A great British muggle once observed:
"I believe that in all men's lives at certain periods, and in many men's
lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the
most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the
terror of being left outside...Of all the passions the passion for the
Inner Ring is most skilful [sic] in making a man who is not yet a
very bad man do very bad things."
~C.S. Lewis, The Inner Ring (1944)
Unfortunately, Argus Filch was not one to read muggle writings. Muggle culture is inferior, one utterly lacking in the influences of magic and all the beauty that came with it. Muggle society was completely at odds with his society.
When his parents discovered that he was a squib, they had tried everything to force magic into him. Some of their tactics were painful. Actually, many were painful. But they were all unsuccessful. He grew up living life in-between, much like the life of the mulatto of eighteenth century America. He wasn't a muggle, and therefore didn't quite grasp muggle culture. But the wizarding world wasn't quite ready to accept him. He knew their secret, yes, but his grasp of magic was so pitiful and only continued to shrink.
No, Argus Filch grew up living the life of an outcast. Rejected by the world he was born into, but unable to assimilate himself into the only other option. That's not to say he hadn't tried. At a meeting of Squibs Anonymous, he was suggested to try and join the muggle world. It hadn't worked out quite as easily as the lecturer had described it would be.
You see, Mr. and Mrs. Filch (after they gave up trying to force magic into poor little Argus) had decided to continue living life as if Argus were never born a squib. He was surrounded by magical trinkets. They pretended the toy broom would float when he rode it. And despite suggestions by Squib Rights organizations, they never exposed him to anything muggle related.
So he humorously had no idea what a television was. Or a telephone. All those tele- objects just made Muggle culture all the more confusing. And that was all the more reason to reject it. But Argus Filch tried, nonetheless. He thought he would first visit a church. After all, the muggles seemed to congregate in these buildings with crosses on them every Sunday, and it seemed like a great way to meet new people and form a ring of friends.
But religion simply wasn't for him. The organ pipe was out of tune. The priest was too preachy and the congregates too religious. He supposed he should have expected it: but his experience with religion left him with a bitter taste in his mouth.
His love of magic was not welcomed by the congregates – at all. They tried to persuade him that magic was a the work of the devil. That magic led to corruption of the soul. That it is used by very evil occults to accomplish very evil deeds.
No, religion was definitely not something Argus Filch wanted to get himself mixed up in. But on the other hand, these people who met every Sunday to praise their Lord were the only people who had accepted him into their ring. It was perplexing at first, and very seductive. It was an additive, to see the smiles on the faces of his ...friends! as they greeted him in the morning at the coffee shop, or to have someone to stop and chat with during a walk through the park.
He would regularly attend St. Paul's Baptist Church at the corner of Hemingway and South Hampton Ave. for the next few years.
The feeling of love and acceptance essentially clinched the deal. He was hooked. There was nothing the church could do to drive him away. He disagreed when they made him pass out fliers decrying gay marriage. What harm could some gays marrying do anyway? But he passed them out nonetheless.
He began volunteering to go about fundraising for the church, stooping to some lows that Filch on other occasions may have found morally wrong. But he didn't care, for Christ and his believers were the first people in his life to accept him just the way he was.
Of course, that was just an illusion. They accepted Filch the way he pretended to be. He would later be rudely expelled when some of the church's members visited his parents to try and convince to join: when to their surprise they were met with floating pots and green fire – objects that to wizards would seem absolutely normal.
But muggles didn't see this as normal, and believed Argus Filch to be a cult member secretly trying to infiltrate the good house of Jesus Christ.
It was probably for the better that this happened, for the Church was seducing him into doing more bad things in the name of God. He was pretty sure the Bible didn't call for him to interfere with the lives of others. It didn't sit quite right with him to tell others that they were going to hell when someone did something contrary to church dogma or for refusing to convert. If he hadn't been kicked out, he may have gone in too deep to dig himself out.
No, he was right in the very beginning. Church life wasn't for him. It was an organization that would only accept him for what he was not.
Around the time he was expelled from the church, he would have been attending fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and preparing for the O.W.L.s had he not been born a squib. But he was a squib and therefore not qualified to perform magic, so he attended a muggle public school.
This was his second attempt at trying to join muggle society. He hadn't gone to primary school because at the time, his parents were still trying to convince themselves that he wasn't a squib. By the time he was in high school he had already very few experiences with muggles and was therefore unfamiliar with seemingly everyday objects.
Filch found that, being a latecomer, the school environment didn't properly offer him a home. He didn't play a musical instrument, couldn't sing, couldn't act, and couldn't paint. He wasn't anywhere near athletic and therefore didn't qualify for a sports team.
He was often teased for his eccentric dress style. It would only take a few days to learn how muggles dressed, but the damage was done. He would, for the rest of his schooling years, be remembered for the pink halter top and black tights he wore to the first day of school.
There would be endless bullying as well. He wasn't popular. Everyone at school was a new face and he hadn't time to make any friends. So naturally they all shunned him and kept to themselves. Filch never felt so alone.
He was also a poor student. He was computer illiterate, for example, and failed a mandatory computer course. He found muggle chemicals utterly boring – what fun is mixing ammonia in a water solution when he could have simply gone home and made some bangs by throwing a bit of wolfsbane with bubotuber. He failed chemistry. Likewise with biology and physics, for similar reasons. And history was a boring affair on another level (although he obviously hadn't met Professor Binns).
The only course he was interested in was arithmetic. Basic math is definitely a useful skill to know, but advanced arithmetic confused him to no end. But not one to give up, he worked very hard to master the skill and, in his sophomore year was already studying calculus and advanced statistics.
It was in his arithmetic class where he made his first real friend, at fifteen years old. Her name is Arabella Figg – it may be a good idea to remember that name, since she will be an important figure later on.
Filch and Arabella were on the school's Math Olympiad team, a group that visited other schools to compete in arithmetic competitions. Filch was thrilled, for here was something that he succeeded at. He was already beginning to dream about university, of attending Cambridge University or maybe traveling to America to study.
His final year of high school flew by, and Filch realized that he had overestimated his ability. His mathematical talent in actuality wasn't as amazing as he had thought it was, yet applied only to the most prestigious universities in the world. Colleges wanted well-rounded students, Filch angrily noted as rejection letter after rejection letter flooded his mailbox. Community college was always an option, but the dream of becoming a successful mathematician or statistician working for a prestigious organization like the London Stock Exchange had just flew out the window.
Sure, he could always flip burgers. That seemed to be the joke that muggles liked to throw around. That burger flippers had the worst job there was.
Simply put, (now) eighteen years later, he was back where he started at birth. Born into a world that didn't accept him for who he was. But there was now something different: the muggle world that he hadn't experienced back then now proved to be a society that he simply wasn't compatible with.
It's a shame that Filch doesn't read muggle literature. His brief experiences with enthusiastic evangelists and cruel schoolchildren made him very wary of muggles in general. And the wizarding world wasn't ready to accept him.
To understand Filch's situation, we have to understand the general situation of squibs in the wizarding world.
The wizarding world continues to have racist impulses within it with seeds rooting back centuries to powerful noble families like Malfoy, Black, and Gaunt.
Legally, squibs were to be treated equally in all aspects of life. In reality, they were regularly treated with an inferior status even that those of muggles. The non-discrimination clause was simply ignored in regular day-to-day activities.
There were little to no job opportunities available to squibs. Those rare few who graduate with top honors in muggle schools find muggle jobs because a muggle degree is worth less than a knut to most wizard eyes.
Most utterly fail to integrate with muggle society, and can't live amongst a wizard society that shuns them. This majority lives in a constant state of poverty, living off of government handouts (both muggle and wizard).
With little influence on the Wizengamot to attempt at change, squibs tended to try and live amongst muggles rather than wizards and many even convinced themselves of the absurdity and impossibility of magic.
Filch was not any one of these squibs. Failed at his muggle life like most squibs before him, he was going to be a part of wizarding world. Somehow, he will make a contribution to magic so great that he will be remembered in the history books as "The first squib to...". Of course, he wasn't quite sure how he would accomplish this.
There is an archaic law somewhere deep within the codes of the Ministry of Magic that required it to send a magical cat to every squib on their eighteenth birthday. Presumably, it had its history centuries ago when a cat-loving sympathetic Minister ordered all squibs to be given a cat on their eighteenth birthday to help guide them through the magical world.
Nowadays, squibs regularly sold their cats for some spare cash, for many (understandably, given their situation) lived in poverty and anyways had no need for cats to guide them in a world that had no need for them.
But Filch couldn't give up Mrs. Norris. He needed to money to feed himself and the cat, but some invisible force prevented him from doing so.
The next few years are years that Filch doesn't want many people to know, so I won't go into much detail. He lived nearly at the brink of death while he contemplated what to do with his life. His parents were dead by now, and he received no help from anyone. He looked and was what muggles simply derided as a hobo.
Filch fell into bouts of depression and sometimes juggled suicidal thoughts. He was utterly alone, with only a cat as company. A better situation than he was just last year, admittedly. But still very alone.
He still harbored dreams of being accepted. Of finding a wife and having children. Of making friends he could share a drink with Friday night at the Leaky Cauldron.
He thought back bitterly at the church members who disowned him the minute they felt something wrong was happening. He thought back at his classmates in school who teased him for being different, for not understanding things they took for granted. He thought back at his parents...parents who all but disowned him when they finally came around and realized that he was a squib and nothing was going to change it.
He had suffered discrimination every step of his life. He wanted nothing less than to belong to something. He wanted to be part of something special. Anything. But he was an outcast. An in-between. Someone who mothers steered their children away from when crossing by on the street.
But if it weren't for a timely letter from Albus Dumbledore, Argus Filch and Mrs. Norris (her guide cat...pssh...) would have wallowed in poverty for the rest of their lives.