His egalitarianism led him to speak in sweeping generalities. 'People do this'; 'We humans are like this': his conversations were frequently peppered with such sentiments.
Sometimes Johnson's egalitarianism rendered him prone to depression and despair. 'We humans are a terrible bunch. We do some terrible things,' he could be heard to fret of an evening. Such observations, saturated with feeling, would fall from his mouth, as he surveyed the history of the human race, which he saw as characterised by viciousness, cruelty, betrayal, and general needless suffering.
On other occasions, however, Johnson's sense that we are all made of the same stuff would give rise to a certain optimism and faith in the human spirit. Put to him the proposition that some politicians really are a nasty bit of business, and he will reassure you that theirs is indeed a difficult job. They are not really bad, but are trying to do their best, just like everybody else. Changing things for the better is not an easy task.
Johnson had a good friend. His name was Larwood. They would spend afternoons walking together by the river or through the forests, half the time in silent communication with nature, half the time in animated discussion.
Johnson and Larwood had much in common. There was one thing, however, about which they could not agree. You see, Larwood was not an egalitarian. He desperately wanted to be one, to be like his dear friend. But, based upon the evidence all around, his heart and his instincts refused to allow it. Larwood could not help but see difference and distinction all around him. Not just difference, but real difference: difference that made a difference. He sensed some people to be seriously different to others. He felt uneasy with the feeling, and struggled hard to throw it off, but all to no avail.
Larwood was still young when he first felt the difference. On returning home from his primary school, he would peer out the front living room window at the world going by. He would watch with unbounded fascination the 9-to-5ers making their way home. Men with briefcases, a few ladies in high heels, after a day earning their keep, paying off the mortgage, now going home to family, food, and television. One day as Larwood was observing the parade, a strange realisation flashed into his young little mind. He wasn't going to be doing this stuff. This all bore no relation whatsoever to his own course through the jungle of life. Where this flash came from he had no idea. But it came with a certainty that was rare. Its impact was almost enough to make him fall onto the floor in shock.
As Larwood grew older, he was relieved to find others who were similar to him; people he met in person or through their writing. People who were not 9-to-5ers; who could not be 9-to-5ers. People whose destiny was distinct, already decided. Normally such people sensed a deep lack, a profound emptiness, in a life devoted to the everyday, to 'normality'.
He had read the stories. About Thule, the Hyperboreans, Atlantis. About how, once upon a time, there prevailed a Golden Age, inhabited by giants, whose wisdom was as great as their height. And about how some sort of catastrophe occurred, decimating these glorious populations, but how a few escaped, their traces and their wisdom still dimly felt here and there, a small minority of distinct humans wandering the face of the globe.
He knew Nietzche and the Superman. He knew, also, about the Gnostics, with their threefold classification of human beings according to their spiritual status. There were the pneumatics, whose nature was essentially spirit; the psychics, who could exercise freewill to go up or down; and the hylics, those on a downward trajectory, and who, some said, possessed no soul whatsoever. There were even those nice guys from Buddhism, the tulkus and Bodhisattvas. In truth, these were Ubermenschen if ever there was one. They were not 'normal people' with a nice kind and friendly bit stuck onto them. They were substantially recalibrated beings, of a different order to the majority of humanity.
Larwood felt no compulsion to believe any of these theories and notions. At the same time, he recognised something in them all, an attempt to understand, explain, or at least describe, the differences which seemed to present themselves.
Larwood hated to feel this way. It filled him with discomfort, distaste. The implications of all this, whatever they might turn out to be, were surely abhorrent.
He resisted and resisted, until ……. One afternoon he was on the bus going home. Two ladies across the aisle from him were engaged in animated discussion about the price of pork sausages in a variety of different leading supermarkets. It was their world, more or less, he realised, the price of pork sausages. He could go and talk to them about his world - the Tree of Life, multidimensional existence, the luminous Void, all felt, experienced realities to him - but it would be to no avail. They, like probably everybody else on the bus, would be incredulous. Not out of personal preference, but because they could not, were not able to, enter into his world. It was beyond them. They somehow lacked the capacity. Larwood's belief system, held together for long years by musty sticky tape, began to crumble. Slowly at first, before disintegrating comprehensively just as he got off the bus at his usual stop.
He felt no arrogance, no ill-will, no sense of superiority, at the now crystal-clear feeling of differences. He felt nothing at all, really. Except for an occasional tender-heartedness towards all and sundry, each and every one of us stumbling along, blindfolded to how things more truly are.
Time passed. It was the evening before the end of the world. Johnson and Larwood sat on a bench overlooking the river. Behind them, the pub was noisy with shouting and laughter as the big match was relayed on the big screen. Johnson put down his thick volume on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, commenting on how awful it all was, and how people act just as viciously today, all of which says a lot about human nature. Larwood gazed into nowhere in particular, quietly bracing himself for the Exit. The Void beckoned irresistibly. He wondered whether he and Johnson would meet again; and, if so, if they would recognise one another.
