Since i'm a literary failure...

...luckily Crass knows what i mean:

Punk used to be a massive cry against inequality and injustice, but then it became incorporated into the mainstream. I detest people who allow that incorporation to happen. It makes me angry. Time and time and time again you hear youth expressing its voice. Time and time and time again you see that voice destroyed by drugs, self-indulgence, stupidity and sell-outs. It's sad.

But for all that, you have to go on believing in possibilities, believing that people want something better in life, looking for something outside of ugliness, vulgarity, cruelty and exploitation; something that has a meaning, that's got connection. But every time there seems to be a possibility of that happening, it gets knocked down.

We offered information, and I do believe that a lot of that information was real and correct. When I say correct I mean actually presenting something of value which people could take hold of and say "Yeah, maybe I could make something of my life". The thing we wanted to help people understand was a sense of autonomy and authenticity of the individual human soul. Just as soul is constantly demeaned in the media, so it is undermined by drugs, inside or outside, but in the end it's the only thing we've truly got. As personalities we're just a series of remarks picked up on our journey through life, and, sadly, this becomes what we think we are. But beneath all that we've got something we were born with, something we die with, something which exists beyond time, and that's our deepest inner soul. I guess I'm talking about a kind of immortality. To me the purpose of life is to connect with that inner soul, because by doing so we actually become part of life's continuum. If we exist as separate entities, as individual personalities, there's no reality to life and no continuity beyond it.

There's a connectedness between everybody and we all breathe, we all eat, we all sleep and we all have an inner soul which enables us to do that. It's all so obvious and natural.

We all exist in a day-to-day reality of lies and deceit, and nobody will ever make any sense of it. That's why we need to allow for tenderness, for silence, for contemplation. We need to find our own soul within all this mess. We've let ourselves become commodities, pawns in the marketplace. The only way we can get out of that is to realise that our personality, the very thing we think we are, is no more than a costume of ideas. We all like to think we're someone special, so we mouth the right words, dress up in the right gear, but it's all projection, all so fucking irrelevant.

But for all that, I believe people want to connect. Deep down they're tired of being no more than an idea of themselves. That's why people look for more, that's why they have sex, why they smoke dope, why they go on binges. They probably won't find the answer that way, but all the same, they want to connect. People want to know that they're alive, but let's face it, in a consumer society, that's no easy job.