By Not Playing the Game, You May Die.

"They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game." These are the words of R.D. Laing. Before Laing, Albert Camus wrote the Stranger, and summed up the work himself in one sentence: "In our society any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death." It is a strikingly true image, especially important for today's fragmented society. If you do not play by the rules, you will be condemned, not necessarily to a physical death, but a figurative death. You may not even know the rules, but that is one of the rules you may not break. You should know the rules, everyone should know them. As long as you fool them, they will not condemn you. But who are this metaphysical They? By definition, it is the others, the outsiders who rule what we may think and my not do.

Society has its rules, you should just follow them. As long as you follow them, without questioning them, you will survive. But dare question these rules, you will feel the wrath of fire from these ruling demons. It like living in medieval times all over again. You may not say this, you may not think this, you may not be this, otherwise, you will burn at the stakes. How did this happen? We normalized the outsider, and we cast the normalized out onto the streets, leaving it with nothing to shield itself.

How did this happen, how did the once innocent normal become the outsider, the punishable, the wrong answer? How did it happen that being who you are will get you killed? How did we normalize that which once was only written about, how did those monsters in the novels come to rule us? The modern classics are filled with those who did not play by the rules, those we looked up to for advice. But today those who we looked up to only try to kill us now. Holden Caulfield is now trying to shoot those who released him from the Novel, Meursault has put the gun against our head. Will he shoot?

No one saw it coming, or maybe we expected it. Normalizing that which is outside is only the normal way things go, but now we completely threw the baby with the bathwater down the drain, trying to accept those who once needed shelter. They took the house, the house that once belonged to us, the house we opened when they needed it. Now they want to burn it all down, they want nothing of this foul memory left for the future. Look at all the flames, just because we tried to kill the fire.

We are not playing the game, because we don't understand it, but this will lead us into the fire. This will burn us down with all we cherish. For a brief moment everyone held hands, we looked to the sky and saw a future in which we could carry on happily until our eventual death, but now no one holds hands. Everyone is scared, no one knows what is going on. The game is being played by only a handful, the game is being won with no one playing. But those who did not even know the game was played, will be the ones who die first, because they did not play the game.

Can we stop the train that is coming for our perpetual anguish? No, the train will not stop, nor will it move away. The only thing we can do is to move away, we are able to jump. No one tied us to the track yet. Maybe this is the way to break this game they are playing, by forcefully stopping to play along. Like kids in the schoolyard, it is only when you walk away from that the constant babble will stop. Maybe we should just get off the track we built, otherwise, the train that we once trusted, will kill us and so kill everything we worked for and fought to keep.

It is only when you lose something that you feel the deep cuts it leaves behind. It is only when you lose something when you realise the importance, but that is not killing it. We know what we lost, we have the ability to build it again. It is when you stop playing the game that you can rebuild it to the glory it once had. Maybe we should just stop playing their game.