All against all

“Clashes are perfectly normal, what is the purpose of the pitiless bronze? certainly labor and management cheat one another—are suspicious, sullen, lazy, greedy, deceitful, Mafia-manipulated—you name it, no surprises, ordinary shiftlessness, ordinary exploitation, ordinary rapacity; physicians pill their poor patients to death and then bill the estates, which are already being fucked over by lawyers who specialize in quarrels and in quarreling: in instigating quarrels, nurturing and sustaining quarrels, in broadening quarrels, in aggravating and deepening them, in spelling quarrels (pretending the word needs no q, arguing against doubling the r), in quarreling among themselves then, in sucking quarrels so dry they whapper back and forth like sheets in the wind (whereas the Third Reich tried to eliminate quarrelsome elements, sought peace inside itself, sought to flatten fulminations); but no one likes their state, their place, or what they’re doing—the copper quarters their pockets, the two-dollar bill; thus riders kick their horses, peasants beat their oxen, dissociated personalities play mean pranks upon their not-so-innocent other selves; wars break out in the bleachers; psychoanalysts betray confidences and make out with their patients; journalists rake muck and ruin reputations; mystics and assorted fakes, lovers, men of the cloth, the soil, the sea: all go at it. The sparrows have learned from us how to fuss and sputter, squirrels saw away at their grievances; locusts stridulate; thorns prick; aspens clatter. What a world!” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel