Emotional Gas Chambers, part 2

A couple more thoughts on emotional gas chambers.

Another reason I call school classrooms "emotional gas chambers" is because I am now convinced more "souls" are being murdered in schools around the world than there were people killed during either the first world war, the second world war or in the gas chambers in Germany. People whose souls have been killed still walk around, they still eat and breath. But they are not really human any more. It is like the movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, if you have ever seen that. People's "souls" are replaced by something like a set of progams to make them all conform. They still look the same as they did before the replacement, but they don't feel or act the same. This replacement takes place under the pretext of being good for society people, just as children and teenagers are forced to go to schools under the same pretext.

Also, the toxic treatment which children and teenagers receive doesn't actually kill their emotions as the Jews were actually killed in the gas chambers of Germany. But as toxic chemicals will damage brain cells, toxic abuse and neglect will damage the brain as well. I am not sure what exactly is happening to the children and teenagers' brains, but I am sure that it is not good for the human species. Whatever is happening inside the brains of children and teenagers quickly causes them so much pain they have to turn to unhealthy activities, what the psychologists call "coping mechanisms" to try not to feel this pain.

It is not hard to see all the ways people try to not feel their pain. In my 1996 book I listed many of these ways. For example, fiction books, thriller novels, movies, television, sports, drugs, smoking, drinking, loveless sex, gambling, shopping, debating, studying, working, making wars, hurting other people

I think of Erich Fromm's book, The Sane Society in which he basically says we don't have sane societies, we have sick societies. And we do. They are emotionally sick. Some are sicker than others. What frightens me is that some of the most powerful countries, are also home to some of the sickest cultures. There are many ways we can see when a culture is sick. We can look at the number of people in prisons, for example. We can look at the number of murders. We can look at the amout of drug use. We can look at the amout of anti-depression medication which is prescribed for teenagers. We can look at the number of teenagers who are cutting and killing themselves. Cutting among teenagers is common, for example, in the United States, England and Australia. We can look at the amount of money spend on "security" and defense and war making.

When I see children and teenagers living on the streets here in South America and I think of all the money that is wasted everyday in the richer countries, I know something is wrong with the current value system. Even within these poor countries, countries like Indonesia, there are the very wealthy people who are spending money on needlessly expensive clothes and a thousand other things. In Jakarta there were so many people sleeping on the street every night. There were children on the streets begging for food, yet there was a shopping center which had all the designer products from around the world. Gucci, Polo, Luis Vuitton, Tommy Hilfiger or whoever it is, and lots of names I don't even remember. This shopping center looked like anything you would see in the most expensive part of Los Angeles or Miami.

Jack Mayer and Peter Salovey wrote: Emotions prioritize thinking by directing attention to important information.

There are a couple things I want to say about this. First I would change it to read by directing our attention to either "what is important for survival" or "to what is important to think about" instead of to "important "information."

Second, as I have said before elsewhere on this site, what is important to us depends on our values and what we have been taught, even when our feelings are directing us. For example, if the adults who run the schools are united with the adults who run the homes and they all tell children and teenagers that grades are important, a teenager will be worried when they don't have what are so often called "good grades." I would question how "good" these grades are though. I would say it is not "good" that a teenager is making "top grades" in all the subjects. I would say instead that this is a warning sign that this teenager does not know what is truely important for life and happiness. So a teenager's fear could drive them to think about their grades. Or the pressure to conform to society's standard of beauty as portrayed by the marketing crowd will cause a teenage female to worry about her appearance. And an adult who is materialistic will have strong feelings when his material possesions are damaged, stolen etc.

I would change Mayer and Salovey's statement, then, to say that our emotions have the potential to prioritize our thinking to what is important for life and happiness, assuming our emotional processes have not been damged. But our emotional process have been damaged. Our emotional chemistry has been poisoned by toxic treatment, by soul murder or whatever you want to call it. I don't really care what you call it, as long as you start to think about what I am really talking about. Simply put, our our emotional intelligence is not working as it was designed by nature. Our emotional intelligence has been damaged. We have been made to be emotionally stupid.

Schools are one of the ways we have been made emotionally stupid. Natural feelings are not valued in schools. Especially not a child or teenager's natural feelings. The entire system is based on the pursuit of corrupted adult values. Students are rewarded for behavior which meets the corrupted expectations of corrupted, emotionally sick, starving and abused adults. These adults try to compensate for their emotional deficits by being intellectually smart. They try to stop their pain by thinking, thinking, thinking. But this whole process is not working. It is a huge mess. It is an unnatural dissaster, created by adults with too much power.

Some of these adults with too much power are parents, teachers, school directors, religious authorities.

Here is one example of how religion has poisoned the emotional thought process of children and teenagers. I was talking to a teenager today. She is an intelligent person. She makes "good grades." Her grandfather was a civil engineer. She goes to a Catholic school. I asked her if she believed Mary was a virgin. She said yes. I asked her if she believed in heaven and hell. She said yes. I then asked her where she would go if she died today. She said she would go to hell. I asked why. She said because she doesn't go to confession. I asked her who taught her to believe this. She said the priest at her school.

So here we have an intelligent person who has fears of going to an imaginary place called "hell" when she dies. So her feelings will prioritize her thinking in corrupted ways. How well will she sleep at night for example? How well will she be able to concentrate when she wants to learn something? How happy can a person be when they have been taught they will go to a frightening place called "hell" when they die if they don't obey all the rules of the Catholic church?

And this is just one tiny example. In Malaysia the teenager females believed they would go to hell if they so much as touched a boy who was not a family memeber before marriage. They were taught it was a "sin" to show their knees, their shoulders, etc. And the majority of the covered their heads. So if they by chance showed their hair, or their knees their beliefs would trigger feelings that would prioritize their thiniing in distorted ways to think that it was important to cover themeselves back up again or that maybe it was too late and they were surely going to hell.

It still hurts me to think of one of my favorite young people there. Her name is Ayu and she lives on the island of Bali in Indonesia. She is being brainwashed by what is called the "Hindu" religion. One of the things she is being taught is that females are "dirty" when they menstruate. So they can't pray, go into temples etc.

It hurts me to think anyone would tell this precious 10 year old that she is "dirty" when her body is doing what is perfectly natural. And this is just a drop in the bucket of dysfunctional bullshit adults "teach" children and teenagers around the world.

S. Hein
Novenber 3, 2004
Chiclayo, Peru

--

As I was writing this, I was distracted by another marching band. Here is that story