What’s Your Test of Humanity?

Alert readers have probably figured out by now that I’m a huge nerd.

As a huge nerd, like all nerds, I read Dune. I loved Dune. Early in Dune, protagonist Paul Atraedes takes the Gom Jabbar Test of Humanity. It works like this.

Step One: Make a high tech box that, if one puts a hand in the box, stimulates the nerves so that the hand feels just like it’s being burnt to the bone…though no damage is actually done.

Step Two: Take a subject (in this case Paul Atraedes). Explain exactly what the box does. Make certain the subject knows that no matter what the hand feels like, no harm is being done.

Step Three: Tell the subject to put a hand in the box.

Step Four: Kill the subject (in this case using a needle full of cyanide called the Gob Jabbar) if the hand comes out of the box before a certain time has passed.

The Bene Gesserit (notable authors of the Litany Against Fear and sundry galaxy-spanning conspiracies) use the Test of Humanity to tell if somebody can place their awareness and rational thought above their natural instincts. Can you let pain happen to your hand because you know it’s not being hurt? If so, the Bene Gesserit consider you human. If not, well…it’s cyanide and tsk tsk.

This got me to thinking…

What was your Gom Jabbar Test of Humanity?

Part of being a grown-ass, adult human is being able to take your lizard brain and tell it to sit the hell down and shut the hell up. It happens when a customer at work is less than polite, when your romantic partner is less than kind, when your kids are less than responsible. It’s part of grown-up life, so much so that most of us just do it automatically as part of our daily responsibilities.

But lots of us can think back and remember the first time (or one of the first times) we successfully did it when it was really, really hard.

That one time, often in our early 20s, when we wanted to rage or cry or snark or fight…but knew we shouldn’t. Then we made the conscious decision to keep our hands in the box of pain and, as the Bene Gesserit witches might say, choose to be a human being. 

Chances are you weren’t having your hand burnt to a crisp, and you probably didn’t have a poison needle against your neck (either that, or your life is way, way more interesting than mine). Chances are you were dealing with something other people might have found boring. But you didn’t find it boring. You found it stressful, emotionally fraught, painful, maybe humiliating.

But you held it together.

You chose to be a human being.

So I ask you:

  1. What was your Test of Humanity?
  2. Afterward, how did passing help you deal with the next challenge in your life? And the next?

We’re all of us way more powerful than we suspect. My Test of Humanity (and some harder tests later in my life) help me to remember that when the next bad stretch hits.

Have you thought about yours?