IJ study archive

the Headmaster's anteroom: the skull rebuilt with the fear-instinct dented out

quote

One possible way of couching it is to choose to say that we will take apart your skull very gently and reconstruct a skull for you that will have a highly developed bump of clarity and a slight concave dent where the fear-instinct used to be.

Context

The disassembly runs all the way into the head. Tavis literalizes it as neurosurgery: they'll "take apart your skull very gently and reconstruct a skull" with the bump of clarity raised and "a slight concave dent where the fear-instinct used to be." What the regimen is really engineering out is fear — the same fear the whole pedagogy elsewhere names as the game's true opponent — and the body-shop metaphor is honest about the cost: you don't master fear, they remove the part of you that has it.

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