Did you like reading scary books as a child? Watching scary films? Do you let your children read scary books etc? Think it’s all harmless fun? Think again.
When discussing exposing children to fear (via books, films etc), some general responses from adults include: (a) children like being frightened or (b) being frightened is good for children because it teaches them to deal with fears, an ability that will be required of them as adults etc.
I’ve been re-reading books that frightened me as a child. As I read these books, I get flashes of déjà vu: namely the same thoughts that went through my head when I first read them. It is extremely unpleasant. And, further, it reveals the damage that exposure to horror books, films etc can do.
For example, I have recently re-read some Beatrix Potter stories. Far from being “charming stories for children”, these are real horrors. They are the children’s equivalent of Jaws, Silence of the Lambs or Jurassic Park, The Descent and so on. Potter’s books are actually worse. They are, quite literally, the stuff of nightmares. (See my recent post on Potter.) Reading Potter’s stories brought back flashes of my childhood nightmares.
Then I read a book on dinosaurs and prehistoric life. The book was full of colour illustrations of predators: velociraptors or T Rex sporting gaping maws revealing rows of fearsomely sharp teeth — all the better with which to rip their prey apart. Not even the herbivores escaped: not allowed to graze peacefully on the grass or trees, they were depicted being ambushed and ripped apart by those same rows of horrifyingly sharp teeth. The language used throughout was also extremely aggressive. The thoughts that went through my mind included: I’m glad I don’t live in prehistoric times, it would have been terrifying. And these were exactly the same thoughts I had as a child when I read such books.
As one palaeontologist remarked on the radio recently: unlike astronomers or biochemists etc, he didn’t need to sell his subject because children LOVE dinosaurs. And even though I was frightened, I went back to them again and again because I too was fascinated by dinosaurs. So, how many generations of children have been terrified, as I was, by those pictures?
I had similar thoughts when, as a child, I watched wildlife films. One would see pictures of crocodiles ambushing wildebeeste as they crossed rivers on their migrations. The pictures were terrifying. As I watched, I would promise myself NEVER to go to Africa because I was petrified of encountering these terrors.
And look at today’s wildlife films. Talk about gratuitous violence! Killer whales lunging out of the shallows to grab an unwary seal; toying with their catches, tossing the bleeding, limp body of their prey high into the air. The leering grins of leopard seals as they hunt penguins. And when it was first discovered that chimps were meat eaters, we were treated to films of them hunting, trapping and catching monkeys which they tore apart while the monkey was still alive. Like Potter’s books, these pictures are not classed as horror, but are considered “educational” or “of scientific interest” — and used by teachers for educational purposes!
Whenever I read history books or watched TV series depicting life, say, in the Tudor period when people had their heads lopped off right left and centre, the fear provoked those same thoughts: I wouldn’t have wanted to live during Tudor times because they were much too dangerous; it was too easy to be executed by beheading, or being hung, drawn and quartered, or being burnt at the stake. Whew! Thank god I live in safer times!
So, these were the thoughts provoked by the fears those horrors induced. You think one deals with those fears, do you? You think they don’t affect you as an adult? Think again.
It’s all very well folk making decisions about fear in relation to children, even in relation to themselves, and it’s all very well therapists coming up with “cures” for fears and phobias, but all this is based on complete ignorance concerning the nature of fear, also on complete ignorance concerning the nature of the mind.
For the most part, fear is treated as a sort of random affliction, as something unreasonable, something without more cause than simple weakness of character. On the contrary, fears are significant and meaningful and should be treated diagnostically.
There are two main sources of fear in our world: the least of these is youthful incompetence and by far the greatest is other people.
The former is protective and prevents people from doing things that are beyond their competence. These fears should be respected. Forcing a person to “overcome” such fears merely persuades them to live beyond their competence i.e. to live dangerously. The fear may disappear, but living beyond one’s competence is extremely stressful and there will be a constant anxiety. Such fears will simply disappear with experience and age as one becomes more competent with all aspects of life.
The second source of fear, the BIG one, as I said, is other people. We live in a world of power addicts. Power addicts play power games. Power addicts like to tease and torment and frighten. Power addicts like to generate fear. When I read a book about hideous predatory dinosaurs and I come away feeling glad that dinosaurs are extinct, it is not because dinosaurs are frightening, nor because there were lots of pictures of predators tearing their prey apart. It is because it is written by a power addict. If it was written by somebody whose intentions are benign, then I would not come away with a mind full of nightmares. I would be more likely to come away laughing at the OTT red-in-tooth-and-claw nature of the Jurassic world.
Similarly, stories about fluffy bunnies contain fears and transmit them to children when written by power addicts, but not when written by benign authors.
Our world, then, is infused and riven by fears generated by power addicts, and in fact, the price power addicts pay for their tormenting of others is that all sorts of fears come to prey upon their own minds.
Living in our society is like living in a haunted house, the most haunted house ever, the most haunted house that is conceivable. Or another analogy would be that we are living as though in an adventure video game where you’re walking through country or buildings and you know there are enemies everywhere and you know they want to kill you and you don’t know when one is going to jump out on you. This is what each of us to cope with and most do so by finding a comfort zone, by establishing themselves in some life and staying there, afraid to venture beyond known boundaries.
But what it is important to always remember is that these are IMAGINARY fears. They are spooks generated by teasing and other forms of power play. You’re best defence is to develop a sense of humour, to develop a lightness of attitude such that you do not take things seriously, not even the state of the economy, not even the latest terrorist threat, not even the prognostications of the latest think tank, not even the latest dire warnings of climate change, not even the fact that you are supposed to be vulnerable to some hereditary disease both your parents have died from ---- you take the latter seriously and you sign your own death warrant. You laugh at it and your death sentence is revoked.