Into the woods: how one man survived alone in the wilderness for 27 years
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
If he were growing up today, they would likely give him some diagnosis on the Autism Spectrum or some related diagnosis and try to give him meds and force him to somehow fit in.
For as long as humans have existed, there have been those that don't connect well socially. We may label them and pontificate and categorize, but this has always been true and is not likely to change. Perhaps we should get over our arrogant idea of normal.
As someone who was diagnosed with Aspergers, and someone that greatly dislikes annoying, confusing, and overly excited people that rely almost entirely on certain forms of non-verbal social cues to communicate (to the point I think they're just as broken as I am, just in the exact opposite way; they seemingly lack the ability to use words and logic to convey ideas, preferring emotions and impulsivity to interact with the world and others)...
I actually understand the hermit to some extent. I do believe that he could easily suffer from something the DSM V considers on the spectrum. It is unfortunate that society's supports fell through for him.
That sounds like you're saying that being able to fit in is a bad thing when talking about a guy who lived in the wilderness alone stealing from people for 25 years as a better alternative.
Shaving a metaphorical square peg rarely gets you a round one that works beautifully. Usually, it just gets you a misshapen, mutilated thing that is neither square nor round.
The way you've written this makes is sound like you're saying that current medicine and techniques to help autistic people are bad(give him meds and force him to somehow fit in) and that his solution of running off into the forest to avoid all human contact and surviving off theft is a better solution. If that isn't what you mean then you've worded your point badly.
>For as long as humans have existed, there have been those that don't connect well socially. We may label them and pontificate and categorize, but this has always been true and is not likely to change
Ok but for as long as humans have existed they've needed societies to help them survive. The article even makes that point with regards to historical hermits needing to sell stuff to buy food. There is a reason exile was one of the harshest punishments available in a lot of historic cultures.
>Perhaps we should get over our arrogant idea of normal.
But participating in society IS normal. No arrogance needed. That doesn't mean that people who have difficulty with it are bad but it does mean they aren't normal.
IMO Mz was a bit terse and you jumped to conclusions. It's true that it would not be uncommon for someone to write what she wrote and mean it how you took it, but it's not the simplest interpretation.
I was always okay with him being him and did not try to force him to be more social. I helped him figure out how to interact with society on his terms.
For example, he likes going to stores with self-checkout so he doesn't have to deal with a cashier. Self-checkout exists and many people use them for many reasons. One of his big motivators is that dealing with people is hard, even for just the brief interaction of paying for his purchase.
this is a fine line though. If you have some level of social anxiety, avoiding social contact is about the worst you can do for it. It's allowing the fear to control you. A better solution is to work your way through the social anxeity, learning organic ways to "grease the gears" and make situations pleasant to both parties.
I had to learn this in my late teens/early 20s. I was withdrawing more and more, stone-faced all the time in public places such as the grocery store. I'd park behind the store just so I didn't have the hassle of interactions in the parking lot. That's letting anxiety reign over you. Cognitive distortions [1] can send you on a downward trajectory where avoidance is the norm and you to go greater and more extreme lengths to mitigate the "problem". I learned that a smile, saying "hi, how are you?" or "excuse me" seem to make most interactions at least 50 "percent" less uncomfortable compared to unemotional silence, which I've seen in psychology books as a sign of hostility.
Now, if you are autistic and have something inhibiting your ability to understand social cues, then "just facing it" wont work, but even people on the spectrum can learn to improve their situation through a skilled therapist.
"Hello!" <clerk something something pleasant> "It's nice outside"
Now I understand the clerk would also rather just jam my shit through the scanner and point at the payment total and grunt.
I think of it as the chatter when two modems connect. Some noise and then a little signal then we are done.
Additionally, letting him avoid it part of the time makes it easier for him to cope effectively the rest of the time. You can think of it as him having a limited people skills budget and not insisting he piss it away unnecessarily just because other people with a bigger budget don't find it to be a hardship to pay such things. For him, it amounts to being nickeled and dimed to death.
I'm having trouble picturing what this kind of reaction would look like. Can you explain what the cashiers did that make you think this way?
We have done a lot of reading and we believe he lacks prosody and lacks the ability to tone match. This is something other people are not consciously aware is socially important, but he routinely gets that reaction that is summed up by the phrase "I don't like your tone."
In contrast, I appear to habitually tone match without trying. This gets me read as incredibly deferential, which has a different social downside. So, one thing that does work is he and I frequently shop together, everyone knows I am his mother and people generally find me likeable. They eventually conclude "He's a nice, quiet young man." and quit having an issue with him being him.
This right here is the arrogance I am talking about. You think you know better than I do what my nearly 30 year old son needs. Now why on earth would you think that? That is incredibly contemptuous.
Hello, ADHD here.
However, you didn't write anything offensive and have your own point which is valid. Nothing to down vote IMO.
But, hey, doctors and other experts don't get paid the big bucks to say "He's just shy." You can't prescribe expensive meds if you respect people's differences.
For the vast majority or people we tether between fear of social exclusion and over-confidence. In theory, social interaction it easy; its just people conversing about shared interests. If you are willing to take the chance at making friendship your life can be so much richer and they will most likely live longer. It's easy to find excuses not to interact but we all have to try. People like Christopher Knight are outliers and probably beyond help but it doesn't mean there shouldn't apply the slightest societal pressure to people to form relationships because not doing so means a deconstruction of society.
I think that principle generalizes pretty well. There are better ways to deal with people like this than forcing them to do something and insisting it is for their own good.
Friendship that is not based upon real respect is not genuine friendship.
The only thing that makes this more or less interesting than some tale of independence and "acceptable" survivalism is the contempt of the beholder.
One of my absolute favourite books as a child was The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by WH Davies. Perhaps it has coloured my vision, but I think we owe at least a grudging respect to people who can survive in the modern world (by any reasonable means) as such outcasts.
Maybe it was the "into the woods", maybe it was the "alone" part, but I just wasn't expecting a story of some person stealing from others and getting caught after 27 years.
In some ways, this guy actually had a much easier time surviving than many of the inner-city homeless. He essentially had access to a low-security, well-stocked resort town in rural Maine - entirely to himself with no other criminal competition and a very small police force to worry about. He didn't have to worry about getting killed by other desperate homeless people or by police, or having to constantly search for a different place to sleep every night.
Also, he wasn't even forced into homelessness. He just made a willful decision to live this kind of parasitic lifestyle. Perhaps he was mentally ill in some way, but regardless, I can't be particularly sympathetic without further information about his motivations.
There is much to learn from this case. I suspect only a few handfulls of humans in history have completed that epic journey.
I personally know poeple who have solo nonstop sailed around the world, speaking on the radio every day, and even that has a huge impact and is less than a year.
Perhaps we can put aside the moral aspects with how he achieved it and focus on the rest of this astonishing edge case?
I guess we could also ask Thomas Silverstein. From his wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Silverstein):
> He has been in solitary confinement since 1983, when he killed prison guard Merle Clutts at the Marion Penitentiary in Illinois.
I'm betting there are other people in US prisons who have been in solitary confinement for 10+ years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/us/herman-wallace-held-41-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/us/for-45-years-in-prison...
A big "lesson" here is: everything's easier when you have no problem with stealing.
The title made it sound like he's a survivalist-type who sustained himself naturally. That would have been way more interesting.
There are countless people who could work but prefer to "survive" by just taking from others instead. It's called "welfare" (not talking about people who need it, for whom it is intended, but people who don't but just take it anyway), and even they don't usually endanger others by breaking and entering, but this guy, well, shrug & "whatever, I'd rather just take people's stuff".
Of course, maybe he was mentally ill. If so, this might not have been his fault, but even in that case, there usually isn't that much to learn from people whose definition of "totally turn their back on society" is to go on being a part of society every single day as takers but totally turning their backs on helping others in return.
Whatever you believe your philosophical purpose is, I guarentee if you take an honest critical look at it, and what actions you actually take in reality (rather than just promote) to further that goal, you'll find that its nonsense.
Well, that's your philosophy :-)
[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/03/homeles...
Remember also that not too long ago "hunting and gathering", poaching, was a hanging crime far greater than petty theft. Our rules change regularly. I wouldn't applaud this man's behavior, but i do respect his thought process. A tweek here and there and i might call him some sort of artist. His story, which i have read about many times, broadens our perspective. That's art. Good art breaks rules. The best art denies them entirely.
In a previous story on him, there was some nice phrasing on his freedom, moon and season:
> Chris became surprisingly introspective. "I did examine myself," he said. "Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free." http://www.gq.com/story/the-last-true-hermit?printable=true
He steals in that too.
This guy is not homeless. He had a home.
I've read similar stories of people setting up semi-permanent homes in hidden urban spaces.
It's the hacking aspect that makes it interesting. Living within a community off the books. If his stealing hurt people, then his bad, but I kinda feel like it didn't. The urban legend itself had a value to the community.
There have been billions of 'pre-Columbian hunter-gatherers', this is different.
In more primitive society this person would have simply been killed for this transgression of the social contract. This isn't a hack, its sociopathy.
In that case I'm wondering why not take the more legal approach of resupplying at a local church / shelter from time to time rather than continue stealing.
More than 1000 burglaries over 27 years is still a frequency of nearly 1/week. Stealing is the hacking equivalent of breaking someone's fingers to tell you the password, or getting lucky and finding their sticky note under the desk.
https://usnews.newsvine.com/_news/2013/04/10/17691737-hermit...
The answer is that if you are single and under 65, then you don't have to file a U.S. tax return if your gross income is less than $10,350.
(As usual with the IRS, nothing is simple. There are reasons you might be compelled to file anyway and possible benefits to file even if you were under the threshold. But you can still give the short answer of $10,350, and a link for the long answer.)
This is different than the tax protester argument regarding the 5th Amendment.
Going back to the SCOTUS debate over Obamacare, remember that one of the conservatives' theories on its unconstitutionality hinged on an obscure concept in the Anglo-American common law that the law cannot in the first instance impose affirmative (positive) duties on a person, as opposed to prohibitions (negative duties). It most often comes up when discussing why under the common law there historically could never be an affirmative duty to provide assistance to a stranger in peril, and why courts traditionally struck down laws which created such a duty. A person must first take some significant affirmative step with the knowledge (usually implied) that he's subjecting himself to positive law. Thus, while you have no duty to help a complete stranger in peril, if you begin to help him you may have opened yourself up to legal obligations that govern your help, including whether you can withdraw it. (If you're a licensed doctor, OTOH, arguably the law could impose such a burden, but only because you first _chose_ to become a doctor, with the implicit understanding that the act of joining a highly regulated profession might attach certain obligations.)
The two big exceptions in this abstract theory are 1) taxation and 2) military service.
If you remember, Chief Justice Roberts' concurring opinion upholding Obamacare was based on his finding that the penalty for violating the individual mandate was a tax. Roberts, too, put stock in this distinction between positive and negative duties. It was difficult from an analytical standpoint not to accept that theory. If the conservative justices claimed the scope of the Commerce Clause didn't encompass the individual mandate, which thus exceeded Congress' enumerated powers, then logically neither could the Commerce Clause, e.g., support Federal prohibitions against growing and smoking marijuana in the privacy of your own home. None of the conservative justices were willing to sacrifice the War on Drugs for their principles. (Were Rehnquist and O'Connor still on the bench Obamacare would have been struck down because they dissented in the famous marijuana case 10 years earlier.) Thus, if Roberts wanted to save Obamacare while preserving the ability to reject similar but more onerous future obligations, he had no choice but to classify the penalty as a tax. He was the only justice on either side to do so. (Note that the individual mandate law was intentionally written, in part, to make the tax argument plausible. It's just that it was almost universally thought that it would live or die according to the scope of the Commerce Clause.)
Participating in commerce is another affirmative activity that allows the government to impose positive duties, and taking income for labor could arguably be considered commercial activity. Paying taxes might be another activity that could attach reporting obligations. But there are reasonable ways to differentiate those activities. Everybody, theoretically, has to work (they certainly have a right to work, at least) and if choosing to undertake simple remunerated labor opened you up to endless government regulation it wouldn't be very fair; there wouldn't be any real freedom not to subject yourself to government regulation. Similarly, because taxation is the big exception, if taxation alone could indirectly attach a bunch of ancillary obligations you're not really free to refrain from subjecting yourself to other positive law.
So, theoretically, if you're just an average working stiff who dutifully pays their taxes, there's a strong case to be made that you don't have to file with the IRS.
Until Obamacare, this facet of legal theory was mostly a curiosity which really only functioned to preserve the fiction that an individual, like in the case of this secluded Russian family, could theoretically live in some sort of state of nature free from government control.
Interesting read, but I don't think there's much to take from it.
"He’d not been sick in the woods, and his worst accident was a tumble on some ice, but his teeth were rotten, and no wonder. I dug through his twenty-five years of trash, buried between boulders, and kept inventory: a five-pound tub that once held Marshmallow Fluff, an empty box of Devil Dogs, peanut butter, Cheetos, honey, graham crackers, Cool Whip, tuna fish, coffee, Tater Tots, pudding, soda, El Monterey spicy jalapeño chimichangas, and on and on and on."[1]
Hunting and fishing are not as calorically rewarding as what he could get concentrated in peanut butter and sweets. Read the GQ article, it's fascinating how he would intentionally get fat for the winter.
Burglary is not armed robbery. They are different in the eyes of the law, and justly so.
Theft of a candy bar carries a different penalty from theft of an automobile, and justly so.
A thief is a thief, and a criminal is a criminal, but not all crimes are identical. There is a difference between the rigidity of ethics, and the flexible punishment-must-fit-the-crime nature of justice.
In the grand scheme of the universe, those things are pretty minor. But they still hurt.
I don't know that I'd want to hurt the person or people who stole from me; I think that I'd like to get to know why he or they did it, that I'd like to see why that seemed like the right thing to do at the time. But it does hurt, even now.
You are correct in that I used an term incorrectly: I shouldn't have said robbery, I should have simply said "theft". Robbery indicates force: there was no indication of direct force/intimidation that I saw. Point conceded.
Where I think your criticism is incorrect. Your examples differentiate based on the what the criminal was trying to get away with. Trying to steal a candy bar is different that trying to steal an automobile: the resources involved in obtaining a candy bar legitimately are much smaller than the resources dedicated to obtaining a car. You rightfully call out that distinction, they are different (as individual acts) and I would not disagree that they should be different in what answer justice should demand of the criminal. Where you go astray is that the context of my criticism of was that the original commentator was differentiating the severity of the crime not on the value of the property stolen, but on some perception of the of the victim's "need". So, it's not the difference of the value of the good taken, but a judgment on how important that should have been to the victim. This is a very important distinction and changes the validity of the ethical judgement. I assert that, whereas the value of the stolen item is correctly a part of the determining the severity of the transgression, the "need" of the victim is not a proper factor in determining the severity of the crime. (And yes, this is a generalization. If I steal a hospital respirator from a medical supply company showroom floor, it is different than if I steal it while it's in use by a patient... though even then the theft aspect should likely be seen as the same and there are just other, different ethical/legal crimes in addition to theft.)
If your argument were correct, then duress would never serve as an acceptable defense.
I'm not saying that Chris was under duress (his situation was due to his own choices, not forced upon him), but the fact is, some accused criminals are able to defend their crimes by saying "my actions were necessary to avoid a serious, immediate danger in a situation that was forced upon me." That is a form of need and it is a legally workable defense, at least in the USA and UK.
Don't be ridiculous. Both you and the OP (and anybody else who wants to) are fully qualified to determine the morality of the situation for yourselves and discus it. Why would either of you not be?
The article indicates that some of them put out pen and paper and tried to get him to leave a grocery list. He declined to cooperate, so they stopped.
I doesn't sound like some of these people were particularly bothered by him getting free groceries and otherwise leaving the place essentially untouched.
I am not saying that makes his choice "morally correct" or anything. But, you are trying to impose a determination here that dramatically differs from the evidence we have been presented for how some of these people felt about the situation.
They were "put out" for the exact value of the items he stole. Whether the theft results in a direct detriment to the victim is irrelevant.
If folks haven't already, the GQ article by Michael Finkel (linked in the older post oska pointed out) is worth the read:
The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit - http://www.gq.com/story/the-last-true-hermit?printable=true
Personally, I didn't know about original thread when it was posted, and your original comment actually prompted me to find the GQ story and read it under the expectation that I was going to learn about a societal mooch.
What ended up making an impression was Christopher Knight's unique writing style, his observations on everyday interactions we take for granted ("I’m not used to seeing people’s faces," he said. "There’s too much information there. Aren’t you aware of it? Too much, too fast."), and how he survived those winters.
And yes, I get it, he stole. He used stolen propane tanks to fire up the stolen Coleman to melt snow in a stolen pot to drink water. But still, he fattened himself up for winter and camped in the winter months of Maine while not leaving behind footprints for 25 years. I was impressed. Yes it's not Primitive Technology [0] ingenuity, but Mr Knight is still an outlier and shared an experience I don't encounter every day.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8205993 [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
And maybe it's my age and experience, but 25-27 years is a really impressive time span to be focused on doing one thing.
I would like to have learned more about how he feels about how the world has changed, he's like Rip Van Winkle or a time traveler in that respect. But most likely as a person who would voluntarily isolate himself from society in the first place, he probably doesn't care about the world.
So pretty much Uber-but-for-some-homeless-guy-in-the-forest-in-Maine then?
Stealing from the rich increases equality, and is thus a morally good thing, not a bad thing.