Shrinkage, Penis-Stealing Witches, Delusion
An essay I will not be submitting to the University of Chicago
I got some good news last week, so probably won’t be applying to the University of Chicago. When I thought I would be, though, I wrote up this sucker, and it’s fairly awesome, so I don’t want it to go to waste.
(Cf. The Geography of Madness)
To hold some false beliefs is inevitable, and to hold insane false beliefs even more so. For any given truth about the world, there are a thousand plausible and sane untruths, and a million more insane ones. Frankly, that we hold any true beliefs at all is an incredible fluke. It’d make sense, then, to expect that insane untruths are most of what we’ve believed throughout our history—delusions, I’ll call them.1
Human society began with a single, simple delusion. That your rationally motivated neighbor can be trusted to cooperate with you instead of cutting off your head and stealing your livestock. It was a useful delusion, once enough of us had evolved to hold it, and it enabled the formation of early societies, tribes. But every once in a while, an unfortunately under-evolved specimen would come along, realize his true interest lied in slaughter, rape, and robbery, and we’d begin to doubt the delusion. We’d worry that maybe it really was as untrue and insane as it is.
But cooperation worked well, so the Darwinian hand took note, and its defense was—I’m sure you can guess it—more delusions! We layered on endlessly more complex delusions. First, we claimed that to slaughter and steal was wrong. And many degenerate minds accepted this, chose to cooperate not out of trust but out of morality. Still, some refused, each century raiding and pillaging our great Ziggurats, and to them we said: there is great punishment to come to those who act wrongly! Our great pharaoh, he has powers bestowed by a transcendent clique of sun-men and moon-women, and he’ll turn them against those who aren’t good. And more degenerates accepted and joined, and they built the god-king a grand tomb and slit their throats to continue serving his will in the beyond.
On it went. Greater and more unbelievable delusions that convinced wackier and more skeptical minds to cooperate. Different societies took different random walks. Eventually, the god-king myth became unconvincing, so some replaced him with the beauty and balance of the natural world, while others chose increasingly more distant and unhuman gods.
Of course, some delusions remained useful to us all: the basest ideas of ‘cooperation’ and ‘good’ are constant across societies. So are certain hunting and agricultural myths, and of course, everyone’s got their own story of creation. And, also, common to South Asia, East Asia, West Africa, the Middle East, and all of Europe are penis-stealing witches.
On occasion, it feels or even appears to a man that his member has shrunk. So ubiquitous is this sensation to the less-fair sex, Seinfeld brought it to broadcast television in the 1990s. “The Hamptons:” George Costanza goes for a swim—the water’s cold—and is seen changing by Jerry’s then-girlfriend, who giggles and runs out (and eventually tells George’s then-almost-girlfriend what she’s seen). George discusses with Jerry, who diagnoses the problem for the audience: “Shrinkage?” The melancholic reply: “Yes! Significant shrinkage…”
Why should George be upset, though? He, a Modern American Man, a congregant of the Modern American Civic Church of Reason, knows why it happened. Sure, it could ruin his relationship, but that’s nothing relative to the suffering that would result of the delusions of most men through history. At least, in the Hamptons, no one will be hung.2
The common explanation for shrinkage has always been, obviously, witchcraft. Bumped into someone and then felt your member became a bit smaller? Why not have a psychotic freak-out, jam a metal rod through your staff, and try to keep it from receding further? And, while you’re at it, maybe round up a posse and make an example of that no-good witch. I do not exaggerate:
In the Malleus Maleficarum, 15th-century Christianity’s foremost witch-hunting manual, penis-stealing witches feature prominently. Parables are told and advice given for retrieving one’s member from a bitter former lover or from the local penis-aficionado witch who keeps her stock up in a tree. Penis-stealing witch panic was alive and well in a remote Chinese village as late as the 1980s. In Nigeria and the Congo, koro, as the post-penis-stealing psychotic panic has become known (from the Malay word for ‘tortoise’, hilariously), still leads to riot-borne deaths every few years. In the 21st century! I feel terrible for using the word ‘hilariously’ so near that tragic truth.
Not all cultural delusions are created equal. Anyone telling you otherwise is either hopelessly idealistic or ruthlessly cynical. Koro panic is bad, and wrong. Moral conscience is good, and right. Some judgments on the margins might be hard to make, but these aren’t. Our delusions have given us vast wealth and incredible technology, and our delusions have given us koro and slavery and the countless genocides and massacres of the past dozen millennia.
So, we come to the great burden incumbent upon man: to tell good delusion from bad. It’s your life’s work, it’s mine, it’s all of ours. And we have no choice in the matter. If we want to make something of our world, we must accept delusion in general, and reject it wholeheartedly where it does harm. No claiming to be perfectly reasonable! Dealing in delusion necessitates plenty of humility. But our duty is to keep track of untruths and to issue judgments, and we must fulfill it.
So, if ever I step out into the chilly wind of Hyde Park, and I feel my member recede, just a little, I can assure you that I won’t allow myself to be so deluded as to impale the poor guy. I’ll simply note the shrinkage, chuckle, and carry on to my next class. And there, inundated with a million new, insane untruths, I’ll begin to tease apart the good from the bad.
Maybe you worry that ‘delusion’ is too demeaning a word. But, of course, the only reason I’d have to demean is to adjust some social status hierarchy in my favor. Well, I assure you I hold as many, if not more, of these delusions as you do. So, no cause for alarm at all, though I thank you for your vigilance.
Fuck you, that’s funny.