FBU - flummoxed by (the) unfamiliar

There’s a phrase which sums up a lot of the problem behaviour (especially uncomprehending bewilderment) I’ve experienced from others: flummoxed by the unfamiliar, or FBU for short.

When people have found, for instance, a set of values, a religion, or a worldview that is different to theirs, rather than saying “Oh that’s interesting”, or “that’s different to mine”, and then looking at the matter, they react blindly, bitterly and with vitriol - more along the lines of “how dare you differ”, or “your difference threatens and undermines me, my existence and the fabric of my reality”.

Especially if it’s about supporting a different footy team.

(Just kidding, on that last one, in case anyone needs it pointed out.)

People who get set on what is comfortable for them - especially preconceived notions about sexuality, gender, religion, how to achieve something, notions that families (or companies) are always good and one should give them unquestioning loyalty, etc - find anything that is different to the concept that they have enshrined in their heart (it is an emotional reaction - thinking has nothing to do with it) a threat to their personal reality: when that happens, how they react is like any stress situation – one of the five responses (flight, fight, freeze, fawn, and network & nurture – see https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-five-stress-responses.html).

(Sometimes the concept that is threatening is genuinely bad - for example, someone may advocate for pederasty, violence or violent overthrow, militarism, neoliberalism, etc. In those cases, being FBU is actually a good thing, as can be the types of reactions I outlined above.)

A little more on this from my forthcoming autobiography:

Basically, this refers to someone who is so out-of-sorts by something that they’re not used to, that they are incapable of thinking about anything other than the fact that “this” is outside their experience - not their comfort zone, their life experience / world view. The mind completely freezes up in the light of the car coming from out of the brick wall they have built around their concept of reality.

Maybe a better analogy is that they have  brain freeze as the rest of the iceberg that is reality emerges from below the surface.

No - here’s a better example yet: in the film “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl”, Captain Jack Sparrow is utterly FBU when Elizabeth Swann burns the rum to make a smoke signal after they’ve been marooned.

If his mind wasn’t experiencing a brain freeze from experiencing something completely outside his conception of reality (Captain Jack would probably accept walking on water more easily than destroying rum), he could have talked rationally about the pros and cons of creating smoke signals and so forth - all of which the film deals with shortly thereafter.

Another example of this is the anger some people show when they discover that some people can drink coffee and then go to sleep straight away. A friend with a degree in genetics told me there is a specific gene which means some people are not affected by caffeine, but are at an elevated risk of cancer if they are carnist and eat overcooked meat. Another possible explanation is the dopamine hit on ADHD brains that enables sleep - as jokingly portrayed at https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cXqCdWoiYk0.

 

For more on this, see :

·         http://www.victorzammit.com/book/4thedition/chapter27.html; 

·         "The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena", by Dean  I.  Radin.

See also FBU, LBI, Newtonianworldview, and FoC.