power and comfort zones

the ability to create a comfort zone

the ability to get others to respect your comfort zone

when comfort zones clash

lions, christians and heretics

people who claim to need no comfort zone do so because the world at large already caters to their needs, is already shaped to fit them, because they are the ones with the most power and have thus made it so. A self-perpetuating cycle.

Some people pretend to be 'fine' because they know that doing otherwise plays into the power game of the bullies who will then accuse you of being weak and 'playing the victim'.

The pretender may have to go through all sorts of contortions to maintain the fiction that he's 'fine': He may be a drug addict, an alcoholic, a chain-smoker; all these are coping mechanisms to cover for the fact that most of his life is spent pretending he's fine when he's actually not fine at all.

The small child in The Emperor's New Clothes represents that in us which sees the truth and longs to call it out. The adults all around him resist the truth, in fact can no longer perceive the truth, because telling the truth is too risky.

What is at risk, exactly? At worst, perhaps the Emperor may have you beheaded. And once someone has been beheaded, there don't actually have to be any further beheadings in order for people to begin to do whatever's necessary to avoid being beheaded, including pretending not to see what you really do see.

After all, a little selective blindness is a relatively small price to pay for keeping your head attached to your body, eh?

So maybe bullying is just another way to enforce the comfort zone of the person with the most power in any given situation?