Forty Years in the Desert

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Forty Years in the Desert: A hypothesis on the ways environment affects the development of the psyche.

 

The desert gives you nothing. When prophets go wandering, they go to the desert, because it is as close as we can physically get to the Abyss. But what of those who were born there? The desert has been made physically habitable by human standards, and has been for some time. So what of the mental state of one who is partially shaped by the desert environment? After all, a little air conditioning and some spindly trees don’t do much to soften the desert environment. It remains a hard, unforgiving place, and tends to attract or create hard, unforgiving ideas, and hard, unforgiving people. When everything you have is what you’ve managed to scrape out of a hostile environment, you aren’t generally inclined to share.

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