Dennis didn't have much time for his wife and kids. He was employed as a bureaucrat and his job wore him out. Not that it was challenging but just the opposite, and being the opposite of challenging was ironically quite taxing and took a toll on his life energy. He did not make time for his wife and kids, but he bought them extravagant gifts under the assumption that material objects can effectively replace the spiritual well-being you get from being present and attentive with the people you love.
One day he came home to witness his daughter playing with a toy doll he had gotten her when he had felt particularly guilty for missing her birthday that year. There was a knob on the back of the doll and you could turn it to alter the vocal responses that the doll would give as you interacted with it. There was "happy" mode, "grumpy" mode, "sassy" mode, and one mode called "nihilistic indifference."
Don't ask me about whether a 5-year-old has the slightest inkling about what the heck a "nihilistic indifference" is, or could possibly mean, because that is not the point of the story. Anyway, where was I?
Oh yeah, so Dennis watches his little girl adjusting the setting and laughing at the new and different responses she gets. At that moment, he gets an idea: Maybe humans are like toy dolls, like meat puppets, and we can simply unilaterally alter the input and create new and different -- sometimes even unprecedented -- responses out of them! The next day he was excited to tell everyone at work about his new idea of manually rearranging the human soul. They loved his idea, he got promoted, and everything was hunky-dorry. Benjamin was his boss and took the idea home to share with his wife, Geraldine.
She loved it and they both decided that they will cease being normal human beings and instead turn themselves into diabolical master-manipulators and spiritual string-pullers. They had a son, Johnny, and they brought him up to believe that broccoli was the greatest-tasting food on the planet. Every night at dinner they would tell Johnny: "Now, you have to eat all of your meat and potatoes if you want desert. And you know what desert is, don't you, Johnny? And then Johnny would yell with wide-eyed and hands-raised excitement: "Broccoli! Yum, yum, yum, yummmmm!"
Benjamin and Geraldine were so proud of their "achievement" that they shared their story at work, at church, and wherever else they could show-off about it. The scheme actually "worked" for 14 years or so. But then one day in the lunchroom at school they had run out of brocolli and Johnny was almost inconsolable. When asked what was wrong he said that he was really, really looking forward to desert that day. The school lunch technician told Johnny that he could have one of the "usual" deserts prepared for all the other kids, and he reluctantly agreed.
The name of the desert was Rocky Road ice cream and Johnny thought that that name didn't make it sound very good -- because it sounds like eating rocks and dirt -- but that, on the suggestion of the lunch technician, he was going to try it out anyway, at least for one day. He took his container of Rocky Road ice cream and sulked back to his seat with his head lowered in despair.
He slowly willed himself to open the top of the container. The other kids, watching his behavior, asked jokingly "What's wrong Johnny, do you hate ice cream? Have you never had ice cream before?!" He defensively said that he preferred an alternative desert and that it's not like he had been missing out on anything for the past 15 years. He frustratingly drove the spoon down into what looked like "dirty" ice cream. ... And then he put a spoonful of this stuff into his mouth.
It took a second for the incoming signal to travel through his taste buds and sensory nerves to reach his brain. Then the taste hit him like a ton of bricks. The look on his face was electric, but in a bad way, like the activity of terrible thunderstorm. He looked around at everyone else eating ice cream, at everyone else who had been allowed to eat ice cream for the past 15 years.
He straighten up and threw his head back and belted out an enraged: "Nooooooooooooooo!" Then his eyes scurried across the table, he grabbed a knife and ran out the door, yelling: "What have you done to me?! What have you done to me?!" He ran all the way home like that (yelling, with the knife raised up and poised to stab).
Luckily, when he got home to his parents, his arm was so tired that he couldn't raise the knife up far enough to stab them. His parents were concerned so they took him to the psychiatrist and said that there is something wrong with Johnny, but that it has nothing to do with their parenting -- i.e., it has nothing to do with them being hoodwinking hucksters willing to treat other humans like inanimate clay to be molded into either their own image, or their own imaginations.
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