic havoc.

To say “I accept” in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine-guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murders.

Orwell

Maybe, but maybe not.

I knew someone at 22 who understood before too long he would get professionalized and life would be different. He had no illusions and enjoyed what hedonism he could while he still could.

He had no trouble discerning between aliveness and deadness, the real thing that has indwelling gravitational force and the inert pablum passed off as the real thing that hordes of impassioned hucksters kept elevating to the surface. Whatever vivifying effect might be packed into that insight was light years off from me at the time I knew him and heard him talk of inevitably becoming professionalized. Like it would be a kind of conversion. Like we could then stop impersonating ourselves and flay the layer of dermal skin beneath which we had been hiding.

Maybe that is a different form of acceptance.