I really dislike the color pink. Not only do I find it incredibly ugly, when I'm in an environment with a lot of pink in it, I get headaches and feel sick. This is a lower brain stem sort of thing, has nothing to do with rationality, and is strictly a strong innate subjective preference.
Fortunately, there's not a lot of pink in my life. The sky is blue, trees are green, and rocks are brown and grey. My wife knows that I don't like pink and her wardrobe is pretty much devoid of pink clothes. My older daughter seems to have inherited my aversion to pink. My younger daughter likes pink a lot, but does her best to keep pink in her room which works just fine for all of us.
But let's say that instead of living with my family, I was living in a house with three roommates, all of whom liked pink a lot. As with my younger daughter, as long as they mostly kept pink to their own rooms, it wouldn't be a big deal. But what if they decided, as the majority of the household, that all rooms, including mine, needed to be pink? I might try to resist somewhat, but realistically, I would simply move out and go somewhere that wasn't pink, even if other living arrangements were substantially more expensive.
But what if moving out wasn't an option? Let's say there was nowhere else to live or that the majority everywhere decided everything needed to be pink. Every day, my roommates add more and more pink to the household. Every day, my headaches and feeling of sickness get worse. There's no place to go, the roommates refuse to back down no matter what, the misery is relentless.
What would you do?
2 comments:
A) Throw their tea into a harbour and start a revolution with the support of my hundreds of thousands of fellow pink-haters;
B) Seek heavy-duty senstitivity training over my aversion to pink, which is obviously caused by my chronic misogyny;
C) Paint my room green while they are away and hole up in it with an assault rifle and survival provisions;
D) Launch a constitutional case in federal court against National Breast Cancer Awareness Month for violating my civil rights;
E) Stock up with Gravol and organize violent counter-demonstrations against Code Pink;
F) Threaten to cut daughter #2 out of my will for being a statist-enabler.
G) Check myself into Bellevue to get treatment for my delusion that everybody is trying to impose pink on me.
Decisions, decisions.
Peter,
Thanks for the laugh. G might work...
"You lock the door and
Throw away the key,
There's someone in my head
But it's not me"
That was my main point - the difference between preference and delusion ("a belief ...that is resistant to all reason") is a fine line. To the extent that a preference is a belief, a preference and a delusion are identical.
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