Education Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs doesn’t offer this as a humbling self-help aphorism; it lands more like a warning label slapped on consciousness. “Only” is the blade here: not sometimes, not in certain cases, but structurally. Whatever you think you know about “what is going on” is condemned to the surface, and worse, it’s “relative” - dependent on the angle of your habits, your addictions, your media feed, your language.

The line carries Burroughs’s lifelong suspicion that reality is not merely misperceived but actively engineered. Coming out of the postwar era - Cold War paranoia, emergent mass advertising, psychiatric and legal institutions eager to classify deviance - he treated “what’s going on” as a kind of managed hallucination. In his cut-up experiments and his obsession with “control,” information isn’t a neutral stream you drink from; it’s a technology that drinks you. Your “knowledge” becomes a thin film laid over forces you don’t command: bureaucracies, surveillance, narratives, compulsions.

The subtext is both bleak and slyly liberating. If knowledge is inevitably partial, then the posture of certainty is the real con. Burroughs punctures the respectable voice that claims full situational awareness - the politician, the cop, the doctor, the straight narrator. He invites a different literacy: not mastery of facts, but alertness to how facts get framed, sold, and internalized. The sentence is short, almost flat, because the point isn’t to persuade; it’s to deprogram.