Generally pertinent.

[leahbobet]

--and thus to be saved for reference. From an article on accidental deaths of children left in cars in the Washington Post:

Ed Hickling believes he knows why. Hickling is a clinical psychologist from Albany, N.Y., who has studied the effects of fatal auto accidents on the drivers who survive them. He says these people are often judged with disproportionate harshness by the public, even when it was clearly an accident, and even when it was indisputably not their fault.

Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.

In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. "We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters."

This is something I sort of keep touching on in terms of Hitler Syndrome (aka: "We must find out as much as we can about Hilter so we can prove we would never do that!") but unsurprisingly, Mr. Hickling up there says it better than I've generally been able to.

---

In other news, I have had a sinus headache so bad that I have been dizzy since about ten last night. Public approval for this action on my head's part is at an all-time low. I'm hoping it's just a really...really big pressure change. :p

Comments

This is tangential. Also possibly pedantic and full of as-you-know-Bobism.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

This is also how a lot of horror stories work. The monster got her because she stole a valuable artifact/slept with a man she wasn't married to/looked into a mirror she'd been told was cursed/was mean to a handicapped child/otherwise violated either a social taboo or a taboo established by the story.* When I was in my early teens and reading all the horror I could get my hands on (and scaring myself sick in the process), that's exactly how I dealt with the scariest ones. "If I don't steal valuable artifacts, the monsters won't get me."

Of course, then there are the horror stories that doesn't work on . . .

---
*A lot of horror does the cultural work of policing social norms, and that's more or less the mechanism by which it does it. Us vs. them, where "them" are the people who violate a taboo, either knowingly or unknowingly, and "us" are the people who don't and are protected by our inherent virtue from every possibly doing so.

It's a little like the Puritan idea of the Elect, come to think of it. You know who the Elect are because they lead virtuous lives; obviously, if bad things happen to them, it's because they aren't among the Elect after all.

[timwb.livejournal.com]

I read once of "zombie syndrome".
When someone is diagnosed with a fatal illness and is near death, then friends and family become reconciled to the impending death.
But if there is a dramatic recovery, then the patient may become shunned, as the friends and family cannot reconcile having the person still in their lives.

[pwyrzykowski.livejournal.com]

I did my undergrad thesis in part on this phenomenon - if you're interested, look up stuff on "locus of control". The idea is that people tend to have either an internal locus of control (they believe they are in charge of their lives) or external locus of control (they believe life is generally unpredictable and uncontrollable, have more tendency to believe in fate). People with an internal locus of control have a tentency to try to assign blame when bad things happen, because the thought that sometimes bad things happen randomly is insufferable - they tend to look for what "who is responsible?", and "what could they have done to avoid the situation?". At it's worst, this can manifest as "blaming the victim" in things like rape cases, etc. A related concept is "cognitive dissonance". This is the idea that holding two incompatible ideas in our heads at the same time is psychologically impossible, so if people do have a strong idea about how the world works, they will reject any evidence to the contrary.

[ex-benpayne119.livejournal.com]

I lived for ten years in a smallish town, the sort of town that had one murder every few years... and almost without fail, the media followed that pattern... the victim would initially be portrayed sympathetically, and then gradually over time details would be revealed which made the incident more "their own fault"... the public reaction followed suit... "how awful" became "well why was she walking the street at that hour?" and "there must have been some relationship between them."

That's a great quote. Thank you.

[clarentine]

This morning, for the first time in three days, I woke without a sinus headache. Heaven, I tell you - and I wish you the same relief this morning.

Obligatory devil's advocacy....

[(Anonymous)]

STEPHEN J. B. SAID:
I don't disagree with the truth of this observation; I'm just profoundly wary of paying too much attention to it.

Humans may have a need to create a narrative where other people are responsible for the terrible things that happen to them, so that we can maintain our belief that we can avoid those things; but we also have a profound need to create narratives where we are *not* responsible for the terrible things that happen to *us* -- even when, in fact, we are, and we *could* have avoided those things with even a little bit of self-control or common sense.

Examples of the former all too often turn into excuses for the latter, in my observation. Because we cannot take responsibility for everything does not mean we should take responsibility for nothing.

[kythiaranos.livejournal.com]

Leaving a kid in the car (or worse, leaving the portable car seat *on top of the car* while loading things in) was one of my main fears as a new parent. Maybe it's because, with the twins, I spent two years in a stupor. But I find it really hard to judge a parent who's made a horrible mistake like that. The rest of us are just freakin' lucky.