Category: Other

They’re Horrible People

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Horrible people are fascinating. They confuse us, they entertain us, and fascinate us. We talk about them all the time. “Did you hear what Sandy did the other day? Ohmigosh, how could she do that? How can she sleep at night?” We love shows and movies about them doing horrible things to one another. We can’t understand them, and how they think they can get away with it. They do. They think a lot about this. They cross their T’s and dot their I’s, and they figure out the best way to do something awful to us without ramifications. It took me a while to figure out it’s not about me, and I’m here to tell you it’s not about you either, or whatever innocent victim they prey upon. It’s about them. They’re horrible people. 

When we talk about horrible people doing horrible things in such discussions, we often limit our discussion to there dastardly doing dastardly things, as opposed to violent criminals committing violent acts. We talk about people who legally manage to ruin the lives of those around them. We talk about a nephew who drains an uncle’s life savings, before forcing him into a care facility; a sister who steals her mentally deficient brother’s inheritance; and a man who poisons the neighbor’s dog. We talk about little people who do little things, because they are so frustrated with their station in life that they develop a twisted logic and justification for what they do.

How many horrible people know they’re horrible. I’m sure they are out there, but I’ve never met one. The most horrible people I’ve met can’t understand why I would say that. They seem genuinely perplexed by the charge. “Well, what about the time you did this?” we ask. “I mean c’mon, even you can see that was pretty awful.”

“What was he going to do with it anyway?” they say. The only thing missing from their ability to pull justifications on us is the “Ta-dah!” punctuation. They rarely if ever address the moral turpitude of their actions. It’s dog-eat-dog to them. It’s take, take, take. They have no conscience, no guilt, and no shame. It’s about getting theirs before anyone else can. 

They tell us a story of a dastardly figure doing something dastardly. “Wait a second, you did that. It wasn’t the exact same thing, but you did something so close that I can’t believe you’re calling this other person out.” They don’t see it. They don’t think the way we do.  

Is it wrong to put Uncle Joe into a subpar care facility after taking all of his money? “If he goes into a care facility, the state will take his estate to help pay for his care?” they say.

“Okay, but he could’ve afforded a better facility.” They didn’t even consider that. We can see it on their face.

“What’s the difference?” they say. “He still gets his pillows propped, three square meals a day, and a couple Jell-O squares.” They don’t consider the role this man played in their maturation. They don’t think about those times their uncle bought them peanut M&M’s in the gas station, or the fishing trips he took them on when he was in his prime, and they were very young. He’s a feeble senior citizen now. He’s not the same man he was in their youth.

“But this is our Uncle Joe?” his sisters say, “and you were his favorite.” 

They have answers, scripted answers that they developed long before this confrontation. It doesn’t matter what they say, because it really doesn’t matter to them what they say. They probably won’t even remember what they said five minutes after they said it, because they just don’t care. We might call them psychopaths, sociopaths, or level some charge of narcissism at them, but those are just names. Kids called them names on the playground, and it hurt back then. We’re adults now, and names are meaningless to us now. So, we back it up with detail, detailed descriptions of what they did, and the loved one to whom they did it. Pfft, it means nothing to them, and we know these people. We know some of them better than anyone else in the world, and we now know that they’re horrible people. It undercuts everything we thought we knew.

Uncle Joe wasn’t a rich man. His life’s savings proved embarrassingly paltry, but it’s theirs now, and they managed to secure the transfer of wealth in such a legal manner that the sisters’ lawyers inform them that it would be wildly expensive and ultimately foolish to challenge it.

They’re going to get theirs before you do.

The sisters could try to trap the nephew with some damning portrayals of what he did, but how do they trap someone who has no conscience, feels no guilt, and has no shame? Even if they were to corner him in a casual conversation that they could not make legally binding, they wouldn’t get anywhere, because it would basically turn into a war of words in which one party wins, and the other party loses, and he can’t lose that argument, because he doesn’t care.

I prefer to think that most people are good, and while I’ve been dealt a barrage of “you’re so naïve”, it has served me well. Having said that, I’m not blind to the fact that there are some horrible people we call friends, in our families, and those waving to us with a mower in front of them. I’ve talked to them so often I know how they tick, I’ve met their mothers and talked to that cousin who cemented that logic in their head. 

When you sit down and talk to them, with mugs of beer between you, they say the most wonderful things. Some of the times, they even manage to drop a few words that expand our philosophy and rationale. Unbeknownst to us, they know right and wrong, but they obviously don’t think it applies in all situations, everywhere in life. “We all experience updrafts and downdrafts in life,” they say, “and you deal with them accordingly.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” they continue, “and it wasn’t built in one way, or the way they tell you.” This philosophy aligns with the narrative that some of the times you have to do things you don’t want to do to build an empire. It also aligns with the idea that most rich people got theirs by doing awful things to whomever stood in their way, and our friends want to climb that ladder by whatever means necessary.

Horrible people sell their soul for money, but when we see the jet skis sitting next to the brand new mower, we think, “You sold your soul for this?” No, they have a motor boat sitting at a dock, and next month they’re headed to Cancun. So, we’re inching toward the five figure territory for turning your back on one of the few people on the planet who actually cared about them. They don’t mind the fact that in the aftermath of their theft, they will turn their whole family against them, and they don’t mind damaging their soul. They don’t believe in all that schmuck.   

Horrible people tell their family, at the last second, that they cannot attend a family dinner to honor their recently-deceased mother. “I’m sorry, I have a conflict.” Then, when the family sets out for the restaurant, she enters the family home, knowing that they will be out, and she steals all of her mother’s most valuable items. She obviously doesn’t think about how she’s disgracing her mother’s memory in some way and how that act could lead others to think she might be awful. Those thoughts don’t even enter her mind. She was just getting hers before her brother could stake a claim to one of the items. “The funny thing is if she challenged me on these items,” the brother said, “I would’ve let her have all of them.” We don’t know what happened in this situation, but anyone who knows anything about the collectible’s market knows that if she pawned everything she stole, she would probably end up enjoying one Burger King value meal.

Some people believe karma holds some kind of existential power. I don’t. I’ve seen far too many people escape awful deeds unharmed to believe that if we do bad things to people bad things will happen to us. The most successful refutation I received arrived after I had a brief, tumultuous confrontation with an unusually awful person was, “He has to live with himself.” 

“You think he feels guilty?” I asked, “because I got the feeling he doesn’t feel the least bit guilty about it.”

“Oh, I don’t either,” he said. “I’m not talking about guilt. I’m talking about how he must live. A person who acts like that cannot be happy. Something drives a person to act like that. I’m guessing he either has an awful wife, or he treats her horribly. Either way, if someone was dumb enough to marry him, they probably now live a life of abject misery. And if she agreed to bring children into their world with him, imagine how miserable they must be. Most of all, think about what must be like for him to live with himself. Outbursts like that are not common. Internal misery causes people like that to unleash on the world around them. You talk about final damnation, and all that. I think it’s much simpler than that. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. He’s living his own version of hell every day of his life.”

How do awful people live with themselves? First, they don’t consider themselves awful. They don’t think about what they’ve done as bad, or if they do, they punctuate it with bromides, such as, “It’s only bad if you get caught.” They say that as a joke, but they say it so often that we can’t help but think that they believe it. “It’s not a lie if you believe it,” is another bromide they might ask their loved ones to chisel into their gravestone, or, “It’s not stealing if you take things from those who have if you are a have-not.”   

Even those of us who ascribe to some of these tenets of moral relativism must recognize that there has to be an internal accumulation of misery to be that miserable, and it manifests itself in a variety of ways.

One of my office managers was not what anyone would call an awful person. He devoted his life to his son, he laughed a lot, and he had such wonderful views that those making bullet points would insist that they absolutely prevent him from ever being on a list of horrible people. When the opportunity arose, however, he did every awful thing he could think of to me, as my manager, and within the constraints of the company handbook. I found out later that he committed suicide, and no one knew why. My best guess is that it wasn’t any one thing in particular. It probably had more to do with the accumulation. 

The one thing I learned from working with this manager was that it’s never enough. He asked me questions about my current straits in the workplace. I had no idea that he was looking for some satisfaction. I now believe that he thought if he could transfer some of his misery to me, he might be a little less miserable, and it might quench a thirst of some sort. He learned that genuinely happy people can be happy no matter what type of misery we try to put them through. In the aftermath of our tenure together, I think he expected me to hate him. I didn’t. I greeted him as I had the day before we started working together. My guess is he was very disappointed by that. 

Does it help us to think that horrible people lead horrible lives? Does it help us to think that the reason they hate us so much is because they hate their home, their family, their career, and themselves? We all have insecurities, and when someone develops that much animosity for us, we’re inclined to look inward. Based on my limited experience with horrible people, they think that way too. They think it’s our fault that they’re temporarily miserable, and if they can fix us, they can fix themselves. If they had the ability to acknowledge the source of the problem, they might have fixed it long ago. They don’t, so they focus their energy on fixing us in the most awful ways they can manage within corporate constraints. 

How do they sleep at night? How can they do such things and think nothing of it? If it’s not entertaining, it’s a least fascinating to think that more often than not, these people get away with it, and they have no remorse. They cross their T’s and dot their I’s, and they take, take, take, and they try to make us as miserable as they are.  

My advice, based on my brief experience with this type of person is try to do everything in your power to make them irrelevant in your life. This is impossible in some cases, as some of the times horrible people have the power and ability to make our lives more miserable, but in cases like these, happiness can, indeed, be the best revenge.  

When One Thing Doesn’t Work, Try Another

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“That won’t work … Yeah, that won’t work either. I tried it,” they say when we offer them solutions to their situations. “Why do you insist on helping me? Why can’t you just listen?”

“When one of my friends has a problem,” we say, “I try to help them.”

“Why do you always think you have to help?” they ask. “Is it because there’s some part of you that needs to be right?”

“If I needed to be right, why would I propose so many, different solutions? If I have an unusual need to be right, I would only pose one solution and insist that you try that. My motto is, if one thing doesn’t work try another. If I thought I was always right, why would I write as much as I do? I’m searching for answers and solutions, and when they work for me I suggest them to my friends to see if it might work for them.”

“Well, you can go ahead and shove your solutions up your nether regions,” they say, “because none of them work.”

“Fair enough,” we say. “What solutions have you found?”

“I’ve tried everything. I have,” they say. “Nothing works.”

It’s simplistic to say that for every problem there is a solution. It’s simplistic to say if one solution doesn’t work, try another? It’s also simplistic to say that some dilemmas are complex and some are very simple. There are only so many facts, and there are only so many solutions. When we argue over truths as they apply to solutions, we think that if all parties concerned dug deep enough, we might eventually arrive at an agreed upon truth.

One agreed upon truth we think we’ve found is that we all want to be happy. Happy, how do I get happy? Happy is a big problem that requires big solutions, and it’s probably something we’ll never achieve … until we start tending to our little things. We can be so distracted by our pursuit of big things that we accidentally allow the little things to accumulate and overwhelm us, which, of course, leads to frustration.    

These little problems might have solutions, but we mere mortals cannot resolve them, because we’re susceptible to the dumb guy/smart guy dynamic. If we cannot resolve a little thing immediately, or easily, we feel dumb, because we imagined that we would be able to solve such things by now, and we feel like dumb guys looking out on the smart guy world that is able to solve their problems. The most frustrating element of this dynamic is that we know some smart guys, and they’re not really that smart. They just have this ability to adapt to variables without the fear that others might consider them dumb for not being able to solve their problems.

What is that? How do they do that? I don’t know if we’re born with preconceived notions about who we are, or if we age into them under the umbrella of idyllic images. We don’t know anything about all that, but we thought we’d be much further along than we are now. We’re not able to figure things out as well as the smart guys who really aren’t that smart. So, what’s the difference? The difference is they approach problem-solving from an ego-less perspective. They’ve been fixing their problems for so long that they know that anytime they try to fix matters there will always be variables that make them feel dumb. They also know that fixing these problems is hard, and fraught with failure. When they fail, they have the same feelings of frustration, feelings of failure, and embarrassment as everyone else. Everyone wants their first solution to work, and everyone feels like an idiot when it doesn’t. The difference between them and us is the “what now” principle. 

What do we do when all of our accumulated knowledge and experience don’t help us fix a problem? First, we curse the manufacturers who created everything from the tools we use as useless to the various swear words we have for product itself, “They shouldn’t have made this so … hard!” When we’re done with that, we might direct our anger at ourselves, our loved ones, and any neighbors who happen to be watching us without offering any help. The next thing we try, following the tenants of the “what now” progressions is to try something else.  

It cannot be that easy, we think as we watch others solve their problems so easily, and they do so with an ego-less approach. That’s disgusting. And we think it is both, especially when their solutions lead to better health, wealth, happiness, and peace of mind. If they don’t like themselves the way they are, and we suspect they do with jealous rage, they appear to know themselves far better than we do, and the most sickening part of it is they want us to be as happy as they are. They want to share their mentality with us and help us shed our complexities. They don’t demand we use their solution, and they’re not hurt when we don’t. Their goal is to join our quest for a solution to that which plagues us, and their solution often involves doing it differently than the way we’ve been doing it.

The problem for the problematic is that they don’t appear as concerned with finding a solution that might work for them, even internally. Their goal, presumably, is to draw attention to the complexities, so they can garner sympathy and attention, and so we all acknowledge their problem for what it is. 

When we reach the nadir of this argument, we have two choices. We can either walk away or acknowledge the severity of their complaint, and offer sympathy. Neither choice solves our problem, of course, but it becomes obvious that we don’t want to solve our problems as much as we thought, and we only want others to acknowledge the severity of our problems as we lay it out. If we perform according to their wishes, our reward is their soothed smile. 

***

I saw that smile once in the otherwise uneventful silence of a hospital’s emergency room (ER). While counting what felt like hours for an ER attendant to tend to me, I overheard another ER attendant inform a teenager that she had a condition. I can’t remember the specifics of her condition, but I remember that it was not dramatic, life-altering, life-threatening, or severely debilitating. “This will require some effort on your part to maintain a modicum of good health,” The ER attendant informed her.

The teenage patient smiled a half-smile that she couldn’t hide, when she received the diagnosis. She turned that smile off quickly as the ER attendant listed off what she would have to attend to to maintain good health. She listened with her serious face on. She didn’t intend to smile, but it happened. She turned it off, because she knew how serious the moment was, but she couldn’t keep it off for long. She turned away from them when the smile rose again. She knew she wouldn’t be able to stop smiling, and she knew it wasn’t appropriate for the situation. 

Before I speculate on what I thought sparked that twinkle in her eye, let me write that it’s entirely possible that the ER attendant’s diagnosis soothed her because it was something, and those of us who have had our body fall apart in small, confusing ways can empathize because we know that something is far better than the fear of knowing nothing. 

Some of us can spend months living in the confusing scary world of knowing nothing before we break down and schedule a visit to our doctor’s office, or worse, the emergency room. We eventually reach a point where we know we need help figuring out what’s wrong with us. We listed our symptoms on various medical websites, trying to come to up with a diagnosis of our own, and we found a whole lot of nothing. Armed with a diagnosis, we, like this young woman, can find some solace, because it puts an end to the not knowing, and a proper diagnosis can lead to specified medicinal care and proactive measures we can employ to maintain some modicum of health that could lead to better health, more energy, and a longer life. A diagnosis and a prescription, or as in this case a prescriptive course of action, are solutions to our problem that can lead to a comforted smile.

The smile I saw on her face was something different however. I saw a little spark in her smile that suggested she couldn’t help but find this a little exciting. We can’t explain such a smile, but we know that this diagnosis will add some dramatic complications to our life. Most of us live simple, boring lives, because we inherited quality genes that provided us with a finely tuned and well honed machine that rarely breaks down. We appreciate the brilliance of the design of our body, on some level, but after living with good health for as many decades as we have, it can be … a little boring at times. When our body breaks down, in small, relatively harmless and painless ways, it can be interesting and even a little exciting for reasons that we know are kind of weird and tough to understand or explain. 

I do not know what was going on in her head, of course, but I imagine that she knew that this condition would not only require attention from her, but her family, her friends, her employer, her school, and everyone else who cared about her. She probably sat in that ER room thinking that she would become the center of attention among those who cared about her. Until they could devise a plan to help her manage her day-to-day activities, she would also be a subject of sympathy from those concerned about her health. She knew she could talk to them about it, and that smile suggested she looked forward to those conversations and all of that love and attention that followed. She knew she would be able to express her concerns, and she knew they would finally listen to her, because this was a big deal. They, along with her doctor, would help her devise a plan that would include a disciplined diet that she would have to follow, and she probably figured she could violate it when she was “feeling a little naughty”, and because she had a relatively mild case, the consequences of these violations would be minimal, but her friends and family would still be concerned when she did that.

She probably also thought about her obnoxious brother, boyfriend, and everyone else who thought they knew what was wrong with her. They probably offered her a guess, and she argued with them and told them that it was far more serious than that, but they wouldn’t listen. They also offered her simplistic home remedies that promised some quick-fix solutions to what ailed her. Her smile suggested that she couldn’t wait to tell them they were all wrong, all along, and her condition was far more complex than any of them dreamed. Armed with ER attendant’s diagnosis, she realized she could now tell them all to go to hell. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. This is a big deal. You have no idea what I’m going through here. I have a condition that requires constant care and treatment.” That smile told me that she couldn’t wait to drop these lines on her obnoxiously simplistic friends and family. And if they continued to argue with her, she could drop some delicious line, such as, “Oh, so, you’re telling me that you know more about this than a doctor?”

***

What is the antonym of solutions-oriented thinking? Is there one? Thesauruses list a number of antonyms for solution, but they have no listings for an antonym of solutions-oriented. These formal sites do not list a term like problems-oriented or problem-centric. Those terms do not exist in their view, because no one is problems-oriented, at least in the sense that they use problems to achieve some happiness. Less formal sites suggest that a problems-oriented person would rather stew over their problems rather “than activate critical-thinking skills to find solutions.” Having problems makes them feel more adult, responsible, and important, and any attempt we make to try to help them arrive at a solution only minimizes their problem in their eyes.

Solutions-oriented thinkers are no smarter, healthier, or in any way better than those who appear to relish talking about their problems. Solutions-oriented thinkers are often quick to recognize patterns and devise an immediate solution, but they, too, have to face the flaws in their pattern-recognition thinking. When those humbling experiences occur, they choose a more methodical approach that includes consulting others, manuals, or another more methodical approach, and they use that information to devise another solution.

“But I thought you just said your initial solution was the answer,” their agitators say. “I thought you knew-it-all.”

“I was wrong.”

Solutions-oriented thinkers are wrong as often as everyone else is, and as we listed above they’re not smarter than us. They might try to find a solution, and they might fail. This leads their agitators to another smile, the inevitable, “See” smile, followed by, “See, you’re not so smart.” 

When I was teaching a bunch of young-uns how to shoot a basketball, I displayed the proper technique. I missed the shot when I was showing it to them them. “Why would I take advice from you?” they asked. “You missed the shot.”

“Just because I missed that particular shot doesn’t mean it isn’t the correct way to shoot the ball. If you use proper technique, your probability of making a shot increases.”

The problems-centric person does not want to listen, and for a wide variety of reasons they prefer to keep shooting the ball the way they’ve always shot it. When their shot never improves, they say, “I just suck at basketball, and the sooner I come to grips with that fact, the happier I’ll be.” The player who wants to get better might not want to take advice from a person “Who missed the shot,” but their best bet will be to try a method other than the one they have, because they will rarely make the shot the way they’re currently shooting it.     

The solutions-oriented thinker might be surprised, confused, and frustrated when their proposed solutions don’t work, and problems-oriented people might enjoy that initial failure, but the solutions-oriented person does something that shocks the problems-oriented person, they try something else. True problem solvers find arriving at a solution an ego-less approach. The recipients of their ideas often believe it is anything but.  

Some solutions-oriented thinkers in solutions-oriented positions, in a Fortune 500 company, decided to put their money where their mouth is by doing away with the traditional interview process. Through trial and error, they’ve decided to do away with the closed boardroom, “hot-seat”,  interview that challenges the potential candidate to solve a hypothetical problem. “This is the problem. Quick, what is your solution?” These Fortune 5oo companies found that this line of questioning doesn’t separate the quality, ideal candidate from the less than. These innovative companies decided to send their questions to their potential candidates’ homes, via email, before the interview, to allow them to process the question, trial and error it, and arrive at what they consider the best possible answer. The Fortune 500 companies now recognize that quick thinking candidates look and sound great in the traditional interview, but that that does nothing for their long-term. The “hot-seat” scenario questions will find the person who “thinks quick on their feet”, and it shows the candidate’s problem-solving hard-wiring. By sending the questions home, however, the companies are now suggesting that their ideal candidate does not have to think quick, and that methodical thinkers often come up with better, more creative, and sometimes more innovative solutions than those who come up with quick, bullet point solutions. The methodical thinkers are trial-and-error processors who diagnose a problem, come up with a solution, recognize the errors of their subjectivity, pose other solutions, recognize the errors of their impulsive, patterned thinking, and arrive at a final solution that the “hot-seat” thinker who “thinks quick on their feet” probably wouldn’t even consider. The take-home method might also allow the potential candidate to forecast variables and diagnose and treat them accordingly. 

The quick-on-their-feet candidate always looks and sounds better behind closed doors. They display confidence, experience, intelligence, charisma, and a number of other intangible qualities we admire in those we meet, but how many quick-thinking, well-spoken, and confident candidates turn out to be the best employees over the long haul? How many of these ideal candidates only display their ideal qualities in the interview? How many of them outperform their peers in the training room, answering every question the trainer asks. We call them hotshots, and hotshots know how to make excellent first impressions. They know how to dress for success, they memorize the answers headhunters want to hear, and they do it all with an award-winning grin. Yet, depending on the industry we’re in, we often find that these types often shine bright and burn out quickly.

Most of the best employees we work with are quiet, unassuming types who offer unique, creative, and innovative approaches to problem solving. They may not be the best employees in the training room, as they may not be the type to raise their hand to answer the trainer’s questions, and they may not be the best employee after the first two weeks. It might take them a little time to figure out the finer points of the machinations of their company, and it might take them a little more time to figure out their role in it. They aren’t the type to dazzle their employer in the early stages in the manner the ideal “hot-seat” quick thinker can, and this frustrates them because everyone wants to make a great first impression. This has haunted them since high school when the “hot-seat” quick thinkers dazzled their teachers. The methodical, slow processors often tried to keep up with them in the beginning, because that’s just what they did in high school. We often had the wrong answer in class, and we were ridiculed for it by our peers, and at times our teachers. We learned to avoid sticking our neck out. Candidates who could absorb such ridicule, and endure the lack of faith they received from teachers and bosses for initially being wrong developed the ability to simply try something else. These candidates, Fortune 500 companies are now saying, are such a rare commodity that they’re willing to upend the traditional interview process to find them. They know such thinkers do not perform well in the standardized, traditional interview format, so they tried another one to find that special candidate who tried something else when their initial, impulsive thoughts didn’t work. The Fortune 500 company doesn’t want people who are always wrong of course, but even the best candidates are going to be wrong once in a while, and some of the times those errors will be humiliating. When that happens, they’re forced to endure the “what now” questions, but due to their mode of thinking, they’re more accustomed to the what-now questions than the “hot-seat” quick thinking dazzlers. What do we do when all else fails? Decades of trial and error evidence have shown Fortune 500 companies that their ideal candidate is an ego-less thinker who already knows what it feels like to be wrong, and they know what to do about it. By changing the traditional “hot-seat” interview format, these companies were trying something else to try to find those who try something else.   

Defeating the Aliens

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“The aliens are not evil, but they are here to eat us,” our main character replies to the first question the talk show host asks him. This contradiction draws some laughter from the studio audience, as they don’t understand the difference. “Do we consider the lion evil? Of course we don’t. When lions eat cute, baby antelopes, they don’t do it to satisfy some perverse love of violence. Anyone who thinks lions are evil is assigning their thought process to the primal actions of the lion, or they might watch too many cartoons. I agree with those who say that the aliens are not evil in the same vein, and I disagree with my colleagues on this note, but I can only guess that the lion’s prey don’t care what their intent is. We know the only reason lions kill is that they’re hungry. I think the aliens who landed on our shoes are desperately hungry, and they know we have meat on our bones. They just want to eat it. If you consider that evil, that’s up to you, but my bet is that the baby antelope doesn’t suffer their fate without, at some point, mischaracterizing the lion’s motive.”

The reactions the various players have to the main character’s appearance on the talk show ends up saying more about them than it does the main character, or the aliens. When the scientists and reporters attempt to interact with the aliens, soon after the shock and awe of their arrival subsides, they do so to understand why they’re here. They want to befriend them, and we follow their lead on the matter, because we want learn everything we can about them, so we can learn from them.

The aliens know their arrival is the greatest thing that has ever happened to us, and they know how much it excites us. They operate in good faith, in the beginning, and they focus on public relations to build trust with us to hide their real motives. When one of the reporters, assigned to cover the aliens, disappears, the aliens’ approval ratings suffers a dive. The public begins to suspect that the main character might be right when he suggested that the aliens captured her, filleted her and refrigerated her to take her meat back to their home planet.

“They had their eyes on that reporter,” the main character suggests, “because she had right combination of muscle and fat. My friends and I have studied all of the people who have gone missing since their arrival, and we’ve found no discernible patterns, other than they’re not too fat or too muscular. We think the aliens are eating those of us of a certain body mass index that contains a quality mix of fat and muscle. We think there are so many humans on earth that they’ve developed a finicky preference. They prefer those of us with a little fat to add flavor to our meat, in the manner a little fat flavors a ribeye steak. 

“Their initial landing was awe-inspiring,” our main character says on another talk show, “and I was as affected as anyone else by their initial messages, and their attempts to help us advance our science, but the number of missing people that followed alarmed me so much that I began studying them. It’s them, I’m telling you, they’re the reason we now have so many missing people. They’re filleting them, and refrigerating them to feed the starving population on their home planet. I don’t know why it’s so hard for us to accept this idea. Our water supplies have not diminished, nor any of our other natural resources, and I don’t think they’re here to build friendly relations between the planets, as they suggest. There’s no evidence to suggest that they’re here to breed with us, or any of the other things we’ve guessed aliens might want over the decades. So, what’s their motive? I don’t care what their public relations team says, we should still ask why they came here in the first place? We’ve heard them say they had the technology to come here decades ago, so why now? Why are they here? I think they regard us as food, and I’ve been trying to get that message out before it’s too late. As we sort through all these complex arguments regarding their intentions and motives, we forget Occam’s Razor, “All other things being equal, we may assume the superiority of the demonstration that derives from fewer hypotheses.” Simply put, the best answer is often the simplest.”

Most moviemakers line “alien attack” movies with hints of the adversary’s high-minded intelligence. The aliens, in these productions, are required to be of an intelligence we cannot comprehend, and they are of unfathomable strength and power. Our production would state that evidence suggests that power and strength usually counter balance one another in most beings. Is the lion smarter than the human is? No, but that wouldn’t matter in a one on one conflict. Is the body builder smarter than the average person is? Most are not, because we all focus on one pursuit to the usual detriment of the other characteristic. Thus, the alien cannot be of superior, unfathomable intellect and superior strength and power. Not only is it a violation of what I consider the natural order of things, it’s not very interesting.

Yet, even productions that try to have it both ways, be they sci-fi novels, movies, or otherwise eventually begin to train their focus on one of these attributes. If they depict the aliens as the literary equivalent to the bloodthirsty lion is this nothing more than a slasher flick? If they focus on the superior intellect, do they do so to achieve a level of complication that might lead to more favorable critical reviews? Whatever the case is, we now require our moviemakers to provide subtle hints of alien intelligence. The more subtle the better, as that makes it creepier. The moviemaker, as with any storyteller, might be feeding us the entertainment we want, but I don’t think so.

I think the quality moviemaker modifies his material in such a way that it provides subtle hints of the surprising and unusual intelligence of the aliens. They spool out hints of the aliens’ intelligence in drips to further horrify and mystify us. They do this to mess with our mind in a way that a slasher flick doesn’t bother doing. They want to creep us out and scare us somewhere deep in our psychology.

In our production, the aliens have developed powers that we cannot comprehend, but as with any decades-long reliance on a power, it comes at a cost. To explain this theory, the main character says, “Imagine if we could emit super gamma rays from our eyes, in the manner these aliens do. It would be a superpower to be sure, but it might lead us to neglect the intelligence we might otherwise employ in tactical and militaristic conflict. We might rely on those powers so much that it could result in a deficit of our intellect. I submit that even though these aliens employ some war-like tactics, they’re as intelligent as a lion and not as smart as we are. I think we can defeat them with our intelligence.”  

Every alien/monster movie eventually also eventually turns into an allegory about our inability to accept outsiders. In our production, the aliens would use our compassionate approach to outsiders against us. They are intelligent enough to put together a seductive war-like plan, and in doing so, they purport to support a cause that most humans adore. They don’t have a cause, but they know that we’ll follow them to our own demise if they cater to our heart correctly.

The reporters and scientists in every alien/monster movie are always correct in the designs they create for how we should approach and handle our relations with aliens. What would happen if they operated from a faulty premise? Everyone who employs the scientific method to resolve a crisis, approaches the situation with a question, does background research and eventually reaches a hypothesis. At what point in the attempts to prove or disprove that hypothesis, do we troubleshoot and find out if we approached the issue from a subjective or biased view? At what point, do we arrow back to the beginning on our algorithm and correct the question that led us to an incorrect conclusion? 

In our production, the reporters and scientists are operating from a flawed premise they develop as a result of their own biases and subjective viewpoints. The aliens enjoy that premise and begin building upon that narrative to sell it to all earthlings. These useful idiots inadvertently aid the aliens’ public relations campaign to soften us up. They discover, too late, that the less worldly main character’s simple truth that while the aliens are not as evil as their detractors suggest, they’re also not hyper-intelligent as the reporters and scientists theorized. The idea that they just want to eat us bears out, and we realize that if we all agreed to these facts earlier, we could’ve saved a lot more people. We all had a difficult time agreeing to the idea that we were of superior intellect, but once we did, we used it to defeat them. We used our intellect to nullify their superior force. We were elated with the victory, of course, but once life returned to normal, there was that sinking feeling that if we just ignored the reporters, the scientists, and all of the people who believed we should be more accepting of the aliens sooner, we probably wouldn’t have been victims of the worldwide slaughter that ensued. If we listened to the main character, and all of the people who supported his view, and we followed his simple strategy for attack, we could’ve saved a lot more lives.