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Sunday August 18th 2019Tim
Candler9
After a bit it
becomes necessary to intellectualize a phobia.
Intellectualize means to give an intellectual character
to something, which generally means you think about it,
try to fit it into an established body of understandings
and if you can't fit it into a body of understandings
you might have to start thinking about exploring a new
understanding, but tread lightly odds are your new
understanding will be completely wrong, possible
deranged, up there with Q Anon. If you take something
like anxiety, to intellectualize the emotion of anxiety
you look for what's causing the anxiety and try to do
something about whatever it is that's causing the
anxiety instead of just sitting there finding reasons
and strategies to avoid going to the Grocery Store.
Now let's take something like Trypophobia, which is
adverse reaction to "irregular patterns or clusters of
small holes or bumps." Not classified as a mental
disorder by the fifth edition of the American
Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual which is all about possible solutions to mental
problems that prevent people from functioning like good
diligent hard working obedient servants of our Corporate
State. Trypophobia falls into the category of a Specific
Phobia, which means anything, no matter how apparently
ludicrous, that has the potential to upset a person to
the point of his or her becoming less than fully engaged
and properly functioning. So you got a body of
understanding that includes the idea that debilitating
and irrational mental reactions are indeed brought on by
exposure to something perfectly cogent like "The Great
Outdoors." And along side this you get a person's highly
suspicious adverse mental reaction to something like
"Coat Hangers." The key point about a Specific
Phobia is the extent to which the Phobia has been well
diagnosed by reference to more objective data with
special attention to the degree to which this or that
phobia has indeed produced genuine, properly studied
examples of debility, rather than something like "I'm
terrified of shopping carts with empty Coca Cola cans
inside them so I can't possibly go within seven miles of
a Grocery Store, can you do my shopping for me, I really
need Raspberry filled donuts." And there's always a
chance with proper peer reviewed study a Specific Phobia
might graduate to genuine Phobia and as a result of
being deemed genuine it gets better than a shrug from
discourse, it gains acceptance, becomes a source of
fascinating insights into us people and if you're lucky
research grants from at best the eccentric, at worst the
entrepreneur.
Past
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Fortunately
there's Social Media where everyone with access has to
being a center of attention, develop a sense of
identity, find a cause, a purpose and a belonging place
in which to find comfort, so that a very, very few
people can make both disgusting and revolting amounts of
money. And on Social Media there are billions of groups
several of which have devoted themselves to their
adverse reaction to "irregular patterns or clusters of
small holes or bumps," or Trypophobia. It's also true
that I rather wish I was joking. However, it's a very
interesting area. You can kind of understand it if
you've ever had Mango Worm you might have noticed your
reaction to the irregular patterns or clusters of small
holes or bumps on much of your left thigh. It's not a
pretty sight and it certainly gave my a screaming
heebie-jeebies case of Trypophobia. Some people, I'm
told, have a similar reaction to irregular patterns or
cluster of small holes and bumps on fruit, soap bubbles
and it's a long to my mind suspicious list. The argument
is that the Trypophobia heebie-jeebies reaction is an
autonomous reaction of fear, but also of disgust, and
more than interesting to my way of thinking is that
research into the debilitating results of disgust,
rather than fear, to a heebie-jeebies reaction took on
an earnestness a couple of months after the 2016
election here in the US. Hithertofore debilitating
Phobia was conceived of in terms of fear rather than
disgust. You can hook the person up with electrodes and
know without a shadow of a doubt that he or she is
genuinely afraid, as opposed to enjoying a theatrical
moment. And you can do the same with Disgust. Fear, it
was reckoned, was a wholly debilitating reaction that
truly mess with a citizens capacity to enhance the
bottom line of the billionaire class. Disgust, for it's
part, was reckoned a long way from debilitating and fell
squarely into the category of "shut up, pull yourself
together, stop being a baby, and get with the program."
Nor was it that long ago that fear fell into that same
category. Either way, in these politically dumfounding
times there's a perfect opportunity for researchers to
establish research norms around the degrees of
disability that directly result from disgust on a
population by subjecting them to images and voice
patterns of our commander in chief. For my part
efficiency, productivity, a capacity to get out of bed
in the morning and anything remotely associated with
enthusiasm is way down since 2016. Interesting, the gust
part of disgust comes from early Italian and French for
'taste.' Revulsion has it's origins in the Latin for
'torn out,' which does work better for me.
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