She did not hate them. She did not despise them. She found them irrelevant.
She went to university for three years. There she enjoyed the double life of such young people: democratic and frugal in the university, and the luxuriousness of an indulged minority to whom everything was possible, at home.
She was not interested in what she was taught, only in whom she met. She drifted in and out of political sects, all on the left. She used in them the cult vocabulary obligatory in those circles, the same in all of them - and they might very well be enemies at various times.
What they all had in common was that "the system" was doomed. And would be replaced by people like themselves, who were different.
These groups, and there were hundreds of them in the Northwest fringes - we are not now considering other parts of the world - were free to make up their own programmes, frameworks of ideas, exactly as they liked, without reference to objective reality. (This girl never saw for instance that during her years among the groups she was as passively accepting as she had ever been in her family.) [SEE History of Shikasta, VOL. 3011, The Age of Ideology, "Pathology of Political Groups."]
From the time the dominant religions lost their grip not only in the Northwest fringes, but everywhere throughout Shikasta, there was a recurrent phenomenon among young people: as they came to young adulthood and saw their immediate predecessors with the cold unliking eye that was the result of the breakdown of the culture into barbarism, groups of them would suddenly, struck for the first time by "truth," reject everything around them and seek in political ideology (emotionally this was of course identical to the reaction of groups that continuously formed and re-formed under the religious tyrannies) solutions to their situation, always seen as new-minted with themselves. Such a group would come into existence overnight, struck by a vision of the world believed by them to be entirely original, and within days they would have framed a philosophy, a code of conduct, lists of enemies and allies, personal, intergroup, national, and international. Inside a cocoon of righteousness, for the essence of it was that they were in the right, these young people would live for weeks, months, even years. And then the group would subdivide. Exactly as a stem branches, lightning branches, cells divide. But their emotional identification with the group was such that it prohibited any examination of the dynamics which must operate in groups. While studies by psychologists, researchers of all kinds, the examiners of the mechanics of society, became every day more intelligent, comprehensive, accurate, these conclusions were never applied to political groups - any more than it had ever been possible to apply a rational eye to religious behaviour while the religions maintained tyrannies, or for religious groups to apply such ideas to themselves. Politics had joined the realm of the sacred - the tabooed. The slightest examination of history showed that every group without exception was bound to divide and subdivide like amoeba, and could not help doing this, but when it happened it was always to the accompaniment of cries of "traitor," "treachery," "sedition," and similar mindless noises. For the member of any such group to suggest that the laws known (in other areas) must be operating here, was treachery; and such a person would be instantly flung out, exactly as had happened inside religions and religious groups, with curses and violent denunciations and emotionalism - not to mention physical torture or even death. Thus it came about that in this infinitely subdivided society, where different sets of ideas could exist side by side without their affecting each other - or at least not for long periods - the mechanisms like parliaments, councils, political parties, groups championing minority ideas, could remain unexamined, tabooed from examination of a cool rational sort, while in another area of the society, psychologists and sociologists could be receiving awards and recognition for work, which were it to be applied, would destroy this structure entirely.
When Individual Seven left university, nothing she had learned there seemed of any relevance to her. Her family expected her to marry a man like her father or her brother, or to take a job of an unchallenging kind. It seemed to her, suddenly, that she was nothing at all, and nothing of interest lay ahead of her.
This was a time when "demonstrations" took place continually. The populace was always taking to the streets to shout out the demands of the hour.
She had taken part in demonstrations at university, and, looking back on them, it seemed to her that during the hours of running and chanting, of shouting and singing, in great crowds, she had been more alive and feeling than ever in her entire life.
She took to slipping away from home when there were demonstrations, for a few hours of intoxication. It did not matter what the occasion was, or the cause. Then, by chance, she found herself at the front of a crowd fighting the police, and soon she was engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with a policeman, a young man who grabbed her, called her insulting names, and tossed her like a bundle of rags into the arms of another, who threw her back. She screamed and struggled, and she was dragged away from the police like a trophy and found herself with a young man whose name she knew as "a leader."
He was a common type of that time: narrow-minded, ill-informed, dogmatic, humourless - a fanatic who could exist only in a group. She admired him completely and without reservation, and had sex with him that night before returning home. He was indifferent to her, but made a favour of it.
She now set herself to win this youth. She wanted to be "his woman." He was flattered when it became known that this girl was the daughter of one of the city's - no, the Northwest fringes' - rich families. But he was stern, even brutal with her, making it a test of her devotion to the cause (and himself, for he saw these as the same) that she should engage herself more and more in dangerous activity. This was not the serious, well-planned type of feat, or coup planned by terrorists type 12, or 3. He demanded of her that she should be with him in the forefront of demonstrations, and fling herself at lines of police, that she should shout and scream louder than the other girls, that she should struggle in the hands of the police, who in fact enjoyed these hysterical women. He was demanding of her, in fact, an ever-increasing degree of voluntary degradation.
She enjoyed it. More and more her life was spent dealing with the police. He was always being arrested, and she was in and out of police stations standing bail, or going with him in police wagons, or handing out leaflets about him and associates. These activities came to the notice of her parents, but after consultation with other parents, they consoled themselves with the formula: young people will be young people.
She was furious at their attitude: she was not being taken seriously. Her lover took her seriously. So did the police. She allowed herself to be arrested and spent some days in jail. Once - twice - three times. And then her parents insisted on bailing her out and so she was always leaving "her man" and her comrades in police cells while she was being driven home behind a chauffeur in one of the family cars.
She changed her name, and left home, insisting that she should live with her man. Which meant, a group of twelve or so young people. She accepted everything, living in a filthy hovel that had been condemned years before. She exulted in the discomfort, the dirt. She found herself cooking and cleaning and waiting on her man and his friends. They took a certain pleasure in this, because of her background, but she felt she was taken seriously, even that she was being forgiven.
Her parents found her, came after her, and she sent them away. They insisted on opening bank accounts for her, despatching messengers with cash, food, artefacts of all kinds, clothes. They were giving her what they had always given her - things.