PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE (PART 1)
Updated: Mar 10
"If using facts changed people's minds, then everyone would believe the same thing according to the facts." - Peter Boghossian
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Pretend you are a scientist. Imagine a scenario whereby you are instructed to conduct an experiment proving that a deadly flu virus is contagious. The preconditions are as follows:
There are no ethical constraints
There are healthy participants willing to risk contracting the deadly virus
None of the healthy participants are known to have had the flu in the past
The contagion is believed to be transmitted through breathing and/or bodily fluid; examples include mucus and/or saliva, snot from the nose, and eye secretions.
Adhering to the preconditions, you arrange for a flu-stricken patient to stand face-to-face with a healthy individual who carries no symptomatic expressions of any illness. To ensure the healthy individual is inflicted with a viral contagion, you instruct the sick person to breath and cough directly into the healthy individual's face and mouth (yum).
In case coughing into the face of another person isn't enough, you instruct the healthy participant to inhale the incoming mucous-infested breaths/coughs.
Next, you place swabs of mucous secretions taken from the sick person's nose and mouth and throat, directly into/onto the respective secretion areas of their brave counterpart.
End-result: The healthy participant became ill and ultimately succumbed to the illness 10 days later and died.
Except, he actually did not die. Nor did he become ill.
Neither did any of the other 18 healthy individuals who participated in your experiment.
It didn't end there, either.
In an effort to manipulate reality, you decided to draw blood from sick patients and inject their blood into the healthy participants.
Finally, after experimenting on 100 participants, you concluded the experiment.
A grand total of 0 people got sick.
Remarkably, your experiment not only failed to support the claim that the virus is contagious, but you unintentionally proved the diametrical opposite: the virus is evidently not contagious.
Let that sink in. Here's why:
This all really happened. Not only did it happen, it happened at the height of the 1918 Spanish Flu, an illness that is said to have killed more than 25,000,000 people. The participants in the experiment were prisoners who were granted freedom in exchange for their participation.
The experiment was repeated elsewhere, multiple times. The results never changed.
See highlights below from literature that details the experiments:
Ladies and gentlemen, this is only the beginning of a troubling reality that grows increasingly more bizarre. How this isn't widely discussed nor examined seems emblematic of a greater incuriosity.
Prepare to be psychologically damaged.
PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE (PART 2)
Life seems to unleash its paradoxical and/or consequential nature when the abundance and/or accessibility of something increases. Have you noticed this?
[This will all tie back to viruses and the Spanish Flu of 1918, please bare with me or else you're doomed, thanks.]
Dating apps, for example, provide an abundant pool of available partners for whom a person can embark on a meaningful relationship with. Paradoxically, people are more alone/anxious/divorced than ever (I'm saving my sources for the good stuff -- if you need a source for that sentence I hate you). Abundance, in this example, is the precursor to pleasure, a domain of paradox.
People give up on their heart far too easily.
Education (YouTube), is abundantly available at scale for anybody reading this article. Consequently, people use their mind primarily as an absorption mechanism for the abundance of readily available information, which is transactionally regurgitated. Paradoxically, this relationship is "recycled garbage."
It can be hard to use your mind, however. It hopefully goes without saying, getting accurate information is potentially more difficult to access if you don't know how to identify search engines outside of Google.