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These Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know
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alt title(s): Things Man Was Not Meant To Know; Man Was Not Meant To Know
Much of the brain is still mysterious to modern science, possibly because modern science itself is using brains to analyze it. There are probably secrets the brain simply doesn't want us to know.
-Cracked.com on hacking the brain
Do not read this page. Just click "back", or close this page right now. Your sanity, nay the fate of all mankind, will be in danger.
You didn't listen. Damn you. Don't you know this knowledge was kept secret for a reason? Your feeble, mortal minds cannot comprehend the vast complexity of what you are seeking to learn. Pray that complete madness is the worst consequence of your transgression.
If you still wish to go further, see the subtropes below. But beware: you may go gibbering insane. Just don't blame us. We warned you.
It's a pretty safe guess, though don't confirm it, that these things resemble Mind Screw and are a Mind Rape.
Learning this can cause you to Go Mad From The Revelation, and is a standard trope of a Cosmic Horror Story. If you can even read and/or understand these final words, pity the Mad Scientist who seeks out this knowledge, for his experiments will Go Horribly Right.
Not to be confused with You Do NOT Want To Know.
Examples:
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- In Full Metal Alchemist, performing a forbidden human transmutation would take you to the Gate, where along with being somehow maimed, you would get to look inside and see 'Truth', which, as Izumi stated looked like hell to her.
- Also, learning that the Philosopher's Stone is created by sacrificing mass numbers of human lives has driven many who have sought its power insane. Scar's brother was one of the people thusly afflicted.
Comic Books
- When Doctor Strange meets the Living Tribunal (the most powerful being in the Marvel Universe who isn't God), he shows Strange how the Universe was created and Strange quickly averts his eyes, paraphrasing this trope.
- In The DCU, the Anti-Life Equation is a mathematical proof that life, hope and freedom are all pointless. Any sentient being who's forced to comprehend the Equation instantly becomes a mindless drone. Darkseid's ultimate goal is to rule the
Universe Multiverse Omniverse with this.
Commercials
- "How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie-Roll center of a Tootsie Pop? The world may never know."
- "How do they get the caramel inside the Caramilk bar?"
- There was a commercial where researchers were asking dolphins that question and the dolphins were shocked that we didn't know already. Smug bastards.
- Another featured a disgruntled Cadbury worker about to publicly disclose the secret, only to be kidnapped by ninjas at the last moment.
- http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/mt-edward/cadbury.htm
- They use dehydrated caramel.
- There used to be an ad for the Rosicrucians: "There are things which cannot be generally told - things you ought to know". Anyone else seeing a self-contradiction here?
- "How do they get so much cheese in a cheese-it cracker?"
- "How do they cram all that graham into Golden Grahams?"
- They use dehydrated graham.
- "How do they get the figs into the fig rolls?"
- They use dehydrated figs.
- Why do kids like Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Because it's full of sugar of course.
- Why do they call them Apple Jacks when they don't taste like apples?
Literature
- Discworld had Things Man Was Not Meant to know Of.
- The Igors of Discworld's Thief of Time, strictly speaking don't believe that there are TMWNMTK, but even they find some obvious stuff that they'd rather not know, such as how it feels to have every single particle of your body sucked through a small hole.
- In general, Terry Pratchett likes to have fun with this trope. For example, The Unseen University library has books that no man can read without dying or going mad, but the Librarian is an orangutan, so he's perfectly safe.
- Although even he reads the most potent of these, the Necrotelicomnicon, from behind a smoked-glass visor, just to be on the safe side.
- In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, if a person ends up knowing both the Ultimate Answer and the Ultimate Question, the universe will end and be replaced by something even more bizarre and incomprehensible. There are some theories that this has already happened.
- Also, the most horrible torture device works by showing you the whole universe, and how insignificant you are. It's powered by a cupcake.
- Not anymore.
- Not the one in the universe the guy had in his office. The one in the normal universe still has it.
- In Robert A Heinlein's novel Methuselah's Children, Slayton Ford goes mad when he meets the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. Interestingly, after Ford goes mad, Lazarus Long mentions he is afraid that if he met them he wouldn't go mad.
- Many, many years later (perhaps a thousand), as related in Time Enough For Love, Lazarus Long goes back to the planet of those aliens and kills them. Apparently, the only reason he does so is to "prove" that Humanity Is Superior.
- In the Robert A Heinlein short story "By His Bootstraps", Bob Wilson sees one of the High Ones through a time viewer and almost loses his mind. It was the emotions the High One was feeling that caused his discomfort - an overwhelming mixture of sadness, tragedy, grief and weariness.
- H.P. Lovecraft's work tends to be full of things that should not be named or known to man. Some variant of the line "there are things in the world man was never meant to know" is frequently said near the end of his stories, just as the protagonist has some (literally) mind-blowing revelation about the nature of the universe and our place in it, or at the beginning when he starts to recount his story that ends like that.
- Carcosa Is A Place Man Was Not Meant To Vacation.
- This is not for you.
- There's a story by Isaac Asimov where a man with access to a super computer that can tell you anything if you know how to ask tries to discover the source of humor. He tries because he himself is a wonderful, though nonprofessional, comedian. Eventually it turns out the sense of humor was an alien experiment that would be halted as soon as anyone figured out that it was so, meaning he destroyed everyone's sense of humor. Plus, the aliens will now replace humor with something else. Who knows what?
- In Piers Anthony's book "Macroscope", use of the title machine accesses a mathematical sequence which is shown to whomever uses the device, which when concluded kills or mentally destroys anyone who has viewed it.
Live Action TV
Movies
- In the movie Pi, the protagonist Max is on the verge of uncovering a number that unlocks the pattern of the universe. A group of Orthodox Jews believes that it is the true name of God. However, the number overwhelms anyone or anything that tries to compute it. Ultimately Max abandons his quest and chooses to simply live life in ignorance, possibly drilling out his mathematical genius to escape the number's curse.
- Another interpretation of the movie's ending is that there is no secret pattern. Max and the Orthodox Jews simply have become obsessed with finding such a pattern, and because of that start seeing it everywhere. However, in the end Max realizes there's no unifying pattern to existence, it is random. This randomness is symbolized by the leaves in the tree Max is watching in the final scene. What he drills out of his head is the obsession to find a pattern.
Music
New Media
Real Life
- "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." - J. Robert Oppenheimer at the first nuclear explosion in history, misquoting the Bhagavad Gita.
- Actually, he was referring to the Chuck Norris Halloween costume he was wearing that day.
- I prefer "Now we are all sons of bitches," said by the test director, Kenneth Bainbridge, to Oppenheimer.
- The accepted translation of what Oppenheimer quoted is "Doom am I, full-ripe, dealing death to the worlds, engaged in devouring mankind." which is disturbingly more appropriate.
- It's an interesting history side-note that when Igor Kurchatov, the head of the Soviet nuclear weapons program, was asked how he felt when they had their first successful nuclear test, he said he was relived because if it would have failed he probably would have been shot.
- Shoggoth On The Roof , The Cthulhu Musical http://www.cthulhulives.org/Shoggoth/screening.html "Man Was Not Meant To Adapt Some Things to Musical Theatre."
- Sometimes people reacting to tales involving Too Much Information will, with degrees of seriousness, claim that said information was something Man Was Not Meant To Know.
- Richard Feynman's memoirs discuss an experiment Feynman set up to determine the rotation of an S-shaped pipe sucking in water. Every time he tried to set up the experiment, something went wrong, culminating in an explosion that destroyed the equipment built for the experiment.
- Advanced Mathematics.
- I can't find it, but I've seen some quote in which a mathematician began a paper about formalizing infinity with a list of mathematicians who tried to do the same thing, and eventually committed suicide. He said he'd try to approach the subject carefully.
- Not quite a joke, funny as it sounds. Some people say that Kurt Gödel (of the famous incompleteness theorem) went insane and died because he couldn't deal with some of the truths he discovered. Of course, he still lived to be 70, so who knows?
- For those that don't know, the theorem was followed up by another one that more or less states that it's impossible to determine if any given question is answerable or impossible to answer ahead of time. Thus a really tough question could have an answer if you just think a little harder... or it could not. But you'll never know unless you find an answer (or don't).
- Similar things were once said about Nietzsche: that his "bleak and nihilistic" philosophy had driven him insane. (Modern scholars tend to think it was something organic, possibly a tumor or a cerebral hernia.))
- Others say it was plain old Syphilis.
- The proof of Fermat's Theorem probably counts, at least as far as Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is concerned.
- There is a documentary on many of these mathematicians driven over the edge.
- Two girls. One cup. Goatse.cx. And so on. Things, once seen, cannot be unseen. Save yourselves. Saaaaaaave yourselves...
- Many men, especially gay men, consider the menstrual cycle and childbirth to be things men simply aren't meant to know.
- Those who enjoy sausages and laws better not find out how either is created.
- Sausage is made from certain parts of the animal that may squick a tiny niche of the population, but are perfectly safe, nutritious, and delicious. These ingredients may include the animal's face, tongue, legs, liver, heart, stomach, lungs, kidneys, and neck, all ground up and stuffed inside the animal's intestines.
- Laws are made from what's left after that.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40000. You really, really, really, really don't want to know. Really.
- The Illuminati: New World Order card game has a card called "Secrets Man Was Not Meant to Know". There was a gag card appropriately titled "Secrets Man Was Not Meant to Know In the Biblical Sense".
- GURPS IOU (Illuminati University) had a class in the Thamurtugy department called "Things Men Were Not Meant to Know". The next class was "Men Things Were Not Meant to Know".
- Appropriately, Munchkin Cthulhu has a card called "Learn Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Go Up a Level."
- The Truth, upon which the World of Progress in SLA Industries is precariously balanced, can be used to grant incredible power to anyone who knows it and understands how to manipulate it. Most people — upon discovering it — are driven infinitely insane and/or die horribly. It's been stated that if enough people discovered The Truth, the entire universe would disappear in a puff of logic and cease to exist...
- Mage The Awakening's The Guardians of the Veil justify many of their actions with the idea that there are plenty of things that man was not meant to know (and not quite as many things which even mages shouldn't). They are often at odds with the Mysterium, who believe man is supposed to know everything.
Video Games
- Diablo II plays this one straight when Marius witnesses Diablo's transformation. He even says it "was not meant for mortal eyes."
- Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem plays on this trope with one of the characters going insane (well he wasn't really but he sure sounded like it) after seeing "beyond the veil".
- In La Mulana, the Skimpy Swimsuit—and a nice screen-sized shot of Lemeza wearing it—is your final reward for beating Hell Temple. Duracuets warns you on multiple occasions that the reward was not meant to be seen and that you may regret obtaining it.
Web Comics
- This Nodwick strip had entirely too much fun with this, as quoted above. The Thing Man Was Not Meant To Know was discovered by She Who Must Be Obeyed ("Let me know if we stumble upon any proper nouns in all this mess"), but it turned out to be completely ineffective (though apparently hilarious) when known by women...
- Vaarsuvius of The Order of the Stick regularly boasts about know secrets that would drive lesser minds mad.
- In Sluggy Freelance, after assuming a more woman-like form, Aylee learns things that men, specifically, were not meant to know.
Western Animation
- Parodied in The Tick: "Let us not forget the lesson that we can learn from this, Arthur, that man was not meant to tamper with the four basic food groups."
- An episode of Justice League Unlimited that featured time travel posited that no one must know how the universe was created (I don't remember why). If you want to know, it's represented as a ball of light emanating from an enormous hand within a dark void, and since all those other gods exist...
- It was a Green Lantern law for some reason.
- If it's the same as it was in comics, it's because observing the start of the universe introduces entropy to the universe at the very start, speeding up the eventual heat-death of the universe.
- And before that retcon, observing the birth of the universe created the multiverse.
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