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Beware the bite of the disenchanter

30/9/2011

2 Comments

 
PictureHercules and the snake - Penni
 There are brutes that threaten, stab and rob, and assassins, but the disenchanters, who rape invisibly your respect for yourself and your belief in a fair, comprehensible world, and your optimism that you can achieve things, harm you with deeper and incurable wounds.

The disenchanters lurk everywhere, even in quiet, wealthy land; some are passers-by: bullies, small-time backyard tyrants, bureaucrats. Others are rulers, teachers or parents. Beware though mistaking anyone criticising you to be evil. In fact, the worse, perfidious enemies will flatter and encourage you in your errors and towards your worst ways astray, until you destroy yourself. And you may hate your perfectionist parents and sincere friends for loving you more than they love peace with you.

In one way or another, the disenchanters – most likely poisoned themselves - drain your illusions, trust, dreams, your faith and beauty. They wreck your compass. They debase you.

Pay the price to fight back or if you cannot, run away but do not break in to their twisted "real world". If it happened, find a way to wash yourself.

Consider punishment - not for he sake of hate, that would be their victory - but to get even in your soul; make justice because your intimate life-space and your soul, your self-respect need balance and closure. Make it become true in your personal life story that betrayal of trust and disenchantment are punished. On the spot, or later, time does not matter. This is a fight for the quality of your entire life.

When good hope, the ability to trust and  the self-respect are broken, you are contaminated, open to do the worst. When your trust is wrecked that the world is understandable, lawful and foreseeable, you are jailed for life.
 
If you were brought to see the world as arbitrary, indifferent, perverse and cruel, there is no need for prisons, police and yoke, no need for Hell in afterlife; you are banished to live in the chaotic empire of evil, until you die. No need of chains, you are crippled. You will carry, branded on your eye-balls, the distorting lens that makes certain the presence of wicked ugliness, wherever you go, wherever you evade, wherever you run, wherever you look.

Whole nations get to live in such nightmarish worlds, bullied by tyrants or by beastly Utopias. It is possible to rob whole nations of their dignity. Half a century may be needed for a people to wake up from the disenchanted nightmare of helplessness and cynicism.

But you can fight back quietly, with resilience, in your own life-time. I did it and it worked.

Have no mercy for the killer of trust.

2 Comments
Daniel Tenner link
18/10/2011 06:37:21 pm

A heavy point.

I wonder if the person who bullies by taking away dreams is more worth of revenge than the one who bullies by taking your dreams and twisting them into a nightmare slowly and imperceptibly...

This article seems to define exactly what an abusive relationship is like, when someone who should be supporting you to grow into your potential consistently saps it and instead undermines your sense of self-worth. However, it is also possible for this to happen with no ill intent from either side.

Mysteriously, this seems to be a very common dynamic even amongst friends. One of the hurdles that entrepreneurs have to face is that everyone will tell them that what they do is not possible (especially their parents, who are concerned that entrepreneurship is a hard road fraught with risk, and that there are ways that seem easier). In a way, to anyone trying to do things differently, many of their friends and acquaintances will turn into disenchanters.

I'm not sure revenge is always advised, unless it is the type you give: revenge by being successful despite the naysayers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rwsuXHA7RA is a good video to conclude this, read by someone who faced a lot of disenchanters in his life.

Reply
Geoffrey Morton-Haworth link
27/2/2015 05:01:44 pm

Yes Daniel, heavy indeed.

And sometimes we may even discover that our spouse has become the disenchanter. At which time, recognition that such abuse takes two (abusee as well as abuser) is vital. Ioan is right. In the end, some things are simply intolerable.

Hope it never happens to you.

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