In the real world, humans eat “basilisks” for breakfast. That’s why the SCP Foundation is an entertainment site, not a real thing.
But it’s not nice to make people read horror stories when they don’t want to.
Edited to add:
Quite a lot of cosmic-horror fiction poses the idea that awareness of some awful truth is harmful to the knower. This is distinct from the motif of harmful sensation; it isn’t seeing something, but drawing a particular conclusion that is the harmful factor.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
In the real world, humans eat “basilisks” for breakfast. That’s why the SCP Foundation is an entertainment site, not a real thing.
But it’s not nice to make people read horror stories when they don’t want to.
Edited to add:
Quite a lot of cosmic-horror fiction poses the idea that awareness of some awful truth is harmful to the knower. This is distinct from the motif of harmful sensation; it isn’t seeing something, but drawing a particular conclusion that is the harmful factor.
— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”