{Morbid curiosity}[19th January 1969]

[Redbook1:71-73][19690119:0000a]{Morbid curiosity}[19th January 1969][Age 17]

Sunday 19th January 1969.

{continued]

Boredom is, I think, responsible for much of the eccentric and unusual behaviour of the male human -- especially the adolescent male human.  There is in most males a deep, dormant desire for the exciting, the strange, the unreal in reality.  It is easily awakened.  It is also present to a certain extent in women.  In its best form, it will cause a human to devote his[/her] spare time to a worthy cause like Oxfam or the W.[R.?]V.S..  In its worst form, it leads students to allow themselves to lose identity by being swept up in a mass movement of violence for a worthy cause like Vietnam.  It is most clearly seen in the crowds that go to look at the scene of an aeroplane crash, or the Torrey Canyon oil slicks.  They have been castigated as morons, and Giles of the Express has drawn them with donkeys’ heads, standing on the cliffs of Cornwall, watching the oil

We are unfair on them.  They are merely responding to a deep call which they do not understand.  Superficially, it is the appeal of the extraordinary to the mediocre -- or why do we go to watch Ben Hur or the Juggling Jacobinis?  Our lives are dull and featureless, especially in Suburbia, and anything unusual gives the brain the stimulation it craves -- i.e. it dispels boredom.  But if we go deeper, we see that it appeals to the Urge that, anthropologists and psychologists say, drives man to feel happiest when he is out and about actively protecting the home.  What outlet is there for this instinct on an office stool?  Hence every small boy's dream of being Superman; hence many adolescents’ dreams of rescuing fair damsels; hence, by one logical step, the desire of men to go and see the scene of a disaster -- the nearest poor alternative to the real life of protection and active usefulness.  As for the women, I am not so sure.  Perhaps, their chief instinct being for the protection of the home internally, they also are stimulated mentally by seeing life and homes and families broken.  This is not morbid, it is merely a natural hunger.  The natural urge of a soldier who has a weapon is to use it -- see autobiographies in the Second World War -- and the natural urge of someone with a natural urge which is dedicated towards a certain end -- internal or external security -- must surely be to find something to combat with that natural urge {-- the dedicated one}. The Welfare State could be the greatest threat to Peace and Civilisation we have known internally for a long time.  Man and Woman must protect the security of the family against something; and if the Welfare State takes away the proper threats to their security -- poverty etc -- they will (a) rely on the Welfare State and (b) turn their protective instincts on something else -- such as Vietnam, with violence, or the scene of a crash, to convince them that they might be needed yet.  They will need some convincing.  You cannot turn a natural drive off just like that, simply by destroying the need for it.

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