The Thief’s Mentality

December 4, 2012December 11, 2024 Rilaly2 Comments

The best thief I ever knew accused me of stealing, lying, and cheating so often that I began to question my integrity. A woman I dated cheated on me so often that I’m still embarrassed that I wasn’t more aware of her infidelities. Her octopus ink involved her accusing me of cheating on her, and she did it so often that I forgot to pay attention to what she was doing to me. If their goals were to prevent me from analyzing them, they did an excellent job because I spent most of my time defending myself around them. Some might call what they did projection, others might call it deflection or obfuscation, but I believe the games these people played fall under a comprehensive, multi-tiered umbrella I call the thief’s mentality.

Kurt Lee introduced me to the confusing mind of a deceptive person. The art of deception was such a key component of his personality that he thought he was able to spot transgressions gestating in the minds of those around us. In the manner a professional saxophone player spots nuances in the play of another, Kurt Lee spotted the intricacies of manipulation around him, and he did so from the same angle of admiration. Yet, he put so much effort and focus into tuning into their frequencies that his instincts often led him astray.

Kurt taught me more about deception than any other person I’ve encountered, movie I’ve watched, or book I’ve read on the subject. He would serve as my prototype for those who would exhibit a wide array of similar traits, traits I would only later deem the characteristics of the thief’s mentality.

The most interesting aspect about him, a characteristic that might defy that which I will describe throughout this piece, was his charm. When it served him, Kurt Lee could be the nicest, most engaging, and infectious person you’ve ever met. He was also a funny guy, and genuinely funny types have a way of disarming us, unless we stick around long enough to learn more about the games they play.

Those who knew Kurt Lee, on a superficial level, envied him for the ways in which he openly defied authority figures without guilt. Those who actually spent as much time around Kurt Lee as I did, however, witnessed that for all the charisma a piece of work (POS) displays, they ultimately end up destroying themselves from the inside out.

One afternoon while on a city bus, Kurt decided to play with the crocheted ball on top of the stocking cap of the elderly woman who sat in front of him. My role in this spectacle may be one of the things I have to answer for on Judgment Day, because I found his appalling act hysterical.

I was young, we both were, but I was so fascinated by this that I now ask myself why? I was learning and learning takes all shapes. We learn Geometry, History, and what to do and what not to do from our peers. We also learn answers to the question of why a young male, in the prime of his life, shouldn’t play with ball atop an old woman’s stocking cap. We learn the difference between a Kurt Lee and ourselves, and the answers are fascinating. Is it all about morality, I asked myself, or does it have more to do with common decency? My mother taught me that when a young, healthy male sees an elderly woman sitting alone, he should smile at her and try to think up something kind to say to brighten her day. My mother taught me to hold the door for her, and she said that I should consider it a privilege to give up my seat to that woman on the city bus, if no other seats were available.

Not only did Kurt Lee ignore those conventions, he chose to pursue the opposite. He chose to violate the sense of security of one of most vulnerable member of our culture by playing with the ball atop her stocking cap. It was wrong on so many levels, of course, but it was also a fascinating exploration of human nature. How would this old woman react? How would a real POS counter her reaction? Why did he do it in the first place? Did he think he would get away with it? Did he even care? I would never know the answer to the latter questions, because I didn’t know Kurt on that level, but my fascination with the answers to the former led me to urge him on with laughter. That was wrong, too, of course, but I now believe my laughter was borne of curiosity. I wanted to learn more about the moral codes by which we all abide. I hoped to learn all that by watching another solidify my rationale, with no regard for the consequences of violating them. My thinking was not that complex, at the time, but I couldn’t wait to see how this episode would end, and I dare say that most of those who are more successful in abiding by the standards our mothers taught us would not have been able to look away either.

The vulnerable, elderly woman eventually turned on Kurt, and she did so with an angry expression. She allowed the first few flicks of the ball atop her stocking cap go, presumably taking a moment to muster up the courage to tell him off, and then she gave him that angry look. Kurt Lee appeared ready to concede to that initial, nonverbal admonition, until he saw me laughing. Egged on by me, he did it three more times before she reached a point of absolute frustration that led her to say something along the lines of, “Stop it, you young punk!”

To that, Kurt began thrusting his hips forward in his seat, while looking at me, whispering, “She just wants unusual carnal relations!” As a teenager trying to elicit more laughter from another teen, Kurt Lee did not use that term. He selected the most vulgar term he could to describe his extrapolation of her desires.

***

Had Kurt Lee decided to stick his middle finger up in the face of a healthier, younger adult, it would have been just as difficult to avoid watching. The fact that he chose such a sacred cow of our culture for his rebellion, however, made his actions over-the-top hilarious. In my young, unformed mind, this was a real life equivalent to David Letterman’s man-on-the-street segments, taken up ten notches on the bold-o-meter. I would later learn that Kurt’s motivations did not involve making profound statements about our societal conventions. He just did things. He was a doer, and doers just do what they do and leave all of the messy interpretations of what they do to others. I would later learn, by watching Kurt Lee, that he selected his victims based on their inability to fight back. In this vein, Kurt Lee was something of a coward, but I couldn’t know the full scope of Kurt Lee at the time. At the time, I found his actions so bold that I couldn’t look away, and I couldn’t stop laughing.

I encountered a wide variety of thieves in the decades that followed Kurt Lee, but they paled in comparison to his mentality, his philosophy, and what drove him to be so different from everyone I had ever met. To listen to him speak on the topic, however, there was nothing different about Kurt Lee. He believed he simply had the courage of his convictions. He ascribed to the more conventional line of thought that we were all afraid to be like him, but he added that the rest of us have had this part of our makeup denied to us by our parents and teachers for so long that we now believe we are different. The import of his message was that this was not about me, and it was not about him. It’s about human nature and the thief’s mentality.

“If you could get away with it, you’d do it too,” was his answer to questions we posed. “You mean to tell me you’ve never stolen anything? Ever? All right then, let’s talk about reality.” Kurt Lee was a thief, and like most thieves, he did not defend his position from the position of being a thief. He would substitute an exaggeration of your moral qualms regarding thievery, claiming that any person who has stolen even once is in no position to judge someone who steals on a regular basis.

In short bursts, and on topic, Kurt Lee could lower the most skilled debater to the ground. We called him a master debater, with the innuendo intended, because it was almost impossible to pin him down on specifics. It was a joy to watch. Prolonged exposure, however, opened up all these windows into his soul.

When we asked him how a guy from the sticks could afford the latest, top-of-the-line zipper pants, a pair of sunglasses that would put an employed fella back two weeks’ pay, and an original, signed copy of the Rolling Stones, Some Girls. He would tell us, but even his most ardent defender had a hard time believing Santa Claus would be that generous to even the nicest kids on his list.

Kurt Lee stole so often by the time I came to know him, the act of shoplifting lost much of its thrill. He decided to challenge himself in a manner top athletes, and top news anchors do, by hiring third-party analysts to scrutinize the minutiae of their performance. He asked me to watch him steal baseball cards from a baseball card shop owner that we agreed needed to learn a lesson, because the man refused to buy our cards 99 percent of the time. On those rare occasions when he agreed to buy them, his offers were so low they were almost insulting.

I posed a theory about our transactions with this shop owner. I theorized that the intent behind his frequent refusals to buy our cards was to establish his bona fides as a resident expert of value. That way, when he informed us that any of our cards were of value, we were ready to jump at the chance, no matter what amount he offered. “By doing so,” I concluded, “he actually makes us feel more valuable, because we think we finally have something worthy of one of his offers.”

“You’re right,” Kurt Lee said. “Let’s get him.”

I felt validated for coming up with a theory that Kurt Lee accepted, but in hindsight, I think Kurt Lee would’ve used anything I said to motivate me to conspire against the owner.

“One thing,” Kurt Lee said before we entered. “I don’t know if this needs to be said, but I’m going to say it anyway. Don’t watch me, don’t talk to me, and be careful about how often you look at me. Don’t try to avoid looking at me either.” When I laughed at that, a laugh that expressed some confusion, he added, “Just don’t do anything stupid or too obvious.”

I had reservations, of course, but I considered this an invitation into a world I never knew, and Kurt Lee’s provisos might have been necessary, because I was not only excited by Kurt’s invitation, I was just as nervous and scared. I was what a number of senior citizens called a good kid, and up until the moment I met Kurt Lee, I led a very sheltered existence. Before entering the baseball call shop, I considered the idea that my foreknowledge of this crime could implicate me as an accessory, but I couldn’t shake the asexual intimacy Kurt Lee was sharing with me, with this invitation into his world.

Standing near the door stop, Kurt Lee opened his pockets, in the manner a magician might, and he asked me to confirm that he had no cards in his pockets. I considered that an unusual act of bravado, but I didn’t stop to think about what it implied in the moment.

Throughout the course of our hour spent in the shop, I didn’t witness Kurt Lee steal one thing, and I mocked him for it. “What happened? I thought you were going to steal something,” I said as we stood outside the store. “I’m beginning to think you’re chicken.”

He allowed me to mock him without saying a word. When I finished, he opened his jacket to show me his inner pockets. What I saw knocked me back a couple steps. I actually took a step back when I witnessed the number of baseball cards that lined his inner pockets. I would’ve been impressed if he displayed one card, and three or four would’ve shocked me, but the sheer number of cards he stole without me noticing one act of thievery, led me to believe that Kurt Lee wasted his abilities on the petty act of shoplifting. I considered telling him to try his hand at being a magician for I thought what I just witnessed the skills of a maestro of deception. I was so shocked I couldn’t think of anything to say. If I could’ve managed words, I would’ve said something nerdy about how I thought Kurt should find a way to employ this skill in a marketable way.

Soon after recovering from that shock, I began to wonder how one acquires such a deft hand. As with any acquired skill, there is some level of trial and error involved, and nestled within that lies the need to find a utility that permits the thief to proceed uninhibited by shame. A skilled performer in the arts or athletics delights in displaying their ability to the world, in other words, but a thief has to operate in the shadows, and they acquire their skill with a modicum of shame attached. Success as a thief, it would seem to those of us on the outside looking in, requires the potential thief to either defeat that sense of shame or find a way to manage it.

Shame, some argue, like other unpleasant emotions, becomes more manageable with greater familiarity. When a father introduces shame to his child, in the brutal assessments he makes regarding the value of his kid, the child becomes intimately familiar with shame before they are old enough to combat it. When such brutal assessments are then echoed by a mother’s concern that their child can’t do anything right, the combined effort can have a profound effect on a child. When those parents then console the child with a suggestion that while the child may be a bad seed, but they’re no worse than anyone else is, something gestates in the child. The moral relativism spawned from these interactions suggests that the search for the definitions of right and wrong is over, and the sooner the child accepts that, the more honest they will become. Seeing their mother scold a teacher for punishing their child for a transgression only clarifies this confusion a little more. In that relativist scolding, the child hears their mother inform the teacher that their child can do no wrong, and they see her unconditional support firsthand. Over time, the child must acknowledge that their parents will not always be there, so they will need to develop internal defense mechanisms in line with what they’re learned. The child also learns to accept these realities for what they are, for the Lee family has never had the courage necessary to commit suicide.

I hated discounting the level of individual ingenuity on Kurt Lee’s part, but he was simply too good at the various forms of deception for it to have been something he arrived at on his own. Attempting to source it might be a fool’s errand, but I wondered if I were able to sort through Kurt’s genealogical tree, if I might find sedimentary layers of grievance, envy, frustration, and desperation that worked their way down to him. To those who consider seeking evidence of foundational layers a bit of a stretch, I ask how much of our lives do we spend rebelling against, and acquiescing to parental influence, and how many of us can say we are entirely free from it?

Poker players tell me that everyone has what they call a tell, which is a twitch, a habit, or a characteristic that we cannot hide when we’re attempting to deceive. “It’s your job to find it during the game,” they say. I don’t doubt what they say. I’m sure we all have tells, and I probably have a ton of them, because I get nervous when I’m being deceitful. When I stole, I felt guilty, ashamed, and I had anxiety issues. What if I kept doing it? What if I had decades of experience? Would I get better at it, and would I find a mechanism to drain the shame of it all? Some in the field of neurology even suggest that research shows that our brains change when we lie more often. Does someone with a thief’s mentality hone the ability to manage emotions most of us normally experience with theft, lying, and cheating so well that it would take a maestro of deception to spot them in the poker game?

I was so obsessed with this, at one point, that I accidentally stepped over the line between being curious and badgering, something Kurt Lee made apparent in his volatile reaction:

“You think you’re better than me?” Kurt Lee asked, employing the universal get-out-of-judgment free card of moral relativism. This time-honored redirect relies on the lessons taught to us by our mothers, that we are no better than anyone else is, but Kurt’s rant began to spiral out of control when he tried to pivot to what he believed its logical extension.

If no one is better than anyone else is and everyone resides on the cusp of whatever Kurt Lee was, the logical extension required the inclusion of an individual that many perceived to be so harmless it was almost laughable to suggest otherwise. The individual, in this case, was a kid named Pete Pestroni. If Kurt Lee’s arguments were going to hold water, the idea that Pete Pestroni was a wolf in sheep’s clothing would have to become an agreed upon fact. I’m still not sure why Kurt Lee went down the Pete Pestroni road so often, but I suspect it had something to do with the idea that if Pete was immune, in one form or another, everyone else had to be too. In Kurt’s estimation, Pete was just too weak, or too scared, to let his inner-wolf run wild. We would laugh at the implausibility of Pete Pestroni having a Kurt Lee trapped inside, a thief dying to come out, but our intention was to laugh with Kurt Lee. He wouldn’t even smile, however, because some part of him believed that if everyone was a thief, then no one was, at least to the point of separating the thief out for comparative analysis. This was a sacred chapter in Kurt Lee’s personal bible, and an ingredient of the thief’s mentality that took me decades to grasp completely.

The thief’s mentality is a mindset that involves a redirect of exposing an uncomfortable truth, or a hypocrisy, in others, so that the thief might escape a level of scrutiny that could lead to an uncomfortable level of introspection. An individual with a thief’s mentality may steal, but that person is just as apt to lie and cheat. The thief’s mentality begins as a coping mechanism for dealing with the character flaws that drive them to do what they do, but it progresses from those harmless, white lies to a form of deception that requires a generational foundation.

The thief’s mentality requires deflection, by way of subterfuge, as a means to explain the carrier’s inability to trust beyond the point that they should be trusted, but some thieves’ outward distrust of others reaches a point of exaggeration that says far more about them than those they accuse. Their cynicism is their objectivity, and others’ faith in humanity is a subjective viewpoint, one that we must bear. We live in a dog-eat-dog, screw-or-be-screwed world in which those who trust anyone outside their own homes are naïve to the point of hopelessness. If the listener is to have any hope of surviving in such a world, it is incumbent upon them to see passed the façades and through the veneer, others present to the truth.

The truth, in Kurt Lee’s worldview, held that TV anchors with fourteen-inch parts, and perfect teeth, ended their days by going home to beat their wives. He didn’t believe that a person could attain wealth by honest means. He insisted that because some states convicted some Catholic priests as pedophiles that meant all Catholic priests were, and he had a particular fascination with infidelity in the White House. “You think JFK and Clinton are different? They’re just the ones that got caught is all.” There was also his contention that little old ladies who complained about having someone toy with the balls on the stocking caps just want to have unusual carnal relations. As with most tenets of a person’s worldview, there was some grain of truth in Kurt Lee’s, but he often had to put forth a great deal of effort to support it.

In most such discussions, Kurt Lee’s audience was immune. “I’m not talking about you,” he would say to his audience, so they might view the subject matter from a shared perspective. If we began to view ourselves as an ally, we might join him in convincing our world that he’s not that bad, or the world is as bad as he is. Yet, our agreed upon immunity from his charges begins to fracture in the course of the thief’s logical extensions. When that happens, the thief turns their accusations on us. We might consider ourselves all virtuous and moral, but the thief knows everything there is to know about hidden agendas. They maintain a perpetual state of readiness for that day when we break free of the constraints of morality and loyalty to expose our evil, naked underbelly to the world. The thief has us all figured out, because they know those lies we tell. It’s the thief’s mentality.

Thieves may even believe their exaggerated or false accusations, regardless of all we’ve done to establish ourselves as good, honest people. The validity of their accusation, however, pales in comparison to their need to keep us, the subjects of their accusations, in a perpetual state of trustworthiness. Kurt Lee, and my adventurous ex-girlfriend, made their accusations to keep me in check in a manner they knew I should’ve kept them in check. The import of that line provides us a key to understanding why an individual with a thief’s mentality would make such a charge against us, and the Pete Pestronis of the world who are so honest it’s laughable to suggest otherwise. Some might call such accusations psychological projection, the inclination one has to either deny or defend their qualities by exaggerating comparative examples in everyone else. Others might say that it’s some sort of deflection or obfuscation on the part of the thief, but I believe it all falls under a comprehensive, multi-tiered umbrella that I call the thief’s mentality. Still others might suggest that Kurt Lee’s accusations were born of theories he had about me, the people around him, and humanity in general. If that is the case, his theories were autobiographical.

Whether it was as complex as all that on an unconscious level, or some simple measures Kurt Lee developed over the years to prevent people from calling him a POS, I witnessed some try to turn the table him on the accusations by telling Kurt Lee that other people trust them. “What are you talking about?” they’d ask when Kurt would start in on one of his ‘You’re no better than me’ rants. “My guess is when you come over for family reunions, your aunts and uncles hide their wallets and purses. They don’t do that to me, because I don’t steal, cheat and lie.”

Kurt Lee’s response to this was so clever that I thought it beyond his years. Again, I hate to discount individual ingenuity, but it just seemed too clever for Kurt to deliver as quickly as he did when he said:

“So, if someone trusts you think that means that you’re trustworthy?” Kurt Lee responded. He said the word trustworthy, as if it was an accusation, but that wasn’t the brilliant part of his response. As brilliance often does, his arrived in a section of the argument where the participants will say whatever they can to win, regardless what those words reveal. Kurt Lee suggested, in different words, that those who consider themselves a beacon of trustworthiness are suffering from a psychosis of another stripe. The reason I considered this response so perfect, as it pertained to this specific argument, was that it put the onus of being trustworthy on the person who challenged Kurt Lee’s trustworthiness. It also put further questions regarding Kurt Lee’s character –or what his inability to trust the people in his life said about him– on the back burner, until the questioner could determine whether the level of his own trustworthiness was a delusion that group thought led him to believe.

Crafting the Frame

With all that Kurt Lee taught me about this fascinating mentality, always fresh in mind, I’ve had a number of otherwise trustworthy friends ask me how to deal with the thief in their life. They failed to understand why their loved one couldn’t trust them in even the most benign arenas of life.

It stressed one of my friends out, “I don’t know what I did to damage his trust, but no one’s ever accused me of half of the things he does.” She said that she considered herself a trustworthy person, and she always had, but she was insecure about it, as we all are. “How do I win him back? How do I regain his trust?” she asked.

“It’s not about you,” I told her. “It’s the thief’s mentality.” I didn’t enjoy saying this to her, because I was basically telling her that she was trapped in a relationship with the afflicted. I explained the mindset of the thief, as I learned it from my personal experiences with Kurt Lee, and she later told me that it helped.

“It helped in a weird way,” she said. “I finally had a name for what he did. Every time he accused me of cheating on him, or wanting to cheat on him, I’d think, it’s the thief’s mentality. It didn’t stop the accusations or the insecurity I felt afterwards, but it helped in a weird way to know that someone else went through all this. It sort of helped me frame him in a way I never considered before.”

When I told her that she wasn’t trapped in the relationship, she said, “Oh, I know. I could dump him like yesterday’s trash,” but she never did. She ended up marrying the guy. So, whatever short-term relief she experienced with this idea that her loved one was never going to trust her anymore than he trusted himself dispelled it.

The damage thieves, like my friend’s lover and Kurt Lee, incur is irreparable. They likely do not enjoy the lives they’ve created for themselves, and the idea that they can’t even trust the one person in their lives that they could, or should, but their accusations do allow them to spread their misery around a little. It lightens their load to transfer some of their toxins to others. It also gives them a little lift to know that we are a little less trusting than we were before we met them. They must find some relief in the belief that they are not such an aberration, but this relief is temporary, as the toxins that have made them what they are as endemic to the biological chemistry as white and red blood cells. Nevertheless, it must please them to know that after our interactions with them, we now view humanity in the same cynical, all-hope-is-lost manner they do.

If it’s true that a mere two percent are self-aware and reflective, then the lack of self-awareness, at least as it pertains to what we are, and what we are to become, is as endemic to the thief’s mentality as it is in every other walk of life. Like the rest of us, thieves do not believe they live on an exaggerated pole of morality. Rather, they believe they reside in the middle, alongside the rest of us, somewhere just north of the good side of the fuzzy dividing line. They also know that we’re all tempted to do that one thing that could tick us over to the south side. What separates them, to their mind, is their lack of fear, coupled with their refusal to conform to the norms their parents and other mentors taught them. They are also keenly aware that we place most of humanity on their side of the fuzzy line because we all have problems trusting those we don’t know well enough to determine whether they will make moral decisions in life. Some take this natural state of skepticism a step further. Some thieves’ exaggerated, outward distrust for those around them says far more about them than about those they condemn and accuse. It’s the thief’s mentality.

Esoteric Man

June 20, 2012December 31, 2024 Rilaly1 Comment

It was difficult for me to evaluate the advertising executive trying to sell my wife on radio ad space in a fair way, because he dressed like every guy I hated in high school. I knew I was being unfair, but as Anaïs Nin said, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Certain things are the way they are, but they’re complicated by the way things were, and we cannot escape their influence.

The guy’s checkered pants reminded me of one of my many arch rivals in high school. The checkers were multi-colored, of course, but some of those colors were pink, and my arch rivals wore pink. Most of the guys I detested in high school wore pink. The ad exec wore sensible shoes, John Lennon spectacles, and he wore his hair in a messy coif. He was also a people person that knew how to relate to us, the folks, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with him before he said twenty words.

“I don’t even have cable!” was the most memorable thing this nouveau hipster said to punctuate the fact that he didn’t watch TV. “I only have Netflix, because my kid enjoys some show, but that’s the only reason.”

“Wow!” is what we were supposed to say in the space he provided. “You’re so esoteric, and philosophical! You’re what they call ‘a with’ it dude!” The hipster mentioned the name of the show his kid enjoyed, but it was as irrelevant to him as it was us. But talking about his kid helped us relate to him, right? Even though he was, of course, divorced, and he only saw his kid on weekends. Yet, he only dropped some info on his kid. He didn’t want us to know much about his kid, because he probably didn’t. He wanted our focus on him and his preferences.

He was a flood of useless information about himself. He was on the edge of his seat wondering what he was going to say next. He was a serious man who didn’t take himself too seriously, but he could get out of control at times too, and he knew that I knew that’s just the way he was, even though I never met him before.

“I don’t drink soda! It’s gross!” he said to initiate another preferences portion of our conversation, so that our sales meeting could be delightfully informal. He found his preferences so esoteric and philosophical, and he found that if he added a personal touch to his conversation it would culminate in a sale. This portion of the conversation gave schlubs like us a point where we could relate to this salesman. He was being real for us to sell himself in the manner all salesmen know is fundamental to obligating customers to fork over a dollar.

As the two of us listened to this man, he presumably decided he was losing me at one point in our conversation, so he decided to focus his energy on me. He directed his energy at talking more often, when his focus should’ve been on talking less. This esoteric ad exec struck me as the type who has always been able to talk himself out of a pickle. His modus operandi (M.O.), I can only assume, was focused on creating more chaos in the minds of his clients, so that they didn’t have time to consider if a sale would be beneficial to them or not. I think he watched the tactics that law enforcement officials use in a drug bust. Break in, crash things, smash things, and scream a bunch of things at high volume to dismantle the central nervous system of the alleged perpetrators, so they don’t know what is going on, until the scene is secure. I think he saw that method as a way to sell ad space.

I’m not sure, if this ad exec decided to disregard transitions in his stories, or if he wasn’t a fella who employed transitions, but his stories began to arrive in such a flurry that I lost my place in his stories a number of times, and I ended up forgetting almost everything he said. He was turning red at various points, and he began yawning in others. This suggested to me that his brain wasn’t receiving enough oxygen, but it was obvious that he preferred an oxygen depleted brain to a lost sale.

“Wow! You must really be smart,” those without control of their sardonic nature would say to the list of this man’s preferences. This is the type of response that an esoteric man expects from a TV watching, soda drinking, Neanderthal. He didn’t get it, this time. This time, he got a guy who stared at him with silent ambivalence, waiting for him to get back to the whole reason we came to him for in the first place.

“You know?” was the only transition that this man didn’t completely abdicate. It was the only form of punctuation this man had left to let his listener know that a sentence was complete. He mixed in a couple “You know what I’m saying?” questions to prevent losing me with redundancies, but that was the extent of his variation.

“Yes!” I replied to put a verbal foot on the floor and keep his transitions from spinning out of control. I almost screamed it once, but the parental, patience practice of counting to ten was all that prevented the outburst.

He engaged in an “aren’t we guys stupid?” chat that everyone considers harmless fun. When that didn’t achieve the desired result from me, he flipped to the “we’re all really stupid anyway” pop psychology, gender neutral nuggets, and the two of us were supposed to laugh heartily at those stories, because we could both relate to dumb people humor. It reminded me of a heavy metal band’s lead singer attempt to reach his audience by mentioning the fact that he actually rode in a motorized vehicle on the paved roads of my hometown. “Today as we were driving down MAIN STREET…” YEAH!

He was a nicknames feller. Even though he didn’t apply such nicknames to me, I’m quite sure that he calls more than one male in his life “dawg”. He probably also calls a couple of them “Bra!” and he bumps fists with them as he works his way past their cubicle. I don’t know if he has any authority in his place of work. If he does, I’m sure he asks all his peeps to call him by his first name, because he’s an informal fella who wants informal relationships with all of his peeps. I’m sure he has an open-door policy, and that all his top performers are “rock stars!” He’s a people person who’s not afraid to let his hair down. If one of his peeps has a name that begins with a B, I’m sure he calls them ‘B’, or ‘J Dawg’ if their name starts with a J. He’s also the esoteric guy in the office that conforms to group thought when called upon to do so. I’ve been around his type so often that I can pick them out of a closet from fifty yards away. They all have nihilist beliefs in private, and they don’t bow to the man, until that man is in the room, and then they turn around to insult “the dude” the moment after he leaves the room and they hear the click of the door closing.

We didn’t talk politics, but I’d be willing to wax Brazilian if it’s revealed to me that we see eye to eye on anything. He’s the type who seeks “a third way” of governing. He strives to avoid labeling. He prefers the open-minded perception. He pities those simpletons conditioned to believe that there are actually very few forms of government from which to choose, and that there are only two viable political parties in this country to run it. Their type knows of another way. They don’t have specifics, but they feel sorry for those of us that have bought into the system. They are open-minded. They are extraordinarily intelligent, and they equate their intelligence with their morality. They are thoughtful, and they are wonderful. We are wrong. We attach these labels to them, and they are “truly” so much more.

When he eventually swerves into the whole reason we came to see him in the first place, I’m gone. I’m beyond listening. He thinks he’s warmed me up with his ‘look at me’ chatter, that he considers good bedside manner, but in reality I’ve begun to feel so sorry for him, and his pointless attempts to sound interesting, hip, funny, likable, intelligent, esoteric, philosophical, and personable, were so overwhelming that I shut down and missed the first two minutes of his sales presentation when he finally started it.

“We guys don’t seek medical attention.” He smiled after that one. He thought that was polite guy, fun chatter. He surveyed my reaction. He told me he enjoyed sports, and then he asked me if the San Diego Chargers were still in existence. I normally would’ve enjoyed such ignorance of my arena, but I realized that I didn’t care if he knew anything about the Chargers, the NFL, sports in general, or anything else. This was a huge accomplishment for this guy, whether he knows it or not, for as anyone who knows me knows, I get off on personal preferences. I want to know what books a person reads, what movies they like, what music they enjoy, and what restaurants they frequent. I love top ten lists, the reasons behind why another’s rankings. Some have informed me that this is one of my more annoying attributes. This esoteric ad exec didn’t have to face any of my more annoying attributes, because he managed to achieve a nearly unprecedented place of me trying to avoid the subject of personal preferences. I just wanted him to stop talking.

The quiet types have something to hide, is a description we’ve all come to accept in one form or another. It could be true, in some cases, but I’ve experienced a number of quiet types who simply don’t know what to say or when to say it. I’ve met other quiet types who have been slapped back for saying what they think so often that when they have a thought on a particular matter, they’re frozen by the fear that you’ll uncover something about them if they voice their opinion, so they usually find it more comfortable to say nothing. When a person talks and talks, we naturally assume they are as advertised. We assume that they’re the “open book” they’ve told us they are so many times that they can only be trying to convince themselves. They are extroverts who are conversant on so many topics that we can’t think of anything that they could possibly be hiding, until we walk away from them with the realization that they didn’t say anything. They just said a whole lot of nothing on nothing topics. We might label that obfuscation and misdirection. We might consider that an art form normally associated with magicians, but talkers can display a talent for this art form too. They just don’t use their hands … as often.

Most People Don’t Give a Crap About You

May 8, 2012August 14, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

Enter some old wise man.

Every day, at eleven A.M., a crotchety, old professor walked through our school’s cafeteria. He had a bag lunch, but he insisted on grabbing a tray to lay his lunch out on. I don’t know if the man was as wise as the typical old man is, or if he was any wiser. I do not know if the man had any allegiances, as his lectures did not favor a religion, a gender, race, political party, persuasion, or class. He didn’t favor students either. I didn’t love too many classes through the years, but I loved his class. He didn’t care. He was a teacher who was at the tail end of his career, and much of the passion he had for teaching was gone. He was still a great teacher, however, and I wanted him to know that I was a willing and eager student. He didn’t care. It was frustrating.

When we tell people others crucial, character-defining moments in our lives, we expect them to side with us, the storytellers, regardless how they feel about it in private. This old man didn’t bother with such pleasantries. It was annoying. I reached a point where I wanted him to tell me that I was correct about one thing, and I wanted him to acknowledge it in an unequivocal manner. He did tell me I was correct in some circumstances, but he added so many qualifiers that I never arrived at a sense of satisfaction in his company. I never left his class, or his lunch table, feeling that I had the correct answer about anything. As a result, I sought his counsel on a number of issues that plagued me.

He never seemed pleased by my need to seek his counsel, nor did he appear annoyed by it. He never greeted me in a pleasant fashion, but he was not rude. He was the type of guy that I’ve always tried to please. A dog acts this way, I realized before I approached him with one particular question. A dog finds the one person in the room ambivalent to its existence, and it attempts to befriend them. The dog is accustomed to all humans fawning over it, and when one person in the room does not gush over its cuteness, they feel a challenge to their essence, and the dog cannot move on until it convinces that one person that it’s as cute as everybody else thinks it is.

Some have complimented me for my objectivity, and they’ve said that my observational skills exceed most of those they encounter, so why do I continue to seek the counsel of the one person that doesn’t acknowledge my attributes in any way? Am I as insecure as the attention craving dog with an identity crisis? Did I need him to tell me, “You’re the one living life the way it should be lived?” The answer was that I saw this man’s ambivalence as objectivity. I thought he might be the one to answer my questions about life in a manner that was neither complimentary nor insulting, and he did … in one short, ambivalent sentence.

“My friend and I have been having a debate,” I informed the crotchety, old professor. “I believe people are inherently good, until they prove otherwise.” I told him that I considered living with an optimistic mindset the only way to live. I told him that optimistic people should be prepared to be wrong about humanity on occasion, but that that anecdotal evidence should not dissuade them from the overriding belief that most people are decent.

“My friend thinks this is a naïve way of approaching humanity,” I continued. “He thinks it’s best to live by the idea that everyone you run across is corrupt, until they prove otherwise. You shouldn’t trust anyone outside your immediate family, he said. This mindset will prepare you for that slime ball you encounter that attempts to dupe you out of everything you hold sacred. Not everyone we run across will be evil, he concedes, but it’s best to be prepared for those that are.”

“I’ll give you a third possibility,” this professor said chewing on some awful smelling, squishy sandwich. “Have you ever considered the possibility that most people don’t give a crap about you?”

It may have been twenty years since that professor dropped that line on me, but it’s had such a profound impression on me that I still can’t shake it. It’s as if he said it to me yesterday. I stayed on topic with this professor. I didn’t consider that a quality answer, at the time, and I continued to belabor the point until I drove him down into what I considered his core answer. Long story short, I don’t remember anything he said after that short, quick response. I forgot that response too, until it started to pertain to more and more situations in life, and I had to admit that it was a relatively profound assessment.

Most of us know, on a certain level, that the people around us don’t give a crap about us. We know we don’t give a crap about them either, but how many things do we do in one day to convince the others around us that we’re wonderful people? How many times do we stop all laughter at the bar to say something important, so someone might think we’re more intelligent, more politically astute, and savvy, and crafty, and how many posts do we put on Facebook to convince those on the other side of the political aisle that they are, in fact, wrong? How many times do we read and write sentences, such as those, with the belief that we’re discussing others, as if we’re above it all? We’re right, they’re wrong, and they’re fools for believing that anyone gives a crap what they think.

Depending on the nature of our interactions, most people don’t care if we have an optimistic outlook on them that offers them a chance to be wonderful. Most people won’t approach us based on different if our perspective is positive or negative. Most people don’t give a crap about us, or our perspective on life. The slime balls and shysters of the world don’t give a crap either. They aren’t more wary of us based on how prepared for them, or if we are more prepared for them, and the very idea that we believe that we’re more prepared for them may, in fact, be our undoing when they flip the page on us and become the guy that we want them to be. They’re bad guys, and this is what they do, but that doesn’t mean they give a crap about what we may think of them when our interaction is complete.

Enter the salesman.

Anyone who has had a stressful sales job, with commission-based compensation, knows that a majority of the population prepare for slime ball, sales people. Most people employed in sales aren’t slime balls, but they prepare for those of us who think they are.

On day one, those training for sales positions receive a massive binder that could kill a thirty-pound Beagle if dropped from a decent height. This binder contains a training manual that contains a reactions chapter, given to us by the sales training team. As with everything else in life, the language in sales’ training manuals is not as overt as the illustration I will provide here, but anyone that has been on a sales training team knows that the reactions chapter is the chapter that the training team devotes the most time to in training sessions.

The “No thank you” chapter of this massive training manual teaches the incoming salesperson how to deal with polite refusals. To find this information, the salesperson learns to turn to page twenty-three of the “reactions” section of this sales training manual. If the salesperson receives a “hell no!” they’re instructed to turn to page forty-six of the reactions section, and if they receive that witty retort –that their potential client thought up that morning in the mirror– in preparation for a slime ball like them, “If it’s so great why don’t you buy it?” they turn to page sixty-nine. If the reaction they receive is a rehearsed one that calls a sales person out for being the slime ball that they know salespeople are, “Because I know slime balls,” salespeople learn that all they have do is to turn to page ninety-two for a suitable response.

The best defense, for potential clients that do not want to become one, is to take a step back and realize that they’re in the majority of those people who don’t trust salespeople, and that they’re in a majority of people who believe they have the perfect witty response to put a salesperson in their place. This defense also requires an acknowledgement from the potential client that they cannot play this game better than salespeople can. This is our home turf, and we know how to play this game better than those we call. The responses they give trainees are focus group tested and focus group approved. These responses are determined to be the best, most polite way of saying we don’t give a crap about you.

Salespeople, don’t give a crap that their potential clients might be the smartest man who ever walked the earth. The corporation, the training team, and their manual, teach us to avoid wondering if we might have a good guy on the line. They train us to make the sale, regardless what the call recipient might think of us, or our abilities. If a potential client wants to know the super-secret way of defeating a salesperson at their game and a method that will separate them from the pack who will have their psychology twisted and turned into a sale, all salespeople know the solution. It involves the psychological complexities inherent in hanging up the phone in the midst of the salesperson’s sales pitch.

In about every cold call, sales job I’ve had in telemarketing firms, there is one constant: the salesperson cannot to hang up the phone. No matter what “the smartest man that ever walked the earth” on the other end of the phone says, the salesperson cannot hang up. A sales rep has sales quotas, and time allotments for each call, and the smart people “who know slime balls when they happen upon them” are wasting everybody’s time by trying to outdo us. By hanging up the phone, the potential client is saving themselves, and the slime ball, salesperson on the other end of the line, a lot of time and frustration.

After spending so much time in training, strategy meetings, and coaching sessions, I thought I found the perfect solution, and the ideal rationale to back up that solution that could help so many of my friends avoid the frustration of a sales call. I told them that the only action the reactions portion of the training manual doesn’t cover, because it can’t, is the hang up. It is fool proof, I told my friends. I received blank, “of course” stares. No one refuted my findings, but no one followed them either.

This is the point where the line ‘psychological complexities inherent in hanging up the phone’ comes into play, for most people cannot simply hang up a phone. Nice people think that hanging up phone violates everything their mother taught them about etiquette. The nice people think that the salespeople might be nice people too, and they feel bad that the salespeople who are working so hard to make this sale. Hanging up, in the middle of someone else’s sentence is rude and mean, and they can’t violate the standards no matter who the other person on the line is. There are others, however, and they are the focal point of this piece. They are the ones who have too much invested in the idea that they are one of the very few people on the planet who can spot a slime ball and beat them at their game, and hanging up the phone just seems too easy and too anti-climactic.

Most salespeople are no smarter, or craftier, than anyone else is, but we have huge advantage: years, sometimes decades, of focus tested material at our disposal. Our training teams have learned from the trial and error experiences of the salespeople in their company, and other companies trading trade secrets, regarding the best ways to flip a potential client. They have alternatives available for just about every type of personality who chooses to work in sales for them. Most of these companies have hundreds of salespeople on the floor making calls, and they know that most people are not aggressive self-starters. They have fashioned responses for these people to help them sound smart, crafty, and pleasing to the average potential client. Therefore, the next time a potential client receives a phone call from a potential slime ball. My advice is to hang up the phone. The potential client may consider this a battle at the O.K. Corral, and they are prepared to do battle with nothing but their wits. If this is the case, they may want to consider the idea that their adversary has a focus-tested, rapid-fire machine gun.

If a potential client is fortunate enough to run across a salesperson who cannot match the potential client’s perspicacity and insurmountable wit, and the salesperson cannot respond to the witty retorts that they thought up that day in the mirror, that salesperson might land themselves in a boardroom for coaching tips. These coaching tips will revolve around the concept that the salesperson should stop caring so about what potential clients say. If that salesperson cannot overcome their sense of empathy and compassion, a salesperson who can will replace them.

For those “slime balls” who strive to excel in sales, a sales call can be like an inescapable penitentiary to a convict. Inmates don’t give a crap that good men have spent their lives designing and fortifying a fortress to make it impossible to escape. Most inmates aren’t the type to appreciate craftsmanship, until they begin searching for that one weakness in the structure. The very idea that they consider this fortress inescapable is what intrigues them. They spend their days and nights focused on finding that crack in the walls good men have built to keep them in. Few inmates believe they are bad guys who need to do time for the crime they committed. They want freedom. They want to escape.

Quality salespeople approach sales in the same manner, in that they don’t give a crap if anyone considers them a wonderful person. They spend countless hours in training seminars and strategy sessions, trying to find the perfect way to flip someone like you. They discuss you on their lunch hour, and they take you to the after work bar to discuss the minutiae of your phone call with their peers. As hard as they try to separate their work life from their home life, they will take your wit and intellect home with them, they will discuss you with their spouse, they will eat you with their tuna salad sandwich, and they will spend hours of insomnia staring at the ceiling with you in mind. It’s not about being nice or mean to a quality salesperson, and it’s not even about the product they’re selling. As many top-tier salespeople will tell anyone interested, sales is not about selling a product as much as it is about a salesperson selling themselves.

If you’ve ever been in sales, in an office of hundreds of people, you’ve witnessed a salesperson lose it:

“How dare you say that to me?” one man said into the microphone attachment of his headset. “Sir, that’s uncalled for,” he said at another point in his phone call with an irate customer. “I understand sir, but I don’t think that personal insults are necessary.”

This particular salesman was a tenured agent on the floor, and my interactions with him led me to believe he was a levelheaded feller who was in full control of his emotions. This phone call appeared to have him on the verge of tears. I wondered, for a moment, if he was ill suited for the job. I flirted with the notion that he may have been doing this for so long that he suffered from burn out. I also wondered if I was suited for the job, for if this otherwise this levelheaded guy could fall prey to hysterics, anyone could. When his call ended, I asked him if he was okay. My concern was more self-serving than an actual concern I had for his well-being.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“What?” he asked. He laughed and made a clicking noise with his mouth, followed by a wave of his hand, to suggest that the phone call hadn’t affected him in any way. “Just making the sale,” he said filling out a ticket that we all had to complete after completing a sale.

My “Are you all right?” question became an ongoing joke for a little while, any time an agent engaged in theatrics to complete a sale. “I’m fine,” the responding jokester would say fluttering a completed ticket in the concerned, fellow jokester’s face. “Just fine.”

My time spent as a phone sales agent taught me as much about human psychology, as it did sales. It taught me that when the prospective client enters the salesperson’s domain with all of their witty responses and refusals, that if these salespeople are any good at what they do, they will understand more about the potential client’s psychology than the potential client does. Coupled with the strategy sessions, and peer review, is the eight hours a day, forty hours a week, hands on application and trial and error of dealing with the best response the client has ever heard regarding a sales call from an annoying telemarketer.

The most shocking aspect for those who receive non-stop, telemarketing sales calls might be that to a tenured salesperson exploiting a client’s weaknesses no longer provides much of a thrill. Most experienced salespeople, schooled in the art of understanding a potential client’s psychology, learn so many ways of flipping potential clients into the sale that doing so becomes nothing more than something they do in the course of a day at work.

Enter the Panhandler.

A panhandler also doesn’t give a crap about the person who hands them money. They may manipulate the psychology of the generous person for the period of time it takes to complete the transaction, but the minute that transaction is complete, they will turn to the next pedestrian or driver. They won’t remember anything about that your generosity. They may remember that someone handed them a twenty-dollar bill, as opposed to the fives they’ve received from everyone else, but that will only change the calculations of how much money they’ve received to that point. They may be fond of the charitable giver during the time it takes to complete the transaction. They may even give that person some of the obligatory responses that are sought, but that’s to feed into the ego of their giver, and the general sense of altruism that may encourage the giver to believe their altruistic enough to give out another twenty in the future. When a panhandler proceeds to purchase their goods, however, they won’t smile when they think of the overwhelming generosity they’ve encountered that day. They won’t think of the person that someone gave them a twenty, as opposed to a five, because they don’t give a crap about them.

They also won’t give a crap that a hard working person with a couple extra bucks trusts them to do something fruitful with the money they’ve given them. As far as the panhandler is concerned, it’s their money now, and they’ll do whatever the hell they want with it.

“That guy must’ve been feeling real guilty about something,” they may say when they are gathered with their snickering peers in regards to the twenty dollar bill fella, but that generous person doesn’t care that they may say that. That’s not why they gave them some of their hard-earned money. They had no agenda. They did it because they’re a generous person with a wonderful sense of altruism about them. Bottom line. If that’s the case, they should continue to give panhandlers money. They should not do it with the belief that the recipient of their largesse will think that they are a better person for doing it. They won’t. They will not consider that person bad for giving them the money, of course, and they may not even consider them were a chump for doing it, but my guess is that they accept that person’s money with all of the consideration, and emotion, of a courteous ticket taker at a movie theater completing a similar transaction.

Enter the Fashion Aficionado.

Nobody gives a crap what we wear either. That might be a bit of a stretch, as we’ll discuss below, some will notice, but they are in the minority. We’ve all received compliments for the clothes we’ve worn, and we’ve all adjusted our wardrobe based on compliments and mockery. Clothes make the man, is something we’ve all said for generations. ‘People pay attention,’ some say. ‘I’ve heard it. I’ve witnessed it firsthand.’ We’ve all met the asterisks, the people who notice, but unless we’re the type who wears the finest clothes known to man, and we constantly remind our peers that we will wear nothing but, a greater percentage of the people we run across will not remember anything about another what we wore that day when we thought everyone knew. Some will notice, of course, and they are the people we consider when we dress. We dress to impress, but how many notice? How many people, in a room full of let’s say twenty, will notice anything about our clothing choices for the day? Our conceit leads us to believe that it’s more than you may think, for most people don’t vocalize their impressions, but the reality suggests otherwise.

In a psychological study, cited in David McRaney’s book You are Not so Smart, one subject of a psychological experiment wore a flamboyant Barry Manilow T-shirt, as instructed. The others who volunteered to partake in an experiment, without knowing the particulars, refused to wear such a flamboyant, attention-grabbing shirt. They didn’t think their pride could take the hit. They believed that the subjects of the experiment would forever label them the guy who wore the Manilow T-shirt that one day. The subject who agreed to wear the shirt received instructions to walk into an auditorium of students to ask the professor a question. He didn’t do anything more or less to draw attention to himself, or his shirt. The result: 25% of the students in the class that day remembered any details about the kid who walked in or the shirt interrupter wore. In a separate part of the same experiment McRaney cites, a subject received instructions to wear the finest duds available to man and interrupt a professor’s class in the exact same manner. The result: 10% of the students in the class remembered any details about the finest duds available to man. Very few people give a crap about what we’re wearing, and even fewer remember what we wore yesterday, because most people aren’t paying near as much attention as we think and even fewer give a crap about us.

Nobody gives a crap that we just messed up in our speech. They don’t even care when we apologize for our mess up. As David McRaney suggests, “Most people don’t pay enough attention to a speech to know that an error was made, until the speaker draws attention to that error by stumbling, losing their place, or apologizing for their error.” Most people just want us to get on with it, so they can go home to watch their shows.

How many of us have committed a show stopping error that we assumed everyone in the auditorium noticed? We stopped in our speech, under the assumption that it would be pointless to continue. We believe that we have just lost all credibility with our audience. We look out into our audience with an overwhelming sense of shame. Yet, how many times have we witnessed an individual commit an error? How many times have we wanted that speaker to go back and correct the error? It’s been my experience, as an audience member, that we just want the speaker to get on with it. Most people in an audience don’t care that we just mispronounced “Nucular”, or “Eckspecially”, or that we may have mixed up our tenses, or lost our place. They just want us to get to the reason they decided to attend our seminar in the first place.

How many errors do professional speakers committed in one hour? How many of those errors did we consider egregious? Yet, we watched the professional speaker move on, as if nothing happened? ‘How can they do that?’ we wonder with amazement. ‘That was an egregious error that would’ve crippled us.’ The professional speaker knows that most people aren’t paying near as much attention as we are, and the fact that they are able to move on is what has separated them from the rest of us in the course of giving a speech. That hutzpah is what has made them a speaker that people are willing to pay to hear.

The very idea that the speech we are delivering should’ve been perfect was our dream scenario. If we can find a route around our self-indulgent desires that this speech may have been the greatest speech delivered since they laid Winston Churchill to rest, we might find that most people care far more about how a speech is delivered than they do what was delivered in that speech. They may want a nugget of information that they didn’t have before entering the ballroom, and if that speaker can deliver that, everything else will fade in their memory.

A fellow employee of mine wore mismatched shoes one day. It was a real life exclamation point to me. One was a running shoe, and the other was a dress shoe. The shift we were on was the night shift, so we can only assume he didn’t just wake up for a poor night’s sleep and put his shoes on. The point of including this story is no one noticed, until I pointed it out to them. How could no one notice? Two mismatched running shoes, or dress shoes, might be noteworthy, but a dress shoe and a running shoe should be an exclamation point that should lead to staring. How do they not notice? How did he not notice, walking about? Most people don’t notice on an otherwise boring Tuesday night.

Nobody gives a crap when someone has mustard on their collar, that they have mismatched socks, or that they haven’t talked all day because they’re upset about the fact that their husband has become lactose intolerant. We may listen to their complaints, but how many times do we hear them? If they say, “I’ll bet you’re wondering why I’m so quiet today?” how many times did we notice that they weren’t speaking? How many times did we fail to notice, because we were focusing on our own problems? Some of the times, we tell people our problems, because it feels better to talk about them. Are they listening, or are they thinking that their problems are so much worse? In the end, neither party gives a crap, because most people aren’t paying enough attention to one another. We just want our workday to end, so we can get on with the lives that most people don’t give a crap about.