For a fair number of years now I have been searching the Internet trying to find the most Horrific Concept in the world. The one idea that would make me instantly get pissed off and desire to flame the living shit out of who ever posted it.
In the midst of my search I have become desensitized to pretty much everything, and thus the query posted here;
Does anybody here on the SDMB know of* the most Horrific Concept in the world? Not necessarily a thing or an object or anything like that, but just a concept would do nicely. Quite frankly beyond the initial concept it is all fluff any ways.
*Posting what it is would be well appreciated too, don’t need a bunch of spoil sports going “yah I know it!”
I was thinking more like something sooo horrific that no living human could think up of it. Which kind of precludes it from actually being posted on a forum anywheres, but. . . .
(I mean after the paintings of having sex with infant entrails, I am REALLY hard pressed to think up of anything much worse then that. Can anybody top it? I have been through the alt.tasteless archives, no go there. )
He actualy learned how to do something remotely resembling acting in one or two of them, not great movies, but at least watchable. (read: Better then his previous teen genre movies)
But even so, not a “HOLY SHIT THAT IS AWFUL” concept.
Hmmm. Not sure that this meets your criteria, but, how about someone who pokes his child’s eyes out because God (or Satan, or the cat, …) told him/her to.
Serious answer: ethno-bombs - biological weapons genetically engineered to target only people who belong to a particular ethnic group.
I’m not a conspiracy nut. I don’t believe that any particular country is producing such weapons. I don’t even believe that we have the capability to produce such things. Yet.
But as far as I know, it’s theoretically possible.
That is the most horrible thing you can think up of?
Something that is taught about in middle school history classes?
Genetically modified horses raping young boys.
See how easy it is to outdo cannibalism? Yeesh, LOL!
Come on, be creative!!!
heresiarch: Thank you for the try, I have read a number of Science Fiction books on the topic though, heh. Scary definitely, but you just know that some wacko is thinking about it in earnest right now.
Plague. No, seriously. I’m not getting into a “what’s grosser than gross?” competition here. A massive pandemic of an extremely contagious, fast-acting, highly lethal disease is the Most Horrific Concept I can think of. Imagine if AIDS went airborne, and began killing in days instead of years. Imagine entire populations reduced to starving, warring fractions of their former selves. Imagine the mass panic, the rioting in the streets, looting, murder, lawlessness. Imagine the living unable to bury the dead. A sudden, unforeseen outbreak of a new pathogen, or a re-emerging disease such as smallpox would decimate nations. Such a pandemic would shut down society as we know it, and its aftermath would force us back into the dark ages. Imagine a disease so fast, so lethal, that its spread cannot be checked. Science and medecine, without benefit of drugs or vaccine, would fail us. We would be stripped of our humanity and our faith, reduced to a state of mindless terror. Imagine being at the mercy of non-human, non-rational forces that cannot be controlled. We would be without salvation, and the course of human history would be forever and irrevocably altered.
And the scary thing is, it’s happened before and it’s more than likely to happen again. While paintings and stories can be stomach-turning or briefly emotionally upsetting, for true ‘gazing into the abyss’ horror, I nominate plague. Read Arno Karlen’s Man and Microbes, or Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. It may put things into perspective for you, Com2Kid. True horror comes not from revulsion, but from the inescapable knowledge that you are utterly and hopelessly powerless to affect your fate. In such circumstances, where your only option is to blindly stumble towards a wretched and anonymous death among countless millions, your child-raping ungulate fantasy kinda seems a little trite, no?
I agree with ratty. I haven’t read the abovementioned books, but I did read The Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis, which has lots of lovely graphic descriptions of “blue sickness”- bubonic plague. It scared the wits out of me.
I think the second most horrifying (or possibly first- I haven’t decided) concept I’ve run across is C.S. Lewis’ conception of Hell in The Great Divorce. No burning sulphur or little demons- just being trapped in your own dreary personality, surrounded by other people trapped in theirs. Only the bad bits of your personality- what he would call “besetting sins”. So you’re in a vast city made up of vice, with no virtue, and nothing but a sense of vast despair. Some people are probably going to say that sounds fun, but the idea is not that you get what you want, but that you’re trapped in the wanting- lust without fulfilment, greed without anything to get, constant simmering anger, jealousy without possession etc.
It doesn’t have the “ick” factor you seem to be looking for, but it terrifies me. May I ask exactly why are you looking for this Most Horrific Concept?
Something that people have not been desensitized to by the media.
Basically something so horrific, so awful, so. . . . horrid, that no human could possibly think of it. Or at least that nobody in western society has thought up of yet.
Think about how ‘modern’ civilization has affected other cultures, things that we say and do have been completely unimaginable to them, they could never ever think up of some of the concepts that we take for granted.
Well I want something like that, but as a brain shock for western society instead.
)
