The Mental Breakdown
LAZINESS works untiringly because it is easy for it to work—in the mind! Just let thinking take a holiday, and it may take a permanent vacation. Just exchange reasoning and logic for emotionalism and sensual thrills and the mind is imperiled with an ominous threat: that of a mental breakdown.
“Danger, Emotion at Work” is a sign that could well be posted at every newsstand, for any careful appraisal of what is for sale graphically illustrates why a breakdown of the public mind is manifesting itself today. Look over the glamorous array of magazines. Are the majority thought-provoking? Do they call for sober thinking? Sales are stimulated by voluptuously uncovered “cover girls”. Magazines and newspapers sell better if they are of the “quick” kind and contain, for the most part, pictures. Pulp magazines grind out issue after issue of sordid immoral life; fornication and sexual lusts subtly normalized! Do the pocket-size books that purvey sex, sadism, murder, vice, passion and crime, and which sell by the millions of copies, require real thinking? No, it is emotion that is at work, sweeping the reader along with jetlike propulsion and wedging an opening in the mental window frame for laziness of thinking to climb in. The public tends to demand fiction; even these “dream world” novels must be of a comparatively light nature. Works by Shakespeare, Browning, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas are losing appeal, for their writing requires the use of a dictionary!
The public mind today avoids a dictionary like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. Reading, like traveling, can acquaint one with entirely new vocabularies. Yet the mass reading of today with its strong emotional impact anesthetizes thinking so the reader believes he does not need to look up a word in the dictionary. Some people, regardless of what they are reading, will never go to the dictionary. Dictionary-phobia is part of the mental breakdown.
Mental laziness is perceived in the language of the “man on the street”—riddled with vulgarism and slang. The trend is for the mass public mind to distrust and dislike material involving an intellectual structure which must be built up through reasoning. At San Francisco recently, Governor Stevenson spoke: “I don’t believe, as some say, that I’ve talked over anyone’s head either. I don’t believe I could if I tried.” This criticism of the presidential candidate’s style of speaking: is it really a condemnation of Stevenson or of the public mind? A letter that Stevenson received from a lady aptly answers the question: “I do not believe you talk above our heads. I am easily swayed by emotion, until I think, which I sometimes do.” The public mind thinks “sometimes”, but thinking “sometimes” is not sufficient for self-protection and self-realization. Thus, even in the matter of political opinion, preference for a candidate is determined only to a small extent by logical thinking based upon knowledge of social conditions and of the actual policies of the parties.
Draft rejection figures spotlight the mental breakdown. About one in every six is turned down for “mental” reasons. Yet schools and colleges are plentiful. Could it be that the mental breakdown has its inception at an early age? Youths are frequently seen at newsstands with handfuls of comic books and teen-agers stroll out of drugstores with a good supply of “Who did its?” generously spiced with lascivious living. Thus mental laziness stalks youth; minds become impervious to thought-provoking material.
Another insidious facet in the mental breakdown picture is the craze for TV. Does TV entail thinking? Does it even stimulate thinking? No! Why, adults and children who wish to improve their mind in a TV home are sometimes forced to leave the house for a private place to study. Concentration is difficult with TV. Complained one announcer: “The number of commercials is driving even me batty.” The TV industry itself, subjecting its adults to stultifying time-killers, seems to assume the public has moron mentality. Mature minds viewing the present trend in TV, in journalism, in the radio, in motion pictures, in magazines, in best-selling books, in mass response to emotionalized propaganda, and in public aversion to dictionaries, wonder: Has Uncle Sam grown into a perpetually adolescent man—with a comic book always in his grasp? If so, he is not so much a man as a boy who has outgrown his breeches.
Some may contend, however, that there is good in TV blood-chillers, pocket-size “Who did its?” with their accent on sex and violence. Good, because it enables a person to get the evil intentions out of his system “vicariously”. But if one can eradicate evil tendencies by reading such abjectly perverse material, and then go out and do good, could not the opposite hold true? Read the Bible, get the good out of you, and then go out and do evil! No, such reasoning is specious, for what the mind is filled with determines the type of actions that ensue on the part of adults and children alike. Children naturally are more susceptible to the mental breakdown. Can a child who sees corpses strewn about like popcorn at a circus—via TV programs, movies, comic books, etc.—understand that it is just “vicarious” for him? Hardly! In Brooklyn one six-year-old son of a policeman asked his father for real bullets because his little sister “doesn’t die for real when I shoot her like they do when Hopalong Cassidy kills ‘em”.
The mental breakdown thus inexorably marches on alongside its sinister twin, the moral breakdown, both of which were foretold for these last days by the Bible. (2 Tim. 3:1-5) Christians must be diligent to guard against the encroachments of emotion and laziness, which work so easily in the mind. God’s own Word says: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith Jehovah.” (Isa. 1:18, AS) Such reasoning means to study his Word, to ascertain God’s will, and then to exercise the mind continually in good works. The mental breakdown must be avoided by Christians. Paul’s advice to them is fitting today: “Whatever things are true, whatever things are of serious concern, whatever things are righteous, whatever things are chaste, whatever things are lovable, whatever things are well spoken of, whatever virtue there is and whatever praiseworthy thing there is, continue considering these things.” (Phil. 4:8, NW) No one will receive the gift of everlasting life in the new world who does not use his mind now to the glory of its Creator, Jehovah.