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The Crazy Lady Speaks

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122 pointsGlennKelman40 comments

I actually had a similar experience on a flight from London to LA a couple of weeks ago.

Was dreading speaking to a man next to me who was reading through some self-help guide for Christians and underlining and circling words and phrases on every page.

I have no problem with religions (though I myself am an atheist), but I really can't stand the type of religious person who insists on never shutting up about that topic (in my experience, normally born again Christians.)

After an hour or so of the eleven hour flight we did start talking, and not once did he mention religion in any way for the next ten hours. Instead we just talked about our lives. Turns out that, after joining a gang, dealing drugs from 13, and going to jail three times before he was 20, he then discovered God, and now spends time helping disadvantaged children, at home in California and in third world countries, and none of his work involves trying to convert the children to believe in God.

It was really nice being reminded that finding religion can turn a person's life around, and make him a better person (yes, my general view is biased heavily against religion.)

Seems like he did mention religion.

No, he didn't. I only discovered that he became a Christian at that time in his life a few days later - we had swapped twitter usernames, and from that I found a few sites of his (personal page, facebook, myspace...)

Reading about him online and the book he had on the plane were the only things I had connecting him to religion.

Ah. You said you talked about your lives, and described his. It seemed as though that was what you talked about on the plane.

I should have been more specific in the first place :)

To find conversations like these on the internet makes me happy.

He didn't talk about it constantly.

You can have the same experience when it goes the other way: someone who is a good friend ends up with a startling revelation that makes your jaw drop.

My case in point was this week: I was hanging out with an academic friend of mine at a conference. He lives somewhat far away, and when I do roll through town, we usually just grab a beer rather than see his house. This week, however, he revealed something that hitherto I had not known. We were talking about how the town the conference was in was sort of shady (sorry Reno) and he mentioned "Yeah, I should have brought my Glock, just in case."

"Pardon?"

"Oh yeah. Did I not tell you? I have guns. Lots of guns."

As a leftie even in Britain, and someone who is scared of even the mention of guns, this was a bit of a surprise. The difficulty/trick, I guess, is to reconcile the person you have with the person you are now presented with, and realize that they are really one and the same, just with one minor change that makes no difference to your interactions.

This happens to me much more in the US than in the UK; UK people are much of a muchness. Americans run a full-spectrum. I guess this is why politics here is so polarized.

This whole question of dealing with learning something surprising about a person you know and like is the subject of my favorite movie of all time: The Third Man. I highly recommend it.

UK people are much of a muchness. Americans run a full-spectrum

I suspect in the UK you've unconsciously constructed an echo chamber around yourself, it's easy to do, especially in London where you can easily fall into a demographic/subculture and never interact with anyone else. Whereas when traveling you are out of your "comfort zone" and interact with a greater range of people.

People are people, and the UK has a reputation for eccentricity for a reason...

Don't you think that most people from western countries would be shocked when an acquaintance casually mentions that he should have brought a gun in case he needs to shoot a criminal?

No, why would we? We're all familiar with American culture from TV. Outside of cities like Boston I'd be more surprised to meet an American who didn't own a gun!

Only because it's illegal to do so in most western countries.

But to be shocked by that in America seems to show a rather high degree of cultural illiteracy.

> the difficulty/trick, I guess, is to reconcile the person you have with the person you are now presented with, and realize that they are really one and the same, just with one minor change that makes no difference to your interactions.

No, the real trick is to use this new experience to reexamine your beliefs and assumptions to see if they need updating.

Yes, I'm wondering if the OP now has a better view of people who own guns.

What's crazy is thinking that someone necessarily agrees with the contents of a book she's reading.

Exactly. Last weekend I watched UFO conspiracy videos all day, just for the entertainment value. I see people reading Marx and sometimes even Hitler's stuff, and they're neither Commies nor Nazis obviously.

Segments of The Communist Manifesto were required reading for one first-year philosophy course I took.

I wonder what people would think if I sat next to them on an airplane reading Mein Kampf, actually. Marx is academic-trendy enough that people won't look down on you for reading him, but Hitler's a different story.

I would think that anyone reading Mein Kampf is an avid student of history, maybe WWII history in particular. It seems much more likely than them being a Nazi.

Maybe. I don't know about the US, but in Europe, reading this book in public would provoke a strong reaction in people. (I think selling or even owning the book is illegal in several countries.) So I think somebody doing that would be more likely to be making a statement of some sort. What kind of statement, may vary... (They could have Nazi sympathies, or be vehemently anti-censorship, or just like to shock people, etc.)

Personally if I were reading a crazy conspiracy-theory book for some other purpose (research for a book I was writing about how crazy other people are, frinstance) I'd avoid reading it in public.

Assumptions. Too many of them. The real message of this article is that people will silently judge you.

While it has many unfortunate effects in society, the ability to make up your mind about something/someone in a split second is actually a survival mechanism.

It's very rare that I run in to a situation where the initial impression is accurate. How's such an inaccurate metric supposed to be a life saver?

it comes down to friend-or-foe, apparently. In one research I read about in the book "how we make mistakes", the split-second judgment upon seeing a photo of a political candidate for the first time was the best indicator of voting behaviour.

In modern society it usually isn't, but it was a survival mechanism for early humans, and still is for animals. If you're an animal (or human) in the wild, and an unknown creature approaches you, you don't have time to think, "hm, I wonder if it's dangerous; let's not be prejudiced and wait until it gets here so I can see what it does." If you do that, and your guess was wrong, you're dead. On the other hand, if you chose to flee or hide, you'd be more likely to still be alive (and you can still choose to come out again once you've decided that the other is not a threat).

The same mechanism still exists in today's humans. Fortunately many of us are not in situations where our immediate survival is at stake. The mechanism is still there though, it just takes different forms, like having an opinion about people or things in a split second, based on what you perceive at that moment. (The reaction is likely to be different too, not fight-or-flight like in nature.) As you point out, it's often wrong, so it's much less useful to us than it used to be (although not completely useless).

Lots of homeless people I've come across are usually looked down upon by other people for god knows what; silent assumptions suck.

I've talked to a few of them and I've been amazed, every single time, what sort of stories they bring to the table, and the sort of intellect a lot of them possessed.

After talking with an old homeless guy at length over a period of a year about literature and various other things, he carted over a basket full of books to give to me and a few of my friends - he was a huge book nerd and talked a lot about McLuhan, life, and literature.

It was pretty obvious that many people didn't have much of a high opinion of him - it was only after you've decided to so much as look at him and say something that you'd find out the truth.

I don't know what the hell happened to him, but I didn't see him after that year.

I miss him dearly.

Sadly there's also the opposite side. I always try to talk to homeless people begging in the street, getting their attention by giving them a small amount of money. A few weeks ago I came to talk to this girl coming from a different country who was just visiting friends in mine. I was looking for that special spark you found in your acquaintance but I simply couldn't find it. After about 20 minutes I had to admit that she was just plain stupid in the normal sense of the word and brainwashed enough to reject the help society offered her. It was a bit depressing to see that she really was just a homeless person and that there wasn't that much more to her.

You saw what she chose to show you.

Ockham's Razor: is the stupid homeless woman (a) stupid or (b) an evil genius who is pretending to be stupid for some unknown reason?

No, she's not an evil genius, but let me spin you a yarn.

She's a homeless woman, so she was perhaps raised by a demanding and misogynistic father figure, from whom she learned to act helpless. Then she figured out in high school that acting dumb makes boys like her. She sort of fell into the identity because it was easy -- her family, friends, and society at large fully expected her to be a dumb slut, so it was easy, even for her, to believe she was, plus she liked the attention.

That's a pretty common thread, and people are WAY more complicated than that. I've found people have rich and varied experiences, even dumb ones. That you couldn't glean anything from this girl other than that she was "stupid" maybe says more about you than about her. She has thoughts and feelings that maybe she either can't express in a way you understand, or that she doesn't care to express to someone who is clearly an outsider.

I'm just saying that people surprise me, and I have a hard time believing some girl is just irredeemably "stupid" and that's all there is to know about her.

There are plenty of people who think I'm whatever they think

I tend to think that if she were that crafty she'd probably have found a way off the streets by now. The only people left on the streets are the worst of the worst.

Look at my post above about a story where homeless people aren't exactly scum?

People who tend to accept things authority figures tell them without some sort of critical analysis I feel are the most threatened by unfamiliar ideas.

I'll listen to just about anybody talk about anything. I don't find other people's beliefs particularly threatening no matter what they are. I often have people open up to me and tell me all sorts of strange stuff that I don't think they'd mention to anyone else. I have certainly had some interesting plane conversations.

"There is a principle, which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." -- Herbert Spencer, 1820-1903

eh, another thing to remember is that the books you read don't define you. I've got a little red book on my bookshelf "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung" 1969 printing. and, uh, I'm not sure I'd call myself a Libertarian, but I'm probably closer to being a Libertarian than I am to being a democrat or a republican. I've also got some Skinner on my bookshelf. I'm an athiest, but I find Jack Chick to be fascinating. I mean, I think he's completely batshit insane, but he's definitely not a boring read.

Oh, and 'crazy conspiracy theories' is an oxymoron. It's the NON-conspiracy theories that are crazy. The world operates primarily by conspiracies. Maybe the lady passenger was just practicing her skills at grading conspiracy probabilities.

I love conspiracy theories, and read them avidly. That doesn't make me crazy.

What a beautiful post.

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