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Rant of the Moment - "Collective Shock"
What is it about humans that we can just refuse to believe that we are capable of horrible acts of violence or perversity? We can be faced with murders, suicides, sexual abuse, and all the rest, time and time again, and are still shocked as a society. In some ways of course, this is very understandable. We need to be shocked in order to stop these kinds of things from happening, and it's a noble cause, yaddayadda... When these sorts of things happen though, we are focussed on that specific event, and don't want to hear about, "Well, statistically speaking, it was bound to happen..." We all understand this, and this isn't really what I'm writing about. What I don't understand personally is our outrage at events that can directly be attributed to situations that we have created. That...is what this rant is about.
Take for example the Catholic Church. Well over a billion faithful worldwide, and many thousands of priests. Now everyone knows that priests are supposed to be celibate. No sex, no way, no how. Ask someone in their late teens how realistic they think this is sometime. We all know what happens when sexual desire gets all twisted around and the urges are suppressed. What happens exactly? Anyone that has read up on serial killers (I have), can tell you that most of them, maybe even all of them, had some serious issues with sex. Many of them later identified themselves as gay, but felt so ashamed that they could not be in a normal gay relationship. Many of them were straight, but so painfully socially awkward and/or disturbed that they couldn't have a normal relationship. Add some child abuse, throw in a dash of isolation, and "Voila!", John Wayne Gacy! The next-door neighbors of these guys say, "Well, he seemed a little strange, but mostly harmless...". Yeah, well, I'm guessing you didn't look into his freezer much, did you?
Let's get back to the priests for a moment. They aren't going to become serial killers, especially since they have presumably healthy, if narrow, social outlets. Not only that, but they don't tend to be mentally ill. They DO still have "regular" sex drives, and nothing short of cutting off their manhood is going to stop that. Many of them secretly want to have sex. Some of them will actually go about trying to do this of course. They don't want anyone to know of course, so it would be difficult to do with anyone that could make things emotionally or logistically complicated. As we all know, that pretty much rules out women, or men for that matter. So that pretty much leaves kids. So then why are the nice church-going parents surprised when priests end up molesting kids? They support this possibility by not accepting a priest that is not celibate. Moral of the story? If you don't let them stick it in a woman, there's an alarmingly high probability that they're going to stick it in your eight-year old. I feel sorry for those involved, but I am not shocked.
Related to this shock of people being the victims of circumstances that they create, is the denial of things that "aren't supposed to happen". The best example of this recently was the Egyptian guy that sent a plane with hundreds of people plunging into the drink. I saw the news reports. I saw the flight recorder transcripts. This guy offed himself and hundreds of other people, but the Egyptian government basically says, "That can't have happened, because suicide is one of the worst sins in the Muslim religion, not to mention mass murder, and so on and so on..." So they expect us to say, "Well OK guys, I guess the evidence is wrong. Close the book on it. They said it can't happen." Keep telling yourself that.
I think there is a great quote for this whole rant. "There are none so blind as those who refuse to see."