The Comfort Zone
From the editor…
Recently I got to thinking about how hard it is for most people to switch gears to embrace new ideas and step outside of their comfort zone.
We see this tendency exhibited every day in every way in every person you know…maybe even yourself!…people who work at dead end jobs they hate but can’t leave, for instance, or they’re in a relationship that’s going nowhere but they refuse to pull the plug, and so on and so forth.
It just seems to be human nature to tolerate intolerable situations and conditions because change is scary!
We have actually been insidiously and continually conditioned to think this way for thousands of years. Think for yourself and the results could be gruesomely unpleasant!
Ordinary folks have slavishly followed whatever their ruling elites decreed upon pain of death since the dawn of civilization. Rulers and religious institutions have caused people to be slaughtered by the billions for having different faiths and ideas.
And, they generally didn’t just kill’em, they made them suffer as horribly as possible before sweet death claimed them, which you have to admit would impart a pretty damned serious lesson in social and religious conformity!
Consider the fate of Giordano Bruno, a brilliant 16th century Italian philosopher, mathematician, astrologer and astronomer. He proposed that the Sun was a star and that the Universe contained an infinite number of inhabited worlds populated by other intelligent beings.
The Roman Inquisition found him guilty of heresy and had him burned at the stake in 1600.
Galileo, who was his contemporary, was also tried by the Roman Inquisition for heresy because of his theories and discoveries. Galileo, however, managed to get off with just house arrest until he died. Condemned to life imprisonment for making discoveries we now recognize as true.
In Doug Adams’ hysterically funny sci-fi/social satire “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” a rather nasty race called the Vogons are the bureaucrats of the known universe.
They don’t tolerate any ideas or innovations outside of the documented and accepted norm, no matter what.
Just like governments and bureaucrats on Planet earth today, eh?
In the most recent movie version of this book, three of the main characters visit the Vogon’s home planet Vogsphere to rescue Arthur’s one true love Trish. As the trio approaches the vast, hideously ugly and institutional complex where they hope to find Trish, every time one of them says something like “I have an idea” or “I think” a big fly swatter looking creature erupts out of the ground and smacks them hard in the face.
Original ideas, dreams and thoughts are not tolerated on Vogsphere!
These critters are presumably the reason why the Vogons themselves have noses that are flattened against their faces, and why they also are utterly incapable of entertaining an original notion!
Another weird true life example of the danger of being different has been demonstrated by experiments with chickens.
Researchers have taken a flock of ordinary white leghorn chickens, picked one at random from out of the flock and painted a spot of colour on its feathers.
When this unfortunate bird is released back into the flock its fellow chickens, who had paid it no particular attention before, will now peck it to death for being different.
Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis discovered in 1847 that puerperal fever, or “childbed fever” was contagious, and that it was being spread by the very physicians themselves.
This deadly fever was rampant in maternity wards in North America and Europe, which in some instances had mortality rates of up to 40 percent!
Germs were still unknown at the time, and the current scientific opinion blamed diseases on an imbalance of the “humours” in the body.
However, a colleague of Semmelweis who had cut his finger after working with a cadaver soon developed puerperal fever and died.
Semmelweis hypothesized that the cadaveric material on his colleague’s hands caused the fever and so he began washing his hands and soon saw infection rates drop dramatically in his wards.
At this time, physicians would regularly perform autopsies and then examine their patients immediately afterwards, without washing their hands.
Semmelweis began to lecture on his discovery but was met with cold hostility by the medical profession. His medical colleagues were so put out by this new notion they argued that even if he was right, washing one’s hands each time before treating a pregnant woman would be too much work!!!!
Semmelweis ultimately suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an insane asylum where he soon died from blood poisoning.
These random ramblings are just a few examples of how being different is not tolerated or can even be fatal, although mankind’s greatest discoveries and innovations since time began have come from thinkers who dared to explore new paths and ideas…..even if the rest of the world did not recognize their genius at the time!
In order for our province and our individual communities to evolve and grow and become more abundant and prosperous we all need to embrace new ideas and thoughts.
Just because something has always been done a certain way does not mean that that’s the best way….just ask all those poor women who died in agony from childbed fever because their doctors were not washing their hands.
We get into ruts and don’t bother to consider new paths because , like the Vogons, we get swatted every time we try out our new ideas and theories.
We’ve allowed our personal lives to be ever more controlled by rules and regulations that don’t benefit anyone but the bureaucrats and officials who are making their hefty paycheques even as they continually find ways to curtail opportunities for people to start up small businesses.
Innovation and new ideas are deadly to the status quo, which is why they have always been ruthlessly suppressed.
We’ve all been conditioned to not think independently or speak our minds for fear of public censure or ridicule… and I think it’s high time we all got over it and started thinking for ourselves again!
Stephanie Kelley
