Anecdote of Idiocy
Peculiar's absence from the internet of late is ascribable mostly to fatigue. I work at a ski area, and our current plenitude of snow, and also management's penchant for hiring mostly drug addicts and sub-normal goat farmers, has left me working some very long, hard days recently. But the people-watching at ski areas is always world class, and yesterday one gentleman displayed idiocy to a degree actually sufficient to set him apart from the crowd.
One of my drearier duties is to scan lift tickets, using a standard hand-held barcode scanner. I go to scan one fellow, the sort of rum cully all too common in Santa Fe, whose disheveled hair, dull stare and three-day beard atop some quite pricey ski clothes imply that an abundance of unearned money was for him the deciding factor between a career as a sensitive new-age guy or as a street drunk. As I reach toward him, he lurches his torso as far from his ticket as possible (with limited success, the two being attached), and demands to me, "Don't point that thing at my body, man! Those things are dangerous!" "No they're not," I say, "I'd worry more about the sunlight than this light here." "Gimme a break man," he replies. "It's a LASER! You know... like laser guns." "They kill fish," his female companion chimes in helpfully.
I've already decided that talking to this guy is like delivering a speech to dryer lint, but my nearby colleague tries good-naturedly to explain to him the difference between Class A and other lasers. But our Idiot-Olympian cuts him off, without the slightest trace of banter or irony, yelling, "Hey man, you got your belief system, I got mine!"
Well, clearly. Now I must admit that this guy bothered me more than he should have, much more than the Mere-Mortal idiots of whom I spent the rest of the day in observation. But, aside from contemplating the pleasure of telling him on his next run that his innards had already been thoroughly cauterized and mutated by the laser controlling the automatic door of our rental shop, I contemplated as well the perniciousness of the Your-Belief-System-Versus-Mine response which one hears so often from people on the losing sides of arguments. The fact that his belief system is a caprice, whereas the logical implications of mine regularly square with reality in the observations of numerous independant observers, is not even what I find most troubling. To respond to another person in this way is deny any possiblity of agreement, or even communication, save perhaps by chance. If we hold beliefs in common, it is pure coincidence, and we cannot use these commonalities to reach agreement on anything else. We cannot learn and we cannot teach; we cannot even communicate an idea to another unless they have it already, in which case it's an empty communication. Human intellect, art, and empathy all cease to have any power, and every person is permanently, hopelessly alone, unable to influence anyone else or even to know if beliefs and perceptions which appear to be shared are truly the same beliefs and perceptions. Someone who determinedly holds such notions is a human being only in the most technical sense.
But I'm over it. My interlocuter of yesterday has doubtless already died of dyspepsia, and I am free to steal a barcode scanner and enjoy a tasty summer of laser-fishing.
