Posted by:
Stray Mutt
(
)
Date: August 26, 2012 12:00PM
I had a storybook when I was a little kid. It was produced during the Cold War to explain how communism was bad. But it was done in allegory without specifically mentioning communism. The normal "people" in the story were shown as happy sphere shaped creatures. The bad guys were angry cubes in uniforms. The cubes rounded up the spheres and shoved them into machines that squeezed them into cubes. Lesson: forced conformity is evil.
Fast forward to my teen years. I became more aware of how The One True Church® was trying to make us all conform -- even though that was supposedly Lucifer's plan. Hmmmmm.
A poster on a recent thread told of being depressed in Provo. But maybe it's more about being squeezed by the predominant local culture. Compression rather than depression.
My mental health sucked on my mission. Conform, conform, CONFORM! And get other people to conform. Round up happy sphere people and and lead them to the Cube-O-Matic. Or you are slothful in the eyes of the Lord.
Things got a little better after my mission. Good thing I went to USU instead of BYU. But I still struggled with self-loathing. The LDS conformity culture is much weaker at USU, but there was still enough to make me feel like my drift into inactivity was sinful. If I had gone to college outside the MoZone, it wouldn't have been an issue.
But when I finished school and moved to California, away from the compressing culture, the "depression" lifted. Oh, I was fine. I was a good person. I was a responsible member of society. Not an enemy of God or slothful servant. I had just been under the influence of the wrong people.
This is why I advocate exmos or those teetering on the wall to get out of Zion. It's really hard to judge reality when you're surrounded by delusional control freaks. You're surrounded by constant pressure. The pressure is still there even if you surrender and conform. You might stop noticing it, but it's there.
I think getting out of the Cube-O-Matic is so important for mental health that it trumps any positives there might be in staying. You'll miss family or skiing or whatever? Not as much as you'll miss your sanity. And, really, do you want to subject your kids to the Cube-O-Matic just so they can see their grandparents more often? Particularly when the grandparents want to shove them into the Cube-O-Matic?