“Hell is Other People” Survey
I’m always happy to pollute survey results with my fucked up opinions, but today I happened on a questionnaire that is pretty interesting in and of itself. It belongs to Cynthia from ThornyThoughts, who has done artwork and shirt designs for Urfaust and several other black metal bands. When not cranking out ridiculously awesome art, shes working on a degree at Fachhochschule Niederrhein (no idea) in Germany, and needs your help for her diploma project!
Her project is focused on Sartre’s quote “L’enfer c’est les autres” (”Hell is other people”), and shes soliciting people’s opinions on the concept of hell, the afterlife and other related topics. In her own words:
The title might be L’ENFER C’EST LES AUTRES (Hell is other people) which is a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit which is about three people finding themselves in hell in form of a windowless hotel room being each other’s personal hell. I will use this as an example in literature and am looking for more inspiration and YOUR thoughts.
The idea of hell developed since human intelligence reached the point of a belief in a life after death and invented morals or rules - once broken eternal punishment is the consequence. The fear of the unknown fed the most cruel visions of hell. Different culture and religions define different versions of right and wrong and naturally expect other, opinions’ to be punished. Nowadays, when people are not really separated geographically anymore, those different individual ideals lead to severe clashes. So hell can be here and now. If you’re not your own personal hell - it’s other people.
The survey itself doesn’t take too long and the questions are all very interesting, and I’m sure that all the readers of this site will have some pretty colorful responses:
You can check out ThornyThoughts’s profile and artwork on ThornyThought’s MySpace page and get a little more info about the project in this blog post.
