Page 38 - Unlikely Stories 3

Cyberceutics Deletes Obsessogens with Ping-a-Ding

they were supposed to cure had been identified—often out of thin air,
when the condition related to mental illness or other pathologies of
contemporary society generated by lifestyle: diet, inactivity, stress,
family problems. Rather than deal with underlying issues, of course,
Americans want the technological fix: if possible, a pill; if not, a
practical technique. A billion-dollar health industry arose by mimicking
what religion has been doing since the dawn of man, as I said earlier.
Again, the problem and its solution are both controlled behind the
scenes by the same manipulators. The key to succeeding in this racket
is to give a new name to what is bothering people, along with
something that sounds like a scientific explanation for its existence. My
book, which has remained on the top-seller list for the past twelve
years, is Obsessogens: their Hidden Influence on Every Aspect of Your Life. It
has been ridiculed in scientific journals, but is no more outrageous in
its content than dozens of other volumes on UFOs, demonic
possession and the miraculous curative powers of some herb imported
from the shores of Lake Baikal—all of which also claim factual basis.”
“Okay,” said Barfuss, Jr. “What’s an obsessogen?”
“Briefly, it is an explanation for every sort of psychological problem
imaginable, rooted in the as-yet uncharted terrain of the human brain:
nobody can definitively deny the existence of such entities, only that
nothing has yet been found resembling them. This is where my
pseudoscience resides, in the realm of remote possibility, where hope
and fear can be imagined as manifest in simple structures resembling
those in computer games. The drug companies cannot hold a candle to
this: none of their products can promise as much. A new secular
religion can grip the public mind by first showing it the villain in the
narrative: a pantropic pathogen, something whose malign effects
radiate out into every manifestation of a person’s life, somatic,
psychosomatic, psychological, psychosocial—ultimately socioeconomic
—as I detail in my final chapter. I’m sorry about the big words, but you
can read the book: it has a glossary. Now, an obsessogen, like an
antigen, is an invader against which an inappropriate defense response
is mounted; that reaction is what does the damage. In my formulation,
an unfamiliar or unpleasant conception or perception entering the
mind may trigger overkill, in the same way antibodies run wild in
autoimmune disorders. This is a familiar paradigm to the majority of
Americans who suffer ailments ranging in severity from mild allergies

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