Astral: (Theosophy) Consisting of, belonging to, or designating, a kind of supersensible substance alleged to be next above the tangible world in refinement; as, astral spirits; astral bodies of persons; astral current.
The Good Boy Placebo
With current realities of political posturing and scripted television spontaneity bombarding us from all sides, we might end up feeling quite lonely by taking the red pill and facing reality. Rather than suffer in isolation with reality, why not just suck on that blue sugar-coated sugar pill delivering today’s reality scene? Would you prefer cable or dish? As far as I know, no one ever died as a direct consequence of the placebo.
Mark Twain approached this topic situation back in 1870 with his character sketch of “The Good Boy” who was caught up in the “media” portrayal of what a good little boy should be and do. (According to the link coming later, This story was originally published in May, 1870, in the Galaxy Magazine, as "The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper.")
For those who’d like to take a five to ten minute break and read the actual story, here’s a link that also has the illustrations from the 1875 printing of the story:
Twain’s “good little boy,” named Jacob Blivens, learns about the profile of the “good little boys” from what he reads in the Sunday School books. He is much impressed by the glory of their lives, but his life doesn’t exactly mirror what he reads. When he sees the bad boy in the apple tree stealing apples, he goes to warn the bad boy he may be punished by falling out of the tree and breaking a leg. Although expecting to be a hero for saving the bad boy, Jacob’s life is not as described in the Sunday School books, for the bad boy does fall out of the tree, but he lands on Jacob and Jacob ends up with broken bones instead.
Nonetheless, Jacob is inspired by the lives of the good little boys in the Sunday School books, for in the end they do something extremely heroic to save the community. The stories always end with the deathbed stirring last words from the good little boy in the Sunday School books, and the final scene of the story describes the glorious funeral scene with the attendees crying into their handkerchiefs over the good little boy who died too young.
This troubles young Jacob, because he can never go and meet another actual good little boy from the stories. Anticipating his own fate, he composes his dying speech to give advice to the community so that he can also be remembered as a remarkable “good little boy” himself. Of course, the drawback would be that he would not be alive at the time to bask in the final recognition of the value of his life.
Since we don’t know the ending, we can’t really discuss the “moral” to the story, but we can note some hints that might be connected to it and perhaps to our current cultural phenomena related to the “reality” motif oozing underfoot as we facebook, twitter, and twaddle each other. Jacob Blivens saw the “good little boys” in the Sunday School stories as the models for his behavior as he imagined his glory would finally be acknowledged, but issues of motivation weren’t really stressed in those stories about those other good little boys.
Fortunately, today we have those little disclaimers on the commercials telling us that the stunts are performed by a professional on closed courses, and we shouldn’t try this at home. It’s too bad that the disclaimers elsewhere are too small to read, even if people bothered to look.
Twain wrote a companion piece, “The Story of the Bad Little Boy,” published five years earlier in 1865. Although we don’t have time and space to discuss it here, it is available online as well:
I forget – is it the red pill or the blue pill that is the placebo?
Walter Lowe
Astral Facts is a monthly presentation of Humanities Science, produced in the bowels of the Humanities Science offices.
