|
Movies like Cast Away and I Am Legend derive most of their effective suspense from a dilemma no one would ever want to face: what it would mean to be, as far as you knew, completely alone in the world. So alone that you had to rely on dolls to preserve a thin illusion of companionship and remain invested in waking up every day.
Among elderly individuals, the medical profession has known for 150 years that the death of a spouse creates a significant mortality risk for the surviving spouse. Chances are that when most people are in their 80s or 90s, their spouse is one of only a handful of people left, if not the only person left, with whom they felt a strong peer relationship.
As I've highlighted before, and will again, solitary confinement in prison can drive people permanently insane, such that we can infer the company of other criminals and prison guards to be healthier than being alone all the time.
Yet as evidence mounts that it's our connections to other people that give our lives meaning, keep us healthy, keep us sound in mind and body, we find ourselves having to constantly struggle against institutions dedicated to the glorification of objects, abstractions and anthropomorphized Jungian archetypes over real human beings and their needs.
The ongoing pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church is merely a symptom of this collective, self-abasing masochism people seem prone to. Particularly, that seen among segments of society that enshrine pre-teen gross out reactions to sex, a very normal part of adult human life, as some sort of binding moral arbiter.
|
STATE BLOGS
Powered by: SoapBlox