Even people who call themselves “social critics” are trapped in what I see as “cultural assimilation."

 Even people who call themselves “social critics” are trapped in what I see as “cultural assimilation,” and they don’t even notice it. Even the fact that they smoke cigars is enough to prove this, because that habit is rarely an individual choice. It reflects imitation—in other words, social influence. On top of that, they turn this into their “style” and identify themselves with cigars, as in figures like Freud and Sartre. Most likely, they also embrace the “courtesy of offering a cigarette,” that is, the absurdity of mistaking poison for a friend. Do they really think they look “cool” by doing this? This lack of compatibility between philosophy and life exists in Schopenhauer as well: although he used Buddhist rhetoric, he lived a comfortable, pleasure-seeking life in practice and even referred to this by saying, “I do not have to live my philosophy; not everyone is obliged to.” Even if I can find such people intellectually justified, I can never warm to them emotionally. The people around them are also the same. They have all grown desensitized. That is why they are the most dangerous ones. In my youth, before I understood them, I assumed they were “enlightened,” so I tried to align myself with their ideas. I tried to prune myself to fit their mold, not out of shallow imitation but because I had accepted them as truth. And I accepted them as truth because I was desperate. I was completely alone in my pain, so I clung to anything that looked like a path to salvation. In that sense, I was hunted too. They hunted me the way someone might offer poisoned food to a penniless, starving homeless person, exploiting his misery to get rid of him. I ate that food as well, but I did not die, and years later its effects were purged from me. The answer to how I survived is simple: I was free from culture. For example, culture sees solitude as “shameful,” but because I did not carry that view, I could take pride in it. Being alone became my revenge. Even the most reclusive people spoke of loneliness as something negative, and to free myself from all of them, I forbade myself from thinking that way. Perhaps it was out of stubbornness, but it doesn’t matter. By merely existing, I would invalidate all their views. Later on, I began doing to them what they had done to me, though not by offering poisoned food, but by giving them nothing at all and keeping them under constant intellectual bombardment.