If I had not been able to emerge from the theater into the bright afternoon sun, I might have bee in trouble after first watching The Exorcist. Even so, it took a little while to calm down; my heart was beating fast.
Immersion therapy is a psychological technique used to help patients overcome fears, such as phobias. If one suffers from acrophobia (fear of heights), a therapist might gradually take the patient to ever greater heights, over a long period of time, acclimating them to the conditions around them and getting them to more accurately perceive the degree or level of danger they are in within a particular circumstance. In some cases, such a therapy might even allow a former acrophobic to work on constructing giant skyscrapers, or skydive, etc. For this person, the fear they may once have had about walking up a flight of stairs now seems silly and childish.
All of us have been in a kind of accidental immersion therapy for our whole lives; a relative few have become aware of this fact. Some of us have become aware of the real threats and dangers; that there is no realistic escape from them other than death, and so, trivial things like ghost stories are, at most, a momentary amusement compared to the real genocide in the abattoir that is our world. Most of us are shielded, most of the time, from the atrocities; sometimes physically, usually psychologically. Ignorance, quite often, is truly bliss.
Most have no realization that the only reason the protagonist in The Tell-Tale Heart - and most readers - experience guilt and fear, is because that is “the norm”, but those who experience no such things; are not hampered by such internal restrictions, will ALWAYS be the richest and the most powerful, the ruling elite. No matter what era or geography, this will always be true as long as humans are humans in the current sense. It is the height and epitome of foolishness to think that such a fundamental fact of human existence can be changed by “education” or “culture”. If you sit down to play a game of chess and you are restricted to the actual rules of the game but your opponent can ignore, change and make up any rules he likes...do you seriously have to be a mental giant to understand what your chances of winning the game are?
TRB
"but those who experience no such things; are not hampered by such internal restrictions, will ALWAYS be the richest and the most powerful, the ruling elite."
ReplyDeleteThat's true for a society that is focused on money, but not true for a society focused on the common good. Unfortunately, due to our brainwashing, we know very little about any societies focused on the common good. That is by design, of course.