I’m very depressed about the state of the world we live in. I would hate to be a young person because it’s totally confusing. We want to make them comfortable and safe, to keep them locked in their comfort zone, but that means not allowing them to grow, it means rejecting new ideas. We are so dominated
by fears and the rhetoric of victimhood.

There’s no sense of community, everyone feels offended, a victim. All that matters these days are the selfish ideals held in many small communities, which are increasingly fractured and increasingly extremist. There is no longer the will to debate or the joy of having different opinions. Paradoxically, the sense of community has been lost and of being genuinely eccentric, different from others, being “queer” in the original sense of the term: Which used to be about being eccentric, bizarre, about having fun. [Now] everything is driven by hate, driven by phobias and driven by ignorance. Yes, that’s the heart of it. It is ignorance. Because if only one person’s view counts, there can be no progress. There’s no sense of reality. The only truth is your truth or my truth. What counts is my version of reality, and if you don’t agree, it isn’t just that we’re disagreeing, you are phobic towards my view. They use this fucking word, phobic. Well, I’m a phobophobic. I hate hate. Fuck all this phobia.

[Amen. Gilliam is a lefty, but he’s smart enough to see the Maoist impulse to label all dissent to the cultural orthodoxy as a form of mental illness. — Ed]