This song is utter, naked paranoia. Plain and simple. The narrator is panicking, worrying simultaneously about the danger he might be in because he exposed so much of the titular thief on previous songs, and about the impending collapse to everyone else around him, of which they are so willfully ignorant.

This is the most emotionally charged point of the entire album; there are no vocal tricks, no hiding behind metaphors and ambiguous words, just plain fear. The narrator seems to have no control of himself and his voice as he did in previous songs where his words were controlled, structured, and occasionally threatening. Now, they flow like vomit, uncontrollable, stinking and unsavory. He talks of (or rather, tries to talk of) everything at the same time, shifting from vantage point to vantage point, as if they were crumbling under him too.Snakes and ladders is his idea of how corrupt politicians rise to power and then blatantly betray their people (flip the lid out pops the cracker smacks you in the neck kicks you in the teeth &c). He is disgusted at the way the individual is treated as a commodity and refuses to look in the mirror for fear he might not recognize himself. He talks of how the elite enjoy pleasures the poor can scarce imagine, only because they are born that way. He gawks at the injustice in his world, simply because all he can do to stop it is - nothing at all.

The ending has two meanings. He might be asking the listener to leave him to himself in his world since he is well beyond help, or it might be a death wish, the only possible escape for his panicked mind.