Madness string 111426

Random mermaid
We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.

This was a plot point in an episode of one of the Law & Order shows, though somehow the writers thought that the calling and receiving phones would have the same ringtone, which was weird.