Humans don't go mad when faced with stuff beyond their ability to understand

Daily reminder that by the standards of Lovecraft's day, we ARE insane.

If you take the clinical approach, everything is stupid and manageable. When humans learn something has died, they move on, what's the big deal about your entire family being tortured to death? You kinda have to be there, or at least make an effort to emulate it.

Similarly, Lovecraft is not about learning, abstractly, that "something big exists" or "science is wrong about stuff." It's about confronting unfathomable horror, not just in itself but in what it implies about the true shape of the world, and doing so on a very personal, intuitive level.

You cannot grasp the true form.
Reality is so much more than numbers, fool. We only go mad because we try to quantify and 'reason' with the naturally endless and mad universe from our own pathetically deluded attempt of 'rationality'. Not true rationality, which is accepting things as they are and acting accordingly, but attempting to ascribe human limitations and priorities to the infinite, which is basically making idols in our own image. It's like concluding that since we are 'merely' human we are animals incapable of true action, or claiming we are all ubermensch instead of accepting we are both subjects and residents of a universe, part of its might but still beholden to the whims of the almighty, almost inconsiderable forces that brought us into being.
Only when we attempt to count up the infinite do we truly go mad. Modern man, proud as he is, cannot tolerate his helplessness, but it is a pure fact of reality that we are not ultimately in control of all. We have tried to kill God, and reel back when we see him rise with knife in chest.

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Well said.

Idjit.
Take something you know, fundamentally know, cannot be true.
Now imagine how you would act and respond to it being indisputably true.

Like, say, only one person ever posts on Veeky Forums and it's one, really, really drunk Finn talking to himself.
Now go on living your life with that knowledge and what it says about you.

In At the Mountains of Madness two explorers find the remains of an ancient civilization after finding their entire away team slaughtered. Neither of them goes crazy until the end, and even then it's more of a "Something really nasty is out there and I KNOW it" in one case, and something undescribed in another.

In Whisperer in the Darkness a guy has to deal with an actual alien conspiracy. He doesn't go crazy.

In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward the main character finds some seriously messed up crap. He doesn't go insane, but he is changed by what he has to deal with.

In other ones such as Shadow Over Innsmouth, Rats in the Walls, etc. there are actual legitimate reasons for people going insane or otherwise mental, but these instances are rare and usually happen under intense duress. Anyone that actually reads the stories would know.

The whole going crazy thing is something that gets blown out of proportion by games.

I feel like "just ignore it and continue on" is a way more likely response than "go crazy"

Ananas ei sovi siihen.

It isn't easy to ignore the fact that you now know without a doubt that you are one of thousands of separate personalities that until now knew nothing of each other. Your entire life has been a fiction cooked up by a drunken Finn. Nothing you see or experience can be real. How could it be unless you live in Finland?

You now know that for sure. That's life-changing. Or it would be if you had a life, which you now know that you don't.

lmao

nigga I ain't gonna eat no bananas

>OP believes that people consider Lovecraft a big deal
>OP believes that Lovecraft's works features humans going mad when encountering things beyond human's ability to understand
>OP believes that these two facts cannot be reconciled
>OP believes that it is beyond his understanding
>OP starts a thread on Veeky Forums in response, proving his madness
Case in point, OP.

Jokes on you, there's already no way to prove my life is real. Nothing changes as long as I don't think about it.

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Laita se kaappiin ja pudota vanukas.

There's a difference between a life you can't prove is real and a life that is proven to not be real.

that's actually how lovecraft proposed dealing with some of the great old ones as far as i know, total ignorance.

Not if I don't think about it!

Yeah. The flaw that leads to madness in his protagonists is that they couldn't just let it go, they had to worry at it like a bad tooth.

>You now know that for sure.
It's also equally possible that every post you've ever made on Veeky Forums was just a hallucination you experienced while you were huffing glue with Gary Shandling.

Sure that might work, but the idea is that humans are curious and they are drawn to new information, even if they quickly regret learning it.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

I WANT TO HABEEB

>muh post modernism
make an ironic statement by ending your own life

How do you know who it is that wants that?

God I wish.

I can't believe you retards are really defending the idea of looking at something weird and going mad

I can't believe you posted without reading the thread

I'm just about going mad confronting the unfathomable truth that someone this stupid even exists

Have you ever even read Lovecraft?

People go insane because Cthulhu has psychic powers that make you go insane.

You know, you don't need to see something weird to go mad. If you were at the site of a mass execution, then someone held a gun to your head and went "You join them tonight" just as you spotted your family's corpses...That's a pretty good reason to go mad.

Better question is what is stopping someone from just blotting it out or ignoring it completely. Sure some simply can't, but that's how I dealt with my loneliness these last couple years.

Because they are powerful ancient gods? You're just a worm to them, worm can't ignore something like that.

I skimmed it. The explanations are stupid and unsubstantiated

Because they're awful and all-consuming. You can't deny or block them out. They're right THERE.

>NO, ANONS. WE ARE THE DEMONS

You see before you a squared circle.

You try to tell people about this fact. They lock you in an asylum.

That's what crazy means. You've SEEN bigfoot, you know he's real. They put microphones in your teeth, you can hear them crackling and giving off feedback when you try to sleep. So you pull your teeth out. You're not crazy, everyone else is crazy for no listening to you.

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You underestimate my ability to ignore things.

No it's not. It's a good reason to get mad, not to lose your reason for good. But also most lovecraft madness it not caused by personal loss

>implying worms haven't killed people singlehandedly before
WHATS A GOD TO A NONBELIEVERRRRRRR

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Does a worm care it is a worm? Nah no it doesn't. Besides, even worms have taken people down, these "gods" are no different, just need to find more chinks in their armor. Say why are these dark evil gods asleep anyhow? Did a "benevolent" god slap them with cosmic chloroform?

Eh, shit happens. I denied my lack of friends and my bad break up, so this is no worse.

Insanity is a relative measure, unless you're a doctor.

Our reality is a slumber dream of one of the gods you know.

>the only way to defeat mind-destroying nihilism inducing gods is to be even more nihilistic
the plot of this thread feels familiar....

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There is a world of difference between seeing something weird and the shit Lovecraft talked about. Seeing an alien won't make us go insane, but seeing a creature like Azathoth or Yogsothoth that literally embody dimensions the human mind cannot comprehend can and will break you. Regular third dimensional shit we can mostly handle, but we can't even understand 4th dimensional space without referring to shadows of simple shapes. And you're gonna tell me that seeing a being that is the embodiment of chaos won't make you go a little crazy? Basic things like abuse, torture, war, and other things can csuse insanity, so I think being punched in the face with creatures from beyond this dimension could easily do it. Even the corporeal ones given the insights that come from knowing of their existence and what it means that they exist.

It's childish and retarded to think that Lovecraft's point was "lol u saw a le ghost u go le crazy XD".

>but seeing a creature like Azathoth or Yogsothoth that literally embody dimensions the human mind cannot comprehend can and will break you.
No, it would just be impossible to meaningfully visualize

Sure it is. Wait, then what the shit are the other gods? Segments of that reality too? That god must be in a pretty deep coma if its entire mind has to be dedicated to dream about some bipedal apes dicking around a comfy little ball in the middle of fucking nowhere, not to mention the fucking cosmos. Maybe something put that god there like that for a reason.

Ya know, I wonder if the "gods" feel the same way too?

Funny and I'm a Christian too. Ya know all the GRACE and TRUTH and HOPE and what not. Figure I'd just go to hell anyhow so might as well as just go along with the show, maybe do something decent here and there occasionally. Even worms have their responsibilities.

Here are the types of things that make you go insane in Lovecraft:

An elder god awakens and unleashes a blast of psychic energy that makes every artist and poet on the planet go into a coma of insane babbling for a week
A man learns his ancestor had sex with a gorilla that ended up being his great great grandmother.
A man is chased by dogs that can attack him by jumping out of the space at any corner of 120 degrees or less, turning virtually every household object into a threat
A man with schizophrenia discovers his ancestors have been turning humans into cattle and eating them for generations, and now he is fated to join them.
A man discovers an evil wizard has been transferring his mind from body to body to live forever, forcing him to kill his best friend, and now he doesn't know if the wizard's mind escaped and if he's still being chased.
A man gets the power to bring the dead back to life, but they become flesh hungry zombies so he can't show it to anyone, and eventually goes mad with power after many decades.

Things that don't cause people to go crazy at any point:
Seeing something spooky.

Could you leave out the personal details? Your personal life is incredibly boring, unless you're working up to a dramatic suicide. In which case I suggest bombing a Mosque.

To be honest I think I would go quite mad If I saw something completely defying all science.
Like a ghost, or if a portal opened up and something horrifying came out.

Hey man, I'm a loser but I ain't /r9k/. I ain't gonna paint the ceiling red with globs of brain and flesh everywhere.

Side note, it's easier to clean up the chunky brain bits than to clean out blood from a hoodie. Cold water cleans out better from personal experience. Lots of cold water and some detergent.

>bombing a mosque
>not a synagogue

Jews aren't a priority target user. You try killing them and they get pissy at you for a century or a couple. They're like dwarves, probably got a book of grudges somewhere too.

People mostly didn't go insane in Lovecraft's stories either. The only example of it happening that I can think of is the protagonist in The Rats in the Walls and that's implied to be hereditary rather than because of what he finds. In all the other cases that I can think of it's the rest of the world that assumes that the character is insane because what he says sounds insane to them.

So I assume that this "oh no a slimey tentacle, I'm going insane"-meme either is something retarded that's Derleth made up or stems entirely from the sanity system in the CoC rpg. Now, Sandy is a pretty good guy all in all but his interpretation of Lovecraft isn't exactly on point and the sanity system he created exists solely for gameplay reasons. It exists so that characters have a reason to act scared even if their players aren't.

>It exists so that characters have a reason to act scared even if their players aren't
It's a downside of "horror" games. It's difficult to scare adults who can freely communicate with each other in a room lit well enough to read from a sheet.

dude, i don't know if you checked your local psych ward, but people go crazy all the time from mundane stuff like losing an unborn child or getting raped. people are still going tinfoil-mode about fucking 9/11. you bet your ass that seeing an outer god would fuck some people up.

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As much as you are rightfully getting bashed, I do like stories where people try to study and gain mastery over lovecraftian-ish horrors. Take bloodborne for example, where church scientists kept a great one in captivity and actually constructed a research hall in a nightmare realm. Of course it all goes to shit anyway, but it’s an interesting idea.

t. Goblino

They do. Most people who encounter the supernatural in Lovecraftian stuff don't remember it or remember it as some fugue state, or a half glimpsed thing that makes them faint.

Not being capable of believing reality is a sign of madness, you know.

I think a lot of this is chaosium tards who haven't read lovecraft stories.

The characters in his stories have wildly different reactions to these things. Some go mad, others GET MAD and do something about it. But one of the key ideas, as people have pointed out is that most of the time it's not the whole OOO UNKNOWABLE HORROR SO SCARY TO LOOK AT factor, it's the fact that they're learning a lot of fucking bizarre facts about reality that makes the world and universe they live in look a lot scarier and inhospitable.

This image is absolutely lovecraftian.

And that's the point. You'v e been forced to visualize it because it is there, in front of you, imprinting it's entire existence upon your brain and your soul. You can't just say "oh I'm immune because I'm sophisticated!" Sophistication is asctually a liability because the unsophisticated mind can just accept that it's seen god. You have to try and cope with the existence of something that has impacted your fourth dimensional existence -you have seen it, will always see it, have always seen it, and will continue to see it forever. It's a part of your eternal existence in all reality as you understand it.

I think Lovecraft wrote "Arthur Jermyn" after he found out his great grandmother was Welsh.
>Soft reeeeing heard from a Gambrel-roofed house

Huh. After reading this thread I just realized that lovecraft is gay as fuck.

>Why do people consider Lovecraft such a big deal?
Maybe you could try reading some Lovecraft if you actually want to know.

Microphones don't create sound on their own. To hear your teeth crackle they'd have to have put a speaker in your mouth somewhere.

Clarke Ashton Smith plz go and stay go

I imagine they had far bigger, more direct and meaningful problems in 1918 that shook society way more

>Huh. After reading this thread I just realized that secondaries are cancer.

It was written at a time when even the upper class was malnourished as a rule and people fainted more often. Really, that's it. Lovecraft set either in modern times or farther in that past shouldn't have people passing out so often.

>when even the upper class was malnourished as a rule

I think you're underrating how alarming Lovecraft's personal diet was to people at the time. Dude would live on a can of beans a week.

You act like the horror theme of something causing harm by merely being observed hasn't existed throughout human history.
Take Medusa for example.

You stupid OP. First of all, we're learning about the human body at an amazing rate, but that's neither here nor there.

It's not that it's hard to comprehend, it's that their logic is completely alien. Like, people say that logic is universal, as is math. Well, imagine it isn't. Imagine the rules there make no sense to you. That 2+2 is 5, but if you're blue, it's 14, but if your mental waves are thgluigh, it's actually 9. Rules that are NOT arbitrary, they follow some logic, but not something you can wrap your head around.

Except people often go mad from startling realisations or seeing traumatic things. Your assumption is that the things they've witnessed are at the level of some particularly complex equation, and not brick-shittingly, life-changingly terrifying.

Excellent point.

Here's a riddle you might enjoy:

>Q: Which mythical creatures cast no reflection?
>A:All of them, technically.

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>Why do people consider Lovecraft such a big deal?

He just was. We"consider" him a "big deal" because his wake was big. He influenced a lot of creatives, that's it.

I'm not gonna waste all my time talking about how stupid your core premise is.

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This. Lovecraft protagonists dont go insane. They simply know a terrible truth, and that knowledge makes them appear crazy.

Take Pickman's Model. The protag wont go underground for any reason and comes off as crazy. But really, he just knows that Boston has fucking man eating monsters living in a network of wells and tunnels and fuck that.

He doesnt even know the big secrets. He just knows about dangers that he knows no one will ever believe him about, so he tries to go back into blissful ignorance but he cant.

I think the fantasy idea of sanity being an invisible quality that you can gain and lose is one that has some potentially interesting applications.

I mean, it's not at all how things actually work, but the same thing applies to the concept of D&D style elemental morality, which can make you more or less "good" or "evil" be something like being exposed to a particular magical item. In a lot of ways it's dumb and doesn't make sense, but in the right setting and type of story, it can be entertaining.

For example, you could do a story inspired by some kinds of pantheism, where everyone and everything is actually the escapist dream of a traumatized sleeping god, and the Things that make you go mad are manifestations of unpleasant parts of the god's subconscious drifting up from the lower regions of their mind into the main dream, twisting everything exposed to them into a literal nightmare version of itself. And maybe when people Learn Too Much they start to realize they're in a dream, the sleeper gets a flicker of consciousness, and that makes them briefly remember what they're trying to sleep away and that allows a Thing to appear, as the person who learned too much realizes they're not real and a nightmare bubbles up to replace the hollow inside them.

Or something like that.

>For example, you could do a story inspired by some kinds of pantheism, where everyone and everything is actually the escapist dream of a traumatized sleeping god, and the Things that make you go mad are manifestations of unpleasant parts of the god's subconscious drifting up from the lower regions of their mind into the main dream, twisting everything exposed to them into a literal nightmare version of itself. And maybe when people Learn Too Much they start to realize they're in a dream, the sleeper gets a flicker of consciousness, and that makes them briefly remember what they're trying to sleep away and that allows a Thing to appear, as the person who learned too much realizes they're not real and a nightmare bubbles up to replace the hollow inside them.
Worthy of discussion in a better thread.

>implying fiction isn't real
I'm too deep in the Hypercrisis to be shocked by revelations about petty things like "reality."

You're just jealous that he got a date to the prom and you didn't.

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>Fucking Armitage, a college professor, was able to BTFO Yog Sothoth's plans.
>Randolph Carter talks with The Key and the Gate himself and travel the dream lands without going crazy.

I want the "see tentacle go crazy" meme to die.

>Expecting OPs on Veeky Forums to actually have read a book

People don't go mad in Lovecraft's works because they run into something they don't understand. They go mad because they understand.

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This. By today's standards, what Lovecraft called madness is more like stress disorders and ridicule from others for saying things outside of the societal norm.

Blame Evangelion and the SAN stat

This. This so much.

I think its fair to blame Eva for a lot of things wrong in "nerd" culture.

>Blame Evangelion
What? Everyone in Eva was in dire need of a shrink well before any monsters showed up, and when the monsters did show up people were simply scared and stressed out from having a huge fucking monster tearing up the place. They didn't loose their marbles simply because they saw something new and in apparent violation of natural law.