Summer Message - Friday 13th - The Long Socialised Psychological Implanting and Leverage of Fear

Ideally, this web-log would have been a continuation of the Summer Interlude series focused upon methods of drawing with case examples of past concept sketches and descriptive contextual detail.

For necessary reason that content has been delayed until the following installation.

As a content filler, instead it is very prosaic that - referring to today's date - a few words be said about the use of psychological manipulation of initially naive and innocent person and peoples.

Friday the 13th has long been considered as unlucky given the spread of superstition that itself harks back centuries.

Given its appearance at least once a year, and so forever availed to the popular consciousness, it has long been deployed by those who are highly manipulative amongst the more educated, rational and so enlightened as a social tool by which to hold power over others through the use of innate fear.

Such nasty people may even go so far as to secretly and disingenuously create problematic events for the innocent person or persons on that date, simply to add supposed substance to the superstition, and so have it appear material and so for all intense purposed seemingly true.

But of course, this is but one of a myriad of methods for manipulating the innocent (and usually trusting and kind) soul, who can be perennially duped and used for all kinds of purposes.

Such manipulation spans across activities such as contacting the 'other side' via seances, the use of tarot cards, 'mind-reading' etc....all stemming from the abuse of trust and the devious use of private information regards the individual being duped.

This has happened for eons, and became more apparent in the Dark Ages in Europe, to scar the Serfs, utilised again via fantasy superstition with the 'photographed' garden fairies in the late Victorian age (achieved with double exposure film processing), seen with the use of Voodoo for centuries in Africa and the 'Deep South' USA amongst tribes and slaves (upon their own race), via Juju in the Caribbean Islands, as deployed by 'Papa Doc' Duvallier in Haiti (reported by Alan Wicker in 1969) and replayed time and again across the UK by fraudulent 'Spiritualists' such as Doris Stokes, who took money from the betrayed and unsuspecting.

Such acts are deplorable and they should be better recognised as crimes, and not left in the margins of society as mere entertainment, comedic 'hocus pocus' or implying that the innocent and duped are merely gullible and stupid.

Friday the 13th should be a wake-up call to society.

To have those that partake in creating superstition and so fear, or false beliefs, so as to leverage that fear or trust, for typically nastier self-serving means.

Now that the issue if deliberate pyschological abuse is gaining traction on the British Statute book, so should the issue of 'superstition' and all that is effectively criminal that surrounds it.