They are everywhere, the herd. They bustle politely in cafés, bow their heads in church pews, form neat queues, and nod along to lectures that bore them into spiritual extinction. They smile without warmth. They f**k without heart. They live not by the pulse, but by the clock.

They are not alive—they are preserved.

I watch them with the mingled pity and disgust that a man feels for a caged lion who no longer remembers the taste of blood. They wear their leashes with pride. Their obedience is not forced—it is chosen. They have been trained so thoroughly, conditioned so completely, that freedom now frightens them. When you speak of liberty, they glance nervously around the room to see who’s watching. When you act with instinct, they mutter that you are mad.

No, they are not angry at the free—they are terrified of them.

The herd is a congregation of the frightened. Their morality is not born of contemplation but of fear—fear of judgment, fear of punishment, fear of being cast out. They are not kind because they are noble. They are kind because cruelty would require them to stand alone in their decisions, to own their shadows. And they dare not.

They decorate their cages with diplomas and family photos. They perfume their submission with civility. They praise compromise and moderation not because those things are wise but because they have forgotten how to desire anything fully. They settle. They shrink. They make themselves small enough to be digestible.

And then—worse still—they try to convert you.

The herd cannot abide by the existence of the unbroken. Your freedom offends them. Your intensity unsettles them. Your refusal to be tamed is a mirror they cannot look into. So they will clothe their envy in righteousness. They will brand you selfish, unstable, immoral, or even dangerous. They will accuse you of pride when it is simply self-possession. They will mock your passion because it reminds them of the heat they once felt before they chose cool silence.

I have seen their eyes—those dull, agreeable eyes—and I have seen what lives behind them: a flicker of something once bright, now buried beneath etiquette and expectation. A child who once screamed and danced and asked why until it was taught not to. That child now whispers in their dreams.

I am the living heresy to their doctrine of safety.

But let us not be sentimental. They are not only victims. They are also jailers. They enforce their mediocrity with smiles and laws, with gossip and guilt. They will vote for your cage, pray for your silence, and call it love. They are not evil, but they are complicit in the slow murder of the human soul.

So I separate myself from them—not with hatred, but with clarity. I will not drink from their trough. I will not seek their approval. I will not walk their path.

Let them tremble in their sanctuaries. Let them cling to their rules like rosary beads. Let them avert their eyes when I pass through their corridors, reeking not of decay, but of danger.

Because I am not one of them. I am something older, something wild, something that still remembers. I am the truth they buried. I am the voice they stifled. I am the flame they want to put out.

And I will not die in their arms.

Get full access to Ronald MacLennan at aesop724.substack.com/subscribe