An online session with a shrink

"You are one of those many new patients suffering from a contra-normalization syndrome", said the online psychologist last night, during a Skype session with the sawdust maker. "Unlike people who simply adapt and arrange to new circumstances, you’re trying to get the speed out of evolution".

Sure, I guess the shrink made a viable point. Here, on the lonesome hill, in the midst of a society where traditions and manners slowly reach the freedom of the 1980s, the need for change is not that obvious. "The dubious symptoms are altruism, complacency, compassion and a thrive for moral magnificence", was the explanation of the man who looked into my kitchen through the webcam. "Suspicious qualities that stand in the way of your personal future and success and even compromise your environment with moral issues that slow down progress".

After a few hours, 6 cups of coffee and half a pack of rolling tobacco, sitting in the dark for a folded laptop, having thought about the diagnosis, I came to the conclusion that being educated, having the allowance to put “Doctor” in front of your name, is not a measure by which one is capable to determine the flaws in someone else's mind. It could, of course, be the result of being exposed to a large quantity of sawdust, but the self-protecting cells in my brain soon started to talk to me.

The new normal, in which the freedom of expression consists of insulting, discriminating and selfishly looking away from other people's persecution, seems to elevate a qualification as focused selfishness to a positive quality that would not look misplaced as the most important mention on a CV. The world around me seems so real, but at the same time so different from the world that is being presented by politicians, fake news writing journalists and talk show analysts. Looking down from the lonesome hill towards the left, the wrong side of the ocean, a historic feudal system is build up at an island not far from the European coast and to the right there’s a worrying process expanding where wannabee dictators maintain close contact with the leaders of populist, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic movements, worshipped by a flog of uneducated sheep, relying on the only source of knowledge they have; their lower abdomen.

I know, from here, safely within the thick dry-stone walls of a little house, overseeing the valley, looking at the world from a fair distance, it is easy to ascribe to yourself some moral eminence without having any sense of guilt or being ashamed of the qualities that make one a nice person. As the 78-year-old akela of the Dutch talk show’s wrote in her memoirs; “It wasn’t the Nazi enemy, who took my Jewish father out of the house to be transported to a concentration camp, but our neighbours who quickly conformed to the new normal”. The sawdust maker is going out again today, doing some chores and delivering some produced expressions of creativity, completely inconspicuous in the refugee resort that Portugal is slowly becoming ...