Herman Hesse is so frustrating. Part of what I don’t like about his writing is that he romanticises struggle while criticising adaptation. You can’t just get from struggle to freedom. To get to freedom you need struggle to go hand in hand with adaptation. You can’t struggle against adaptation and actually achieve freedom.

I struggle against society and dillute-decline-culture but I don’t pose myself as its outsider, facing it antagonistically. Rather I pose as a symbiotic organism suckling from within on its warm portions and vital, not-yet-dillute energies.

Instead of posing as an antagonist who needs to tear and smash and break free, I place myself as a blastula of dedifferentiated cells slowly consuming and changing society and culture around me with my fierce growth and revelry.

Hesse was writing to a society in which the alienated, dissolute mindset was first becoming a social phenomenon. People who want to romanticise their sense of alienation tend to be drawn to him. I feel that in spite of the positive messages that his work offers, his books allow, or even encourage, an unhealthy escapism. At the time that he was writing, this sense of escapism was useful for soul-searching and appropriate for those who needed to anchor themselves as society began its slow degenration. Now the decline of society is so obvious and apparent that anyone who needs to take time to reflect on it is doing so that the expense of changing it for the better.