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It appears that in some regions of India, thousands of people have been praying and fasting in anticipation that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world. And one of them is now dead.
She was sixteen.
A teenage girl in central India killed herself on Wednesday after being traumatized by media reports that a "Big Bang" experiment in Europe could bring about the end of the world, her father said.The 16-year old girl from the state of Madhya Pradesh drank pesticide and was rushed to the hospital but later died, police said.
Her father, identified on local television as Biharilal, said that his daughter, Chayya, killed herself after watching doomsday predictions made on Indian news programs.
Yes.
"In the past two days, Chayya had asked me and other relatives about the world coming to an end on September 10," Biharilal was quoted as saying."We tried to divert her attention and told her she should not worry about such things, but to no avail," he said.
For the past two days, many Indian news channels held discussions airing doomsday predictions over a huge particle-smashing machine buried under the Swiss-French border.
Superstition kills.
Physical Science
Comments
Blake, you do realize that the girl probably suffered from an anxiety disorder? She could've just as easily fixated on the possibility of being killed in some other way, and gone down hill from there. Granted that it's not rational, sure, but I think blithely dismissing this as a product of superstition overstates things.
After all, the explanation of why the LHC is not going to produce a world-devouring singularity is not all that accessible to the average person, who instead places their trust in the authority of the scientific establishment. In effect, they place their faith in a different priesthood than the poor girl, who likely had a preexisting condition that predisposed her to fear the worst.
Posted by: Scott Hatfield, OM | September 10, 2008 11:39 PM
Yes, a person who is provoked to desperate measures by one circumstance could be provoked by another. That much is obvious. But when there's an entire giant fear-generation apparatus — that which goes under the name "media" — that can't be making the situation better.
It's not just the one death. It's also the thousands of other people who are doing things they otherwise wouldn't. Something sent those thousand extra people to the Orissa temple yesterday. They all reacted. One person, perhaps among the most vulnerable, went too far.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | September 10, 2008 11:49 PM
My thought is, say the LHC actually did create a black hole that swallowed the world, ...that would be painless, why would you kill you self in such a horrible way just because the world 'might' be destroyed, just wait, because if it is, then your dead, but if you kill yourself, you don't even play the odds
but i guess if you have that much sense, you wouldn't be in that situation to begin with.
ignorance is such a bitch.
Posted by: Mike W | September 10, 2008 11:59 PM
Actually, as Blake says, if you read the article it does say that it was being encouraged - I popped it into my mini-blog entries (http://podblack.com/?p=902) after noticing that:
'But in deeply religious and superstitious India, fears about the experiment and the minor risks associated with it spread rapidly through the media.
In east India, thousands of people rushed to temples to pray and fast while others savored their favorite foods in anticipation of the world's end.
"There were a thousand more devotees yesterday as well as today compared to (any) other normal day," Benudhara Sahu, a temple official in Orissa state, told Reuters.'
Posted by: Podblack | September 11, 2008 12:21 AM
as a south asian i'm offended that you are trotting out these stereotypes of superstitious brown folk!
Posted by: razib | September 11, 2008 12:21 AM
Huh?
We're talking about a subset of the population which is going out and doing this stuff. If there's a stereotype, they're the ones living up to it. Millions of other people could be completely rational about the situation, but we don't hear about them. Maybe India's news channels are fanning the flames worse than those in other countries, but then again, fearmongering and credulity manifest themselves in the news media of other countries too.
The same story could have played out in the United States, where the young woman would have been named Catherine and would have overdosed on sleeping pills. I chose to blog about it because I thought it pointed to universal vulnerabilities in human nature and social problems which all our countries share.
I don't bother with racial, ethnic or geographical stereotypes: once you're a human being, that's bad enough. You don't need to get any worse.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | September 11, 2008 12:34 AM
I blame the media.
Posted by: Phil | September 11, 2008 1:23 AM
your response is flip and insensitive. try and walk in someone else's shoes for a moment and attempt to see where i'm coming from, instead of trotting out your defensive rejoinders!
Posted by: razib | September 11, 2008 1:28 AM
Mike W is correct. If the world was instantly swallowed by a Black hole then you'd never even know so there's nothing to worry about. Of course if it was a tiny black hole and the destruction took a bit longer, well you could always kill yourself then. Killing yourself now is just silly, poor kid.
Btw, don't mind Razib, s/he so crazy.
Posted by: tincture | September 11, 2008 1:30 AM
We're looking at indian media reports. Where's the stereotypes, razib?
Once again you prove yourself to be a grade-a arsehole.
Posted by: eddie | September 11, 2008 1:31 AM
I talk about seeing the failures of my own country and society reflected in a story from the far side of the planet, and I get called insensitive.
*Sigh*
You can't win on the Internet.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | September 11, 2008 1:39 AM
it would also be convenient if clicking on the header took you back to the homepage!
Btw, don't mind Razib, s/he so crazy.
is it a coincidence that you juxtaposed an atypical gender (s/he) with the word crazy? i think not!
Posted by: razib | September 11, 2008 1:48 AM
I accuse myself of typing that sentence... ON PURPOSE!
*gasp*
Posted by: tincture | September 11, 2008 1:54 AM
Good point. I'm still tweaking my various templates to get all the fiddlybits working properly.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | September 11, 2008 1:54 AM
I accuse myself of typing that sentence... ON PURPOSE!
you know that such heteronormative aggression in linguistic style is tantamount to psychodynamic violence, don't you? someone should send you to a reeducation camp to interrogate your privilege.
Posted by: razib | September 11, 2008 2:14 AM
Are you aware that linguistoimperialism like you're displaying is an outmoded facet of the phallocentric WCM power structure? Somebody should send you to a reNEDucation camp to interrogate your semantics.
S/he is not atypical, s/he is as anti-atypical as it gets. It being the quantitive approximation for any given amount of it.
Posted by: tincture | September 11, 2008 2:31 AM
tincture, it isn't appropriate for you to turn the tools of the oppressed against them. the master may not appropriate any tools he wishes to tear down the houses of those who are in an inferior power position. as a person of color i can not by my essence and ontology engage in imperialism. hundreds of years of white male hegemony mitigate any impression of oppression, i, a Man of Color (MoC), can impart to any with whom i engage in discourse.
Posted by: razib | September 11, 2008 2:37 AM
As a gender and racial nonspecific entity, I take offense at your labeling of me as "master" both for its phallocentricity(why not mistress?) and for its use as a means to make WCM the status quo. I reject your claim that imperialism is in any way connected to colour. The widespread acceptance that imperialism is the sole property of the WCM power structure has long been a goal of racist leaders seeking to rob minorities, such as myself, of the power of self determination. Furthermore, as a gender and racially nonspecific entity, any tools I use cannot, morally, be used by a self-confessed immortal who has hundreds of years of experience to draw on.
Posted by: tincture | September 11, 2008 4:07 AM
Given the dateline of the story from Bophal, maybe people there are not inclined to believe assurances of safety from large industrial enterprises. Rationality is difficult after tragedy; look at our own country after 9/11. Shame on the media for fanning those flames.
It wasn't clear to me that her death was the result of superstition though. It's not like there was a mass movement to suicide. When the LHC doesn't destroy the world, though, they'll claim they prevented it with prayer.
Posted by: decrepitoldfool | September 11, 2008 6:55 AM
Razib, you're funny. :) Me next, me next!
(In response to the actual blog post, that's awful. I have no idea what media in india have been telling people but even here in Sweden, there has been the occasional doomsday story in major news outlets.)
Posted by: Felicia Gilljam | September 11, 2008 7:35 AM
Much of my blogging, at Podblack, is about superstitious behaviour - across gender, culture, countries, time and age.
Feel free to check it out and see how it backs up what Blake said about it being universal. Quite a few academic papers that say the same thing too, at the end of this list, called 'Research Papers':
http://podblack.com/?page_id=392
Posted by: Podblack Blog | September 11, 2008 7:35 AM
The razib sez @15
Here in Nevada, interrogating your privilege is legal in most counties.
Unfortunately, I can't afford it.
Posted by: BobbyEarle | September 11, 2008 7:51 AM
@Blake Stacey
Don't worry about razib.
He's just a fake troll. I would advise adding him to a kill file if he gets too annoying (which he imho does).
Posted by: student_b | September 11, 2008 7:54 AM
Sad. Very sad.
And of course the media is gonna lay the blame for this death at the feet of 'crazy, megalomaniacal scientists'.
Posted by: Sili | September 11, 2008 10:47 AM
I never get this kind of feedback when I write about new science textbooks!
Imagine, for a moment, a highly immoral experiment: we take a thousand people and subject them to — immerse them in — predictions of doomsday. How do they react? Some might shrug it off and try to get on with their lives, some might resort to a frenzy of ritual, and some, yes, probably the ones with pre-existing anxieties of some kind, will take the most desperate measures of all. Do we, the experimenters, carry any of the moral responsibility for their death? And, if we infect everyone with fear, doesn't that make the situation even more difficult to handle for the people who are unlucky enough to be particularly vulnerable? Consider Catherine, the hypothetical young woman introduced in comment #6: she might have wanted to kill herself after her boyfriend left her, but in that circumstance, she has resources to draw upon, people who have been through breakups and survived. Her friends and her parents have a chance of keeping her connected to bedrock. But what happens when most of the people Catherine meets share to some extent the same fear?
Posted by: Blake Stacey | September 11, 2008 10:55 AM
they wait on their rooftops dressed in their best whites, in eager anticipation of heaven.
or, at least, that's what some Jehova's Witnesses are (possibly apocryphally) reported to have done one of the several times this particular experiment was run on them.
Posted by: Nomen Nescio | September 11, 2008 11:15 AM
I still blame the media.
After all they're promoting a crap story. Just like I blame Fox news for all the uninformed that there was no connection between 9/11 and Saddam. People go by what they are told or read or see on TV. If the media fails to do its job its not like you can go somewhere else.
Posted by: Phil | September 11, 2008 2:47 PM
Blake: after reading some of the comments here, I withdraw my objection. I'm beginning to wonder if this isn't a form of superstition, after all. It's certainly true that the media fanned the flames of irrationality, and the qualitative difference between that flame and the fire of crazed religiosity may not be that much. (sigh) I may be wrong, in other words.
Posted by: Scott Hatfield, OM | September 12, 2008 8:04 PM