Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The Conflict Between Desecrating And Fetishizing

So now that I have talked about both desecrating and fetishizing, it's time to finally elaborate on the conflict between them.

If you believe, and I mean truly believe, that an item is lucky or otherwise magical, then it kind of is. Your mind looks at the world in a way that allows your belief to be true. When you have your good luck charm, everything seems to go your way; even "bad" events seem to have a silver lining. Therefore, your charm works; your life is better when you have it.

When somebody tells you that you're stupid for believing in luck, and especially when they tell you that your good luck charm is a powerless bauble, it is an attack not just on you, but on your entire reality.

The conflict between desecrating and fetishizing is the conflict of subjective truths. Cold, hard facts are pretty hard to argue with (not that it stops people from doing so frequently), but most of life deals with all that mushy gray stuff that is neither black nor white.

The entirety of human history is shaped by people having different beliefs. And the conflicts within our collective history (from as large as world wars to as small as two people passive-aggressively harrassing each other) arose from people who didn't fetishize the same things in the same ways.

The power of a fetish can be great enough to unite the most diverse of people across the world. Consequently, the more powerful a fetish is, the more powerful the outlash will be if that fetish is desecrated.

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