It’s an axiom of the human condition: the more you
do or experience something, the more you become used to it. We speak of being able to tolerate things
better, even become resistant to them, as they become more and more a regular
part of our lives.
Medical science has taught us that our bodies
become tolerant to various germs and bugs after they’ve made us sick. Often, once we’ve had a particular malady, we become fully resistant to it for the rest of our lives. We may breath in or ingest the pathogen, but
our bodies just sort of say, “Oh, you again?
You can’t hurt me anymore. Go
infect someone else.” And the bug just
slinks harmlessly away.
Similarly, we speak of how people who drink a lot
develops a high tolerance to alcohol. At
first, one beer or a little wine will give them a good buzz, and it doesn’t
take much to get them wasted. But over
time, they have to drink more and more just to get the desired effect. The same is true with most illegal drugs.
And tolerance to physical pain is legendary in
history. Many warrior cultures put their
recruits through hellish ordeals in order to develop their tolerance to
pain. At first, they probably cry like
babies, but the more pain they are forced to endure, the more resistant they
become to its debilitating effects.
In time, they become perfect warriors who can carry
the fight despite broken bones, serious wounds or even the loss of a limb. Their pain is still there – they’ve just
become so used to it that they don’t react to it anymore. These are the scariest – and the most
effective – fighting machines.
We can still see this today in the “play with pain”
cultures of many of our sports, like hockey and football. Guys who sit out with anything less than a
broken leg or gaping holes in their chests are derided as wusses.
But it’s not just physical pain that we can learn
to tolerate. We can become increasingly
resistant to the effects of emotional pain as well. When we experience heartache early in life,
it feels like the whole world is coming to an end. But it doesn’t end. And we begin to realize this.
As the years go by and we accumulate a succession of
heartaches, we find that they affect us less and less until, finally, we hardly
flinch. We expect it, we’re ready for
it, and after a brief bout of disappointment, we get over it and move on.
I can’t say that this is a good thing, really. I mean, the fact that we can take heartache
so much more easily just means that we lose our ability to really invest
ourselves deeply in our relationships. I
guess it’s just the price we pay to have that kind of emotional
self-protection, to grow that thick skin of pain resistance.
It occurred to me recently that perhaps we can also
develop a tolerance for, or resistance to, reality. That is, the more we look at a reality we don’t
really like, the more we begin to ignore it in favor or an idea that is more
pleasing. Eventually, the “real” reality
has less and less effect on us as our “preferred” reality takes center
stage. We can dispatch that unwanted
reality with any of a hundred arrows from our quiver of rationalizations.
Perhaps this is the basis of self-deception. When reality is unpleasant enough, or even
hurts enough, we build up a callous to it.
Or, like the antibodies our systems produce to fight off viruses and
other pathogens, our minds develop something like “antirealities” to protect us
from the ravages of those attacking realities.
Our “antirealities” are the ideas and beliefs our
minds create to give us a nicer alternative to what we don’t like. In time, we buy in to the nicer alternatives
and become almost fully resistant to those nasty reality bugs. We feel safe and secure in the protection of
our pleasant mental alternatives – our “antirealities.”
Maybe this is all the garbage of a rambling
mind. Or maybe there is something to it.
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