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Instead of repressing these dark feelings and thoughts, Wilson argues that they should be examined and embraced. “It’s that part of ourselves where we keep everything we hate and fear,” said Wilson. That instinctive act is part of who we are and relates to what some psychologists such as Carl Jung would call the shadow side of humanity. “A train wreck points to all those parts of our existence that our culture says we should not look at, but we do,” he said. “There are literal train wrecks, but there are celebrity scandals and footage of wars and natural disasters that are on television,” Wilson told CTV News Channel. That fascination is continually fed by today’s media, as Wilson writes in his book.įrom newscasts to new movies, death and violence are all around us and impossible to ignore in a post 9-11 world. Yet deep inside us our fascination with death continues, said Wilson. Today, however, death has disappeared behind the doors of hospitals and funeral homes. Prior to the 1950s, “people usually suffered and died in their own homes,” Wilson writes.Įven children were familiar with death’s “sound and its smells, the agony of it, and its peace,” he adds. Society’s handling of death in a modern-day world has also contributed to the public’s fascination with the macabre. In watching these violent images the human brain registered what actions to avoid in the future to escape such harm. In studies cited by Wilson, scientists showed pictures to people of animals being eaten by lions. That society deems it a taboo to enjoy violence makes it all the more interesting, according to Wilson.įrom the appeal of torture porn and fight clubs to the strange allure wielded by Civil War battlefields, our inability to ignore gore stems from an innate “hunger to penetrate the most profound mysteries of existence,” Wilson writes.Įvolution can also be credited for our taste for disaster. Whether we admit it or not, that physiological rush that comes from observing catastrophe feels good.
It’s very much like riding a roller-coaster,” said Wilson. The reasons for this compulsion are both psychological and physiological in nature, according to the biologists, psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists interviewed for this book. You can’t shut out the accident,” he said. You tell yourself you’re not going to look, but as you get closer it’s like an itch. “You’re caught in traffic and you see an accident up ahead. “Think about being on a highway,” said Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University in Winton-Salem, N.C. To prove his point, Wilson cited one scenario that is familiar to people around the globe. “We can’t help enjoying gore and violence, whether it’s fictional or non-fiction,” Wilson said earlier this week on CTV News Channel. In his latest work, Wilson examines our morbid curiosity with violence and outlines why humans are hard-wired to watch other people suffer.
But author Eric Wilson wants readers to get in touch with their dark side in his new book, “Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can’t Look Away.” Tapping into happiness has become a big money-maker for authors in recent years.
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