as the sense that one is becoming better and better socialized, imbued with a greater and greater probity whose primary function is to temper one’s ability to defend oneself and act in one’s own interests and to silence in the interest of a stern sanity the knowing voices of streetlamps, floorboards, and iron bridges so that one can better hear the ass-like braying of one’s fellow humans as they thrash about like broken chickens in boiling water, squawking in cliches they believe will bring them deliverance.
Socialization is a poor excuse for competence; it sometimes seems to me as though suicide is society’s way of losing its geniuses.