
What is it about collective denial that turns me off? Perhaps it’s the consistent head-shaking and impassive skepticism to everything-else-ness that makes me all silent and quiet on the facial front (whilst contemplating imaginary scenarios involving mass nuclear destruction and the collective end of humanity in my head).
When I was young, in primary school, I remember remarking about the veritable sizes of Procompsognathus, the little chicken-sized Triassic dinosaur that I had a personal affection for. Not that it mattered to my friends. Remember that this was a few years before Jurassic Park came along, “properly” educating the lot of us about the genealogies of dinosaurs in typified Hollywood form.
No.
The responses I got from saying “Actually ah, there’s a particularly small dinosaur that’s as small as a chicken” ranged from “Talk cock lah” to “Who you trying to bluff”, from some of my closest peers. The remarks were so harsh in nature that even I had begun to doubt my own facts on the matter (despite multiple recheckings of Mr. Encyclopedia himself).
More recently, the same scenario played out over a minuscule set of desserts at a local al fresco joint.
“Some species of house lizards are known to grow to the size of my palm”.
The subsequent wheezing and water-choking from (once more) some of my closest peers brought to mind rather gaudy flashbacks of my lizard-affirmation days from an earlier time. This time, I gave up on arguing. I guess I’ve learned that sometimes, reality isn’t meant to be bent for some people. That anything that upsets the natural order of things has a tendency for collective backlash – and I’m too old to be involved in that kinda shit.
Besides. We’ve got google.
On my part, I suppose my own “vow of silence” response was a positive confirmation of the Asch experiments. I think that when you first hear about them, the first thing you say to yourself is “I’m not going to fall for that”. Which was aptly, my initial reaction. No one wants to be part of the herd. But in truth, what Solomon Asch presented wasn’t a simple hypothesis on human conformity, but a suggestion for human indifference.
That’s one plausible reason why atrocities like the Holocaust, Dafur, and Iraq will always be with us. On one hand, you’ve got a bunch of enlightened individuals who feel that some of these things aren’t tangibly linked to us enough. On the other, you’ve got people going “Talk cock lah” and “Who you trying to bluff” (with the first group of people throwing their arms up in the air and going “What the Shit?”). Collectively, these elements, once shaken and stirred properly, result in the rather pulverizing cocktail mix of BTW, We R All Fuck-ed.
Not that it matters.
Really.
We’re all walking fossils anyway.
P.S: With reference to lizards: I know that dinosaurs aren’t exactly lizards. But for the sake of one man’s ongoing narrative rant > quit nitpicking will you?