Note: This post is a bit long, so I am dividing it into two parts, Seg One and Seg Two.
Last night, I noticed a notification from a news hub I follow when time finds me, that said "Blue Whale: 'Soon all you will have is a picture of me', the words of a boy who..."
Didn't really get to click it, had a lot on my plate yesterday as it was, and such articles are typically quite long (with regard to reading time, I don't rush through anything I read unless I absolutely have to) when coming from this particular newsgroup, so I simply noted it instead, meaning to look it up today. Before I had the chance however, it was on TV, and my family and I got the specifics of the story.
Apparently, a Russian man by the name of Philipp Budeikin (pictured above), designed a game app called 'Blue Whale', that was piloted by a EULA participants agreed to, that explicitly stated that they would die at the end of the game; according the man himself, there were as many as 45 takers, with a reported 130 takers from other sources. It involved the participants, mostly teenagers (each assigned his or her own moderator), waking up at 4:20 AM in the morning for a 'community conference', every day, where they were subjected to pictures and audiovisuals depicting gruesome, macabre, and disturbing visuals, such as other teenagers jumping to their deaths from great heights, animal torture, people being run over or torn apart by trains while standing on railway tracks as well as pure, unhealthy amounts of bloodshed, breaking down their psychological guards through the lack of sleep and repeated subjection to such visages, and after an exposure to this was deemed sufficient, they would be given tasks of greater and more challenging nature, such as to carve into their own skins a figure of a blue whale, and the likes, ultimately culminating in convincing those that stayed through all of this that their lives were not worth living, and that ending their 'meagre' existences would be 'warm and rewarding'. At least 16 teenage girls have been confirmed victims of this sadistic madman's scheme. The reason it showed up on my newsfeed? Because this week saw its first reported Indian casualty at the hands of the killer app, a 14-year old boy.
When asked about why he did what he did, the man apparently said that he was 'cleansing society' of its 'biological waste'. That those with strong minds and a sense of self-worth would eventually see the horrid truth about what this endeavour was all about, and the weaker, less fortunate individuals who wanted so badly to be valued would hold their place in this 'community' dear and do whatever it took to be appreciated in it. Until now, it sounds like he was performing a little twisted form of 'forced-Darwinism', but when you consider that he told his victims that he was going to 'assemble a squad of them, the select, rare special ones who could see the truth, in heaven', one starts to question what his real motives for doing any of this at all even were, especially when it is revealed that like so many of those he targeted, in his youth, he too was an underperformer at school, in social disequilibrium with his friends, and had a mother who couldn't spare too much time for him. What struck me most was his age; he was 21. Not too greater a number than the ages of those he targeted. While he is currently in jail, others engaged in similar efforts to his have actually stepped up their efforts and support of what he was doing since his incarceration.
Horrific as this story may prove, I believe it is the principle behind what he did that really matters. For it is one thing that he employed a method that could well be called 'waking hypnosis', by forcing susceptibility of their minds to his suggestion (as opposed to gently and gradually opening them up to it), through sleep deprivation and other such tactics, on the most vulnerable and malleable minds one could prey on in society, aside from children and pre-teens, and another given how he actually convinced them of why their lives were so worthless. For in our world, 'good' and 'bad' exist in roughly equal quantities. For as many of examples one may find depicting the worst that humanity as a species has to offer, that many examples could be found of us exhibiting the better angels of our nature. What he did was find and collate all the examples of human negativity he could find, then subject tired, weakened minds to an overwhelming amount of the stuff, and then make it seem like the world is too horrid a place to actually try and exist in at all. See seventeen examples of brutal, gut wrenching animal cruelty in the meat industry, and it can spur some completely sold non-vegetarians to have second thoughts, and in some cases, even turn vegetarian or vegan. See continuous examples of the kind of things Mr. Budeikin had them absorb on a daily basis, and it is not difficult to imagine why they were so easily convinced that life was truly just not worth living, if it was in a world this 'overcome by negativity'. Especially when they were subjected to said negativity every day at 4:20 AM in the morning (a time of the day when most folk would rather value their precious sleep), in addition to any difficulties they already faced in their social lives, as well as any with their social image or how they valued themselves.
(cont. in Conundrum: Humanity - Met One, Seg Two
https://steemit.com/bluewhale/@callistanix/conundrum-humanity-met-one-seg-two)