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Last week you may recall (if you don't then check the archives) that I discussed my mother's obsessive-compulsive cleaning behavior, and I mentioned that she also suffers from paranoia. I shall now discuss that topic. When she is left home alone various things "happen" in the basement. She says that they happen everytime she is home alone, sometimes she hears them when we are home with her, and we cannot hear a thing. This makes her afraid that something will happen. That sounds almost like paranoid schizophrenia to me. This does not mean that her paranoia is left to hearing things in the basement, but she also suffers from a very strong fear of what she does not understand. Whenever she hears anything that is remotely scientific sounding she is either excited or as is most of the cases scared based on the context of its use and tries to avoid those things. If I were to ask her if she has ever had dihydrogen oxide (H2O) on her skin she would probably say no and tell me that she never wants it on her skin before she would ask "What is dihydrogen oxide?" This strange fear of the unknown I think was best summed up by Horace Mann when he said Ignorance breeds little monsters that fill the vacancies unoccupied by the varieties of knowledge. I know that she was the first person in line protesting the iradiating of meat to kill bacteria. She did not understand that there are different kinds of radiation. The meat was not being hit with gamma radiation which the worst kind and can only be blocked by very thick blocks of lead. but it was being hit with beta rays which are electrons, and can be blocked by a sheet of aluminum foil. I imagine that there was some fear about the meat being altered by the radiation, but radiation only effects living cells by altering their DNA and causing them to divide in strange ways or die. A dead cell will not behave in that way because it will not be reproducing any more. Before you become opposed to something that you really do not understand listen to the people who support it and try to understand if you cannot then ask someone who does. You really have a lot less to fear than you think. |
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