Amnesia is the price of admission

In the same way that when you enter a prison as a cop, you have to give up your weapon. Well, when you enter the prison of the institutions, you have to give up your memory, as well as your spine. Or you can keep the memory but people will look askance and be a bit worried. And you yourself will find come to find it quite quickly, a burden. And you will regret not having handed in your memory at the appropriate time. Because the cost of sitting in these rooms and listening to white men flap their meat as they go through yet another PowerPoint with pretty pictures of wind turbines and street streetscapes and all the rest of it means that you just lose the will to live and you lose your self-respect (If you had any self-respect, or if you have enough self-awareness to know what’s going on).

And nobody wants to say “the Emperor is naked”, because that’s a really career-limiting move if you do that. So, yeah. Leave your memory at the door. amnesia is the price of admission, wilful, self-inflicted.

And the one of the main mechanisms by which they encourage and justify this self-lobotomisation is through stock phrases like “Well, we’re not here to discuss the past,” “we’re not caught up in the past,” “We’re here to looking forward thinking about the future,” “I’m optimistic,”  blah, blah, blah. And it’s a classic “don’t look at the man behind the curtain” situation.

So amnesia is the price of admission.