Okay you should have a breakdown of this. Basically a "martial artist" with a whole dojo full of students he trains in mystical "chi" energy said he could beat any normally trained (as in, they defeat you using punches and kicks and stuff instead of chi) martial arts expert. Someone took him up on it, and well, the results speak for themselves. Note that beforehand you'll need to endure some painful pretend martial arts where all his students get flung around by his magic. Ah the power of delusion... Sure would have been nice if he could perhaps levitate someone or have done anything to them that isn't adequately explained by them just willingly dancing themselves.
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Stuff like this is funny to me, but the sad fact is he'll make up excuses just like everyone who has to face such brutal reality about their super powers.
Call James Randi to drop kick his baloney play fighting.
"Uh, uh s-surely he had some sort of, uh, DEMON or something, like, inside of him and, uh, my power was of little use. Then he, uh, came at me from all sides, yeah! There was no escape from his brutal, uh, dark magic!"
And our brave hero beats up the delusional elderly man.
EXCITING
Admittedly, this is almost as grand a heroic triumph as my defeating of little red riding hood in Marvel vs Capcom 2, but the guy brought it on himself. He knew, or should have known, what he was getting himself into.
some people have to hold on to fantasies because they think that's all they've got.
Indeed. Personally I've learned to enjoy the world for what it is rather than what I wish it would be. The world is amazing enough without us making stuff up about it. Big deal if I can't accidently add an extra ingrediant to the concoction and get ultra super powers. I can create entire artificial worlds in silicon. Isn't that enough? There's a big world out there beyond one's fantasies if only people would learn to enjoy what it does offer instead of bemoaning what it doesn't or "should". Find your own meaning in life and live it, or don't but being depressed sure seems a depressing way of going through life. Someone can bemoan the utter oblivion at the end of all things and the mostly empty space, or marvel at the interplay of chemicals in our bodies and the sheer fact that using little more than stray million year old beams of light can allow us to figure out how STARS ARE BORN.
The ones who play into this mans delusions acting along with them for whatever motivation are really the ones at wrong here ,For helping to keep this poor old man out of reality in psychosis and for having him get into scenarios were he is likely to get physically harmed.
You have to be psychotic to truly believe you have mystical powers , Rather then a fraud who is just a magician.
Psychotic? Perhaps... A lot of people that believe in this stuff are, otherwise, well adjusted members of society. Psychotic, at least from definitions I've seen, requires the subject to be so out of it they can't or won't properly care for themselves and need to become wards of the state. These people seem to be thriving well enough. It's still a shame they waste their efforts on this as opposed to something that would actually work.
From what I've heard, apparently one of the most widely spread delusions is "dowsing", which is the believe that you can determine where water, gold, missing people, or whatever are by waving some off-balance contraption around. The problem of course is that they generally already know where they can find it (for example, there's plenty of water pretty much anywhere you dig, and finding better places can be done just by looking around and noticing more plants there, or going to the bottom of hills, or so on) and the effect is basically the same way ouiji boards "work" (the idiomotor effect, well documented, you ARE moving it basically). These people genuinly believe they have it. It's a delusion, but are they crazy? Well, you can define the word as you will but my point is other than that, they seem to function well in society, some turning this delusion into a business as others can be deluded into thinking they have the ability.
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Psychotic? Perhaps... A lot of people that believe in this stuff are, otherwise, well adjusted members of society. Psychotic, at least from definitions I've seen, requires the subject to be so out of it they can't or won't properly care for themselves and need to become wards of the state. These people seem to be thriving well enough. It's still a shame they waste their efforts on this as opposed to something that would actually work.
Psycotic doesn't necessarily mean in "medical terms at least" that someone is always dangerous or needs to be institutionalized. It just means the individual has lost contact with reality and cannot differentiate from his delusions.
But some of these delusions could be like believing that a pet dog talks to him, he might still be capable of caring for himself if he takes medication, Its a matter of the extent of what the delusion is.
Believing you have magical fighting powers is probably not as serious as say believing you can actually fly, Although something tells me this old man does not live alone without supervision.