Is is as if life or reality itself has had it in mind all along to unravel the very design i have been trying all along to impose on it.
Imagine a land where people are afraid of dragons. It is a reasonable fear: dragons possess a number of qualities that make being afraid of them a very commendable response. Things like their terrible size, their ability to spout fire, or to crack boulders into splinters with their massive talons. In fact, the only terrifying quality that dragons do not possess is that of existence.Now, the people of this land know about dragons because their leaders have warned them about them. They tell stories about cruel dragons with razor teeth and fiery breath. They recount legends of dragons hunting by night on silent wings. In short, the leaders make sure that the people believe in all the qualities of dragons, including that key quality of existence. And then they control the people _ when they need to _ with their fear of dragons. The people pay a dragon-slaying tax _ everyone stays indoors after dark to avoid being snatched by swooping claws _ and nobody ever strays out of bounds for fear of being eaten well and truly up. one. And so it is necessary from time to time to provide evidence: a burnt tree or two, a splintered rock, the mysterious absence of a villager. The population is controlled by the dragons in its collective mind. It__ contrived superstition, and it is possible because the people do not know enough about the way the world works to know that dragons do not exist.
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Imagine a land where people are afraid of dragons. It is a reasonable fear: dragons possess a number of qualities that make being afraid of them a very commendable response. Things like their terrible size, their ability to spout fire, or to crack boulders into splinters with their massive talons. In fact, the only terrifying quality that dragons do not possess is that of existence.Now, the people of this land know about dragons because their leaders have warned them about them. They tell stories about cruel dragons with razor teeth and fiery breath. They recount legends of dragons hunting by night on silent wings. In short, the leaders make sure that the people believe in all the qualities of dragons, including that key quality of existence. And then they control the people _ when they need to _ with their fear of dragons. The people pay a dragon-slaying tax _ everyone stays indoors after dark to avoid being snatched by swooping claws _ and nobody ever strays out of bounds for fear of being eaten well and truly up. one. And so it is necessary from time to time to provide evidence: a burnt tree or two, a splintered rock, the mysterious absence of a villager. The population is controlled by the dragons in its collective mind. It__ contrived superstition, and it is possible because the people do not know enough about the way the world works to know that dragons do not exist.
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Now, however open a person manages to be, there is one possibility to which he remains as closed as ever: the possibility that when he uncovers his deepest anxieties he will find hidden inside them certain horrifying truths which his whole effort to control his life has been designed to keep repressed.
When we operate on the basis of the will to control, we are aware of only one kind of "evil": the failure of existence to conform to the plan we have for it.
Despite the horror, we survivors were endowed with a will to survive. Or instinct. Or maybe it was faith.
What we work so hard to avoid is the shattering of our lives by horrors we know we will be helpless to control.
The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, a priori, abnormal.