"Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage"
About this Quote
Burroughs doesn’t dress up self-sabotage as a tragic flaw; he diagnoses it as an infestation. “Parasitic being” is deliberately unromantic language, closer to a lab report or a junkie’s cold morning clarity than to therapy-speak. The sting is in the phrasing “not at all to his advantage”: the problem isn’t moral failure, it’s misaligned incentive. Something in you is feeding, and it doesn’t care if you thrive.
That framing fits Burroughs’ lifelong preoccupation with addiction, control systems, and what he often treated as external forces squatting inside the body: substances, habits, language, even institutions. The parasite can be read literally (the monkey on your back), but also structurally: the internalized cop, the compulsive voice, the algorithmic loop before algorithms had a name. By making it “inside himself,” Burroughs collapses the usual comfort of blaming the outside world while still refusing the tidy rhetoric of personal responsibility. You’re culpable in the sense that it’s in your house; you’re also outmatched because it’s built to survive.
The gendered “Every man” signals the era more than the argument, but it adds a hard-boiled universality: nobody gets to opt out, not even the supposedly sovereign individual. Burroughs’ intent is less to console than to estrange you from your own impulses. If you can see the saboteur as a separate organism, you can stop romanticizing it as “who you are” and start treating it as what it is: a hostile tenant with a talent for mimicry.
That framing fits Burroughs’ lifelong preoccupation with addiction, control systems, and what he often treated as external forces squatting inside the body: substances, habits, language, even institutions. The parasite can be read literally (the monkey on your back), but also structurally: the internalized cop, the compulsive voice, the algorithmic loop before algorithms had a name. By making it “inside himself,” Burroughs collapses the usual comfort of blaming the outside world while still refusing the tidy rhetoric of personal responsibility. You’re culpable in the sense that it’s in your house; you’re also outmatched because it’s built to survive.
The gendered “Every man” signals the era more than the argument, but it adds a hard-boiled universality: nobody gets to opt out, not even the supposedly sovereign individual. Burroughs’ intent is less to console than to estrange you from your own impulses. If you can see the saboteur as a separate organism, you can stop romanticizing it as “who you are” and start treating it as what it is: a hostile tenant with a talent for mimicry.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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