Citadel del Fouls

I know someone who (if only he had the vocabulary) would call me a champagne socialist. Instead, when he briefs against me he struggles to properly describe the kernel of no-goodness at the heart of my withered soul. He lumbers around near to what he means to say. And he's pretty much got it right. The fullest expression of my ideals would probably be in communism. I imagine a state of affairs where people have a monk-like indifference about the relationship between the nature of the work they do and how much they receive in return. That society's credo would be "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". The trouble is that this quixotic dream shrivels in the cold bath of cynicism, apathy and greed that is the rest of my psyche. It is only used for the purposes of buying newspapers and judging others.

(My real politics – after several years studying the subject – may most accurately be termed Foulist-Robotarianism. I may write about that at another time).

In addition to this, I am an atheist. This probably has its origin in early childhood but it has been galvanised more recently by friendships with evangelical Christians. You can take the horse to a Christian Union quiz social but you can't make it accept Jesus as its own personal saviour, as they say. In fact, the horse will be apt to resent any further attempts to make it accept Jesus.

In spite of this I have no trouble imagining what my beliefs would be were I either politically right-wing or religious. For some reason I have well-developed ideas about what I would think and the sort of things I would say that sit in my brain like the developer levels on Goldeneye; unplayable except with a GameShark (I suppose I am using the GameShark here as a metaphor for a life experience that is sufficiently harrowing for it to wholly change my values and beliefs, which is a strange thing to use a GameShark for).

If I were a right-wing sort of person I would think the following things. There is a moral value to hard work and personal responsibility. It is good to get up early. Despite this people should, more often than not, be left to their own devices. High rates of income tax for the very wealthy are not dreadful because most of those guys are Daddys' boys who don't deserve those jobs but it's a pretty raw deal for people who did work their way up. The Royal family do not interest me. Our economy isn't built on social workers. Business and greed are not synonymous. It's good to see someone running their own shop; real pride of ownership; not like these lackeys in the supermarkets. We can't all just be selling each other car insurance; some of us need to make stuff.

Were I a man of religion I would eliminate superstitions as much as possible. No demons, no miracles, no visions, no angels, no ark, no Eden, no virgin birth. God is imminent; he is everywhere and he is everything. In death, we all come to know God, we are God and we are one. No more sui generis Fouls, no more sui generis you. It is blissful; like looking into the sun and it not hurting. The blinkers are off and we know everything. Supreme gangsta shit, we dream gangsta shit. No judgment and no punishment. We know the nature of our crimes and we now ourselves and everyone else.

It's difficult to know what these phantom ideologies are for. The right-wing one definitely has a voice in my head like an unimpressed father. And I feel that I ought to apply his standards about working hard to my own life if not to anyone else's. The religious ideas are perhaps meant to be an aesthetic improvement on my friends' Christian beliefs. They are more modern with sharper lines and a more metallic finish. Perhaps these alternative and unused beliefs exist in preparation for the well-publicised process of a person's views becoming more conservative as they get older.

I got that picture of a (right) wing from a Conservative blog but I had to flip it horizontally... because they'd used a fucking left wing. It was under the heading "What next for the right?"

*Update: having looked at it again I can't tell if that is a right or a left wing. So they may not be idiots.