Emotional Gas Chambers

Emotional Gas Chambers

For some reason, I still have the number one site on emotional intelligence, as ranked by google. I really don't understand this, as I have been criticizing pretty much everyone in the world, and haven't even been updating the site with much information that is specifically about emotional intelligence, at least as it is defined by Mayer and Salovey, for a long time.

But the fact remains that when you search for "emotional intelligence" in google, my site is the first on the list.

So I feel a sense of responsibility to tell you what I really believe and what I am seeing as I travel. Evidently you, the people around the world who read my site, think that what I say, what I believe, what I think and how I feel has some value to you. So I feel an obligation to be true to you and to myself.

What I have seen around the world, especially since I left Australia in July of 2003 and travelled to Asia, and started visiting schools by going into English classes and volunteering my time to help the students, has just about killed me. There is no other way I can say it.

The more I think about what I have seen and what the implications are for humanity, the more it pains me, yet also drives me to write about, and now show pictures of, what I am seeing.

For some time now I have been talking about how society poisons the minds of children and teenagers. A few days ago I wrote in my private journal something like "if there is such a thing as emotional intelligence, then we are annihilating it on a massive level around the world."

Two days ago I started thinking about the term "soul murder." Yesterday I found this definition of "soul murder":

"the apparently willful abuse and neglect of children by adults that are of sufficient intensity and frequency to be traumatic"

Soul murder "distorts and inhibits the emotional life of the child...tends to destroy the child’s capacity for joy and inhibit the power to care and to love...it is especially damaging to the capacity for love that can partially transcend narcissism, permitting caring for others" (ref)

But I would change this to say that the willful abuse and neglect of children by adults is just the tip of the iceberg.

The rest of the iceberg, that which lies just below the surface, and which is much more dangerous, and which sunk the Titanic, is the unintentional abuse and neglect. And as I have said before, there is much, much, much more emotional abuse and neglect than physical or sexual.

Based on what I have seen I now firmly believe that everywhere around the word children and teenagers are being unintentionally abused and neglected emotionally. I would even say they are being emotionally starved. And I am afraid humanity itself is the Titanic and this emotional abuse and starvation is the iceberg.

I also believe the primary source of this emotional abuse and emotional starvation is in the buildings around the world we call ¨schools¨.

Highschools, primary schools, secondary schools, middle schools, kindergardens, universities.

Then yesterday when I visited another school and saw how far removed the director was from the needs and feelings of the children, I thought of the gas chambers in Germany.

This is a very strong image to use, but I cannot say this any other way to try to express how strong my feelings are about what is happening inside what are commonly called "classrooms." From now on, I will think of these rooms as emotional gas chambers -- EGC´s, let's say.

If you really want to see what is wrong with the world, what is wrong with humanity, why adult humans do such seemingly incredibly cruel and senseless things to each other, study what is happening emotionally in the schools. This is not to minimize the emotional abuse and starvation in the homes, (or in churches and mosques and synagogues) but you will see more of it, more quickly, and it is more systematic and organized, in the schools.

I will have more to say about this, but I want to post this now because this message is so important.

S. Hein
November 3, 2004
Chiclayo, Peru

Reference

http://mentalhelp.net/books/books.php?type=de&id=219