feotakahari

Trying to read Human Domestication Guide again, and it’s got me thinking about The Worthing Saga. The superhumans in TWS basically domesticate the regular humans, although it’s treated as completely nonsexual. Their ancestor who founded their civilization comes back, and when they consider domesticating him, he points out they never domesticate themselves because they don’t want to lose all their neuroses and traumas. So they freak out and stop domestication. Then a former pet wants to make the point that they should still use their powers, just not as much. She sets herself on fire to force one of them to save her.

I’ve been outlining the boundaries of my squick about mind control, trying to figure out exactly what makes me feel like someone threw up inside my soul. I don’t think mind control is the actual point at issue. In some way, it comes back to the idea of worship.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read A Wrinkle in Time, but I remember not being squicked at all by the fascists and the torture. I thought they were evil, sure, but they were evil in a way that seemed understandable to me. What made me feel wildly uncomfortable was a scene where a spirit-angel-thing reveals herself and one of the MCs bows down in awe of her magnificence. I tried to imagine something that would make me want to bow, and all I could think of is something that would make me run or scream or punch or anything to make the feeling stop. 

I’ve never had much use for the idea of charisma. Someone like Martin Luther King Jr. doesn’t make me feel inspired; they make me go through their writing line by line, taking apart the gaps and inconsistencies in their statements and looking for ways to construct a more logical argument. (“The shape of the world today”? What on earth is “the shape of the world today”?) So when I think of something that would make me bow, that’s something that would reach inside my head and make me stop being me. It feels intensely violent in a way that goes beyond knives or pokers, creating a hollowed-out corpse without spilling so much as a drop of blood.

So maybe my problem with mind control is also my problem with religion. There are people who act like a god is not just a thing you kneel to, but a thing to which kneeling feels natural and right. For me, kneeling was never natural or right, and that makes me feel like their religion isn’t meant to include me.