Social Psychological Operations

RilalyLeave a comment

“Excuse me,” I told the 7-11 coffee guy, “could I get in there?” I knew this guy. I was in line behind him twice before. I knew his routine, and I knew it was not courteous. The last time I was behind him, I swore that I would say something next time. I knew he would fill his cup, sip on it, and fill it again. I wondered if he was the type to calculate how much free coffee he attained in those little sips over the years. Once the cup was finally full, he would grab a sugar packet, tear it open and fill the cup with it, without taking the obligatory step to the side.

I put some of the blame on 7-11. They should put the sugar packets in a location that required a step to the side. Numerous other franchises do this for their impatient customers. This 7-11 did not.

As for the 7-11 coffee guy, I considered him a narcissist. For who, other than a complete narcissist, has no awareness of the people around him? I guess that’s the question isn’t it, I thought staring at his back, is a narcissist aware of his surroundings, and he chooses to ignore them, or is he blissfully unaware?

He has to be aware that others are waiting behind him, I thought, but as far as I could tell, he didn’t consider us in anyway. Maybe he’s not a narcissist. Maybe he’s just inconsiderate. Is there a difference?

In the midst of his sugar pouring, I hit him with my request that he step aside, and I was astounded by his response. He said, “What? Oh sorry,” as if it never occurred to him that people might be behind him in line. I was ready for a confrontation. I was ready for him to consider me rude. I had two to three lines ready for him. He didn’t know. I was so ready for what I felt sure to follow that I was a little disappointed. What really got to me was that there were three people behind me and two of them were chatting, making noise that should’ve made this man aware that other people were waiting for him to finish.

I wondered if the others in line considered this man rude, inconsiderate, or narcissistic. I wondered if any of them thought this might be some sort of psychological game this man played to achieve some sort of subtle dominance in our little 7-11 world. Most people don’t wake it this far, and even fewer would suggest that it was a psychological operation on par with that military term. Anyone who thinks this way should probably be checked out, is something the three of them might say. If a person goes that far, and they have all of their facilities, they might have way too much time on their hands, they may think too much, and they might overanalyze simple situations too much. It is an overreach to illustrate a point, I decided, but how many of these naysayers get obliterated in the psychological field of battle without recognizing that a shot was even fired?

When my turn to fill a cup finally arrived, I couldn’t keep my mind’s eye off that guy now stirring sugar into his coffee. I couldn’t stop thinking about how the man’s deliberate actions should be penalized. Our anti-climactic conclusion left me with the thought that I should add something more confrontational, just to have the exchange live up to the billing. ‘Well, be more considerate of others,’ is something I thought of saying, ‘from now on.’ I thought of two or three more things to say, as I poured my sugar in, but I decided to just let it die. The guy obviously didn’t mean to be inconsiderate, I realized, and there was nothing to be gained from further confrontation.

“Could you at least step aside to pour your sugar in,” one of the guys behind me said, “so we can get our coffee?” The irony of that question didn’t hit me in the moment. I was so focused on the first guy that the third guy in line woke me out of my thoughts.

It wasn’t until I said, “What? Oh sorry,” as I stepped to the side that the full breadth of the irony struck me. It dawned on me that the most vociferous complaints I heard about narcissists were often made by those who are so narcissistic that they never flirted with the idea that they might be a narcissist. This hall of mirrors was, at the very least, embarrassing, and at most a worrisome display of contradictions that could lead to a full-blown identity crisis. I didn’t have time for an identity crisis, I was late for work.

The moment wasn’t dramatic enough for an identity crisis either. It was just a couple of guys who were impatient, and once the matter was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction we all moved on without another word. I would’ve been able to put the matter behind me as quickly as it confronted me, were it not for the two men chatting. Those two men, number four and five in line, who were chatting so much that I couldn’t believe the first coffee pourer didn’t acknowledge their presence, were still chatting. That wobbled me a little more, as I stood there, but I knew I couldn’t stand there forever contemplating my place in the world, because I was late for work. Actually, I realized, I was on schedule for being on time for work, with what I considered enough time to allow for traffic delays.

Before entirely putting the matter behind me, I wondered how many identity crises are averted because a person is late for work. Is this why so few people are reflective, I wondered, while putting my keys in the ignition. Is this why so many people are so much happier than me? Is this how a narcissist misses their own narcissistic tendencies when they complain about another’s narcissistic characteristics? Is it psychological projection, or is it easier to spot another’s faults when we suffer the same? Do we need to be more reflective on matters such as these, or am I too reflective? Do I sweat the small stuff too much? These people don’t care about your contradictions, or that you may be hypocritical, they just want you to move aside, so they can get some coffee. Is there a fine line between being reflective and too reflective, and how many reflective types are so reflective that they’re almost afraid to leave their homes, lest they reveal a contradiction? If reflective artists like Kurt Cobain picked up a part-time job working the drive-thru at Arby’s, might he still be alive? Does a busy work schedule fill the empty spaces in one’s soul in such a way that they don’t obsess over obvious contradictions in their character?

Social Psychological Operations

Regardless how such moments play out, there are often some sort of psych ops (psychological operations) games at play in even the most mundane interactions.

The term psych ops is most notably associated with military operations, but it could be said that we engage in various forms of psychological operations every day. For the purpose of distinguishing the two, we’ll call the latter social psych ops, as opposed to military psych ops. This allows us to distinguish day-to-day, conversational psych ops from those that may eventuate in death.

If the third customer’s complaint affected us in such a way that we recognize the contradiction in our being, how do we react? In the interaction with the third guy, I was as nonplussed as the first guy, and I was as genuinely as apologetic. That’s really all you can do. The alternative is cleanse our soul and provide a detailed account for the how he revealed our contradiction on this subject. His response would probably be something along the lines of:

“Listen, I don’t want to get physical here, so I’m going to ask you once again to please step aside.”

The genuine apology allows everyone to move on. No harm no foul. Unless we happened to notice the clothes number three was wearing, the manner in which he parted his hair, the way he tied his tie, the way he licked his lips before speaking, or the brand of coffee he chose. If we noticed any of the above, we did so to counter their brief evaluation of our character, and the points we gained by noticing their flaws are often innocuous, and they do little-to-nothing substantial for our psychology, and we forget all about them the moment our coffee cup is full, because the likelihood of running into any of these 7-11 customers again is negligible.

Most true points, scored in social psychological operations such as these, involve encountering an opponent more than once, remembering the points we scored in previous encounters and using them in the future.

Let’s say that that the interaction we have at the coffee machine is not at a 7-11 involving complete strangers, but one that occurs in refreshment center of the office. Let’s say the person we encounter is one with whom we have an ongoing, work-related relationship. Let’s say the two combatants know superficial, something somethings about each other, but that they keep that information close to the vest. We might know some things about them, but we would consider it a violation of protocol to use that information against them. If that’s the case, a ‘How you doing?’ intro can take on altogether different meaning. They might say this in a benign manner, but it’s not as innocuous as our brief 7-11 interactions were.

“I’m doing fine,” we say. “Thank you for asking.”

“That’s great to hear,” they say. “How’s the wife?” It’s possible, and likely in most occasions, that these introductory questions are benign. Even the most cynical mind knows that’s possible, but we might also wonder if it’s as strategically innocuous as it appears to be. Why didn’t they choose to speak of the quality of coffee the company offers in the refreshment center, or the pizza they serve in the cafeteria? They could choose to speak about our boss, “I hear you have Mr. Druthers as a boss. I had him once, he’s a real ball buster.” They didn’t chose to speak about any of this. They chose to speak about our wife. Yet, we can’t openly psychoanalyze our interrogators, for there’s no defense to taking umbrage with relatively innocuous questions.

“Hey, I just asked how she was doing,” is what they say. We both know that anytime one assigns motive to a piece of conversation, that’s an excellent out. We all know that most such conversation points are innocuous attempts at polite conversation, but the cynical among us can’t help but think that some statements are strategically placed to put the subject in a place of feeling too sensitive.

Some of us believe that this tactic can be located somewhere in the devious chapter of their social psych OPS playbook, for we know they have no real interest in our wife’s condition. They may think that their wife is better looking, or in some way superior, to ours. They may also know that our wife is something of a nag, and that we have had some resultant, marital problems as a result that permits them some feeling of dominance through comparative analysis. It’s also possible that this is not an overt attempt to be devious, but that they just feel more comfortable discussing wives with us. The question we ask ourselves is why do they feel more comfortable talking about our wife?

“How are the kids?” is another question they may ask. “How’s your kid’s soccer game going?”

All of the same questions and answers apply to this question. They know our kid has had some challenges when it comes to displaying athletic prowess, and they have had no such difficulties with their kid. They know that they have a lot of social psych op points on us on this page, and they enjoy displaying them whenever the two of us interact in the refreshment center. It gives them a little lift for that day to know that while their lives are not what anyone would call intact, at least it isn’t as bad as ours.

Whether the subject of the conversation revolves around kids, or wives, most people do not concoct conversations with us for the sole purpose of proving superiority, and most of them do not take overt glee in whatever causes us stress, but they just feel comfortable speaking to us on certain subjects. They may not want to start a conversation about productivity numbers, for example, because that is where we have proven superiority. We may try to change the subject to productivity numbers, because that is where we feel most comfortable, and we may not take overt glee from their troubles in this area, but we feel that we’re in some sort of psychological arm wrestle.

“What do you think of that Jones fella?” they ask. “He’s such a blow hard, always going off about how great his kids are, and how great his wife is, and how much money he makes.” By saying this, they’re telling us that they like us because we’re humble, self-effacing, and self-deprecating, and they find our comments endearing. Nobody likes a blowhard, who doesn’t know how to laugh at themselves, and we all consider humility a virtue, but why do we prefer humble people? Is it because we don’t like playing these games, or does it have something to do with the idea that we don’t like playing these games with this Jones character, because he defeats us on most of our bullet points?

We tried being self-effacing around this Jones character once. He didn’t get it. He immediately went about telling us that he had no such problems in that area. We said what we said to be funny, but he used that occasion to take a leg up on us. That’s just who that Jones character is, we decide.

“As for that all that money he talks about,” our refreshment center friend adds. “I heard it from a bird, who heard it from another bird that Mr. and Mrs. Jones cannot afford that house they live in. Yeah, everyone thinks he has it all, but I’m here to tell you that the Jones clan is deep in debt, and they’re playing it day-to-day.”

The two of us know that Jones has a beautiful house, and we both hate him for the beautiful, well-rounded family he has. There’s got to be more to it, we say, searching for a taint in the man’s glorious armor. Knowing the man can’t afford the lifestyle he lives gives us both a lift for the day. Even if all we’re doing is speculating with each other about Jones’ situation, we feel a little better about our comparative situations.

“I could live like that too,” we add with a laugh, “if I didn’t mind living in debt.”

The two of us have just compiled some much needed points on the Jones fella that we can keep close to the vest the next time we see him. We thank this work associate for that information, because we needed that lift. We needed the social psych op points.

Strategic Psych Ops

The previous scenarios detail the strategy chapter of the social psych op playbook. In this chapter, the psych ops soldier is involved in information gathering activities on those outside their immediate sphere of influence.

The accumulation might begin with a simple attempt to understand our likes and dislikes, but they evolve this conversation into an attempt to understand why we have these likes and dislikes, until they have a snapshot of our soul, and our sense of life. They may not be engaging in warfare in the truest sense of the word, but the knowledge they gain in this basic training phase will help them establish some form of dominance in preparation for any for social warfare that erupts in the future.

“But I don’t do any of this,” some of our friends will complain, if we present them with social psych ops theories, “and I don’t know anyone who does.” When we hold them to account, by repeating to them some instances where they did, they say, “I wasn’t dressing you down. I just wanted to know how your wife and kids were doing. I was making conversation for the love of St. Francis of Assisi. I just wanted to know how your family was doing. Nothing more. I had no ulterior motives. I just wanted to get to know you better. Sheesh, maybe you need to get out more.”

It is possible that some people think this way. It is possible that their “How is your day?” conversation starter was totally benign? It’s also possible that their search for dominance was occurring on a subconscious level for which they are not even aware, but no one ever considers the idea that this attempt to tell you that they don’t play such games is a game in and of itself.

The follow up sentence to further condemn you to a few moments beneath their heel would be, “And I can’t believe you do … play games like these.”

Such a characterization might be daunting, in that it makes us think we might be an incurable cynic, and we should evaluate ourselves to see if we mischaracterize some comments, but some of the times they use such vulnerable moments to score future points on us.

It’s possible we might never know the difference. It’s also just as possible that they might engage in a similar tactic later on down the road, with the knowledge that we are now vulnerable to the cynicism charge. The latter occurs when we reflect back on the initial charge and realize that they were engaging in a social psychological operation that is foreign to us, one steeped in passive aggressions. We may believe that, on some level, they were lying, and we may believe we have just gained some insight into who they are, and that we have gained some points in the social psych ops playbook with that knowledge.

But, and this is a crucial element to understanding how other people’s minds work, they may not be deceiving us in any way. They may believe that they never engage in social psych ops. They may believe that they’re just nice people working their way through a day, trying to make as many friends as possible, but they might turn around, not five minutes later, and inform us of a conversation they had with Mary in accounting.

Some suggest that only 2% reflect on themselves objectively and that the rest of us have a subjective perspective of who we think we are. Thus, they don’t view their conversation with Mary in accounting the same way we do. They may see it as a simple conversation that the two of them had, and if we see something more in it, that’s on us. They may see Mary in accounting as the hoebag that she is, and the fact that Mary just happened to tell one of her hoebag stories to them was done without any prompting on their part, but the fact that they told us about it means that they think they scored some points on Mary.

The latter description is the true definition of social psych ops, for most of them occur without either party’s knowledge. Most social psych ops occur when we notice the clothes someone wears, the coffee they drink, their inferior hygienic practices, the manner in which they entered into our conversation or exited it, how often they swear, or how they part their hair, how they tell a joke, if they’re hip to the latest music, or if they’re too hip and conformed to marketing manipulation, how they get emotional, or if they do, what they eat, and how they eat, if they’re too random, or too calculating, and where we fit into all those social paradigms. Those are the social psych ops that we engage in every day whether we know it or not.

Like military psychological operations, social psych ops are conducted to convey select information and indicators to an audience to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of groups and individuals.

The mission of these operations is to inform our audience that we are superior to them in some way shape or form, or if that’s not the case, we hope to at least take something away from the interactions. The latter may be more important, for it is in these bumper car-type interactions, with opposing forces that we tend to locate some definition of our character. It is also by engaging in these interactions that we become more equipped to deal with them in the future. They can be practiced in wartime situations, and in peace, and they can be used to define or malign, but best practices dictate that we, at least, acknowledge how often they are in play with everyone from our fiercest opponents to our good friends so that we are prepared.

As with any exercise of this sort, our opponent will attempt to survey the battlefield before engaging. He will try to locate our insecurities and place his best forces there. The best social psych ops general will also have knowledge of his weaknesses, and either place some forces there, or cede ground. There’s nothing wrong with temporary, strategic surrender, as long as we recognize our opponent’s attack strategy for what it is. As with most martial arts training, self-defense is the optimal use of social psychological operations.

Those equipped with a brain that requires more processing, may need to concede ground to those who are blessed with quick-wits for a time. If we are the types who require more processing time, consider the fact that our life will be filled with social psychological operations from all quarters, and we will need to learn how to react to them. Accept defeats for what they are, recognize these psychological ploys for what they are, no matter what excuses are given for deployment –and there will always be excuses given for few openly admit their strategy– and develop counter attacks that may foil or prevent future attacks.

All attacks and counterattacks are situational, of course, but one needs to establish reference points for their opponents that they can use to counterattack. This universal frame of reference is vital to a psychological operations soldier, for once we’ve established ourselves in a given area our antagonists will attempt to switch the playing field on us. They might choose politics or sports, because their team has a recent history of beating ours in these arenas. They may choose the department of the company they work in, or our inferior position in the company. The might speak of the type of dog they own that is superior in a physical sense, or the shows we watch that are not as funny as theirs, or any psychological vine they cling to, as they hang off the cliff with all of their inferiorities dangling out for the world to see because they forgot to wear their psychological support hose.

One might think that those who engage in strategic, information often rely on professorial and clinical psychological study, but most of it relies on the incidental research we perform on friends and family to achieve active dominance on the battleground. It is the latter that we will concentrate on in our conversations here, for if a reader’s interests lie in the more clinical and professorial arenas there are countless books and blogs that will educate and entertain in this fashion, but we know what we know. For the rest, the reader must go … elsewhere.

Operational Psych Ops

To this point in our psych ops training, we have focused on some unknown strategic ploys and information gathering exercises of social psych ops warfare. All of this is key to understanding how these psych ops are employed, of course, but no amount of theoretical discussion will help a reader understand what they’re up against better than witnessing these practices deployed in live action.

Operational psych ops involve putting that which was gathered during the information gathering exercises of social psychological operations into play. It is an informed approach that the social psych op soldier uses to attack fellow psych op soldiers in what could loosely be termed a training exercise.

Have you ever confided a weakness to a friend? “I have a fundamental weakness about me that no one knows about, but don’t tell anyone else about it.” We provide these people excruciatingly painful details about our weakness, only to have them divulge it. We’re angry and vulnerable. “I confided that information to you in strict confidence!”

“If I knew it meant that much to you, I wouldn’t have said anything,” they say to our surprise. If you have been in this situation a number of times, you know the U-bend pipe defense that psych ops soldiers employ in a manner Buggs Bunny did against Yosemite Sam did to return gunfire.

“I told you that in strict confidence,” we say. “I said the words don’t tell anyone too.”

“Don’t be so sensitive,” they might say, or “Don’t be so defensive.” They may word their responses a number of ways, of course, but the point of their responses is that it’s incumbent on us to get over their violation of our trust.

Inherent in such messages is this idea that we’re naïve. “So, you can lie to me, break my trust, and twist my mind up with your tactics, and I’m the one who needs enough cultural awareness to accept these things for what they aren’t?” These responses are the type we don’t think of in the moment. Too often, we accept these evaluations at face value, and we walk away feeling too defensive and too sensitive.

The idea that a strategic operational campaign can occur without our knowledge is not only possible, it is likely, for they will often occur in pot shot fashion, similar to guerrilla warfare. This may appear to be a training exercise to all parties concerned, but watch what is said during training exercises, for they can evolve into a live-fire training exercise when we least expect it.

Tactical Psych Ops

Tactical psych ops are the culmination of all that was learned in the previous two phases of the social psychological operations, in that they are conducted in an arena assigned by the individual across a wide range of psychological operations to support the tactical mission against opposing forces. When the psych ops soldier exploited our weakness in the training exercises, they were testing our vulnerabilities, and gauging our reactions to see if the material could be used later, before the opposite sex, or in any arena that involves an individual that the psychological operations soldier is trying to impress.

One may not experience tactical operations from their closest friends for years, until such time that the individual uses all that they have learned in live exercises to impress that one person who means something to them. The victim might be surprised by an attack that appears to come from nowhere and didn’t appear to establish anything beyond what could be termed humorous and insignificant. For the operational soldier, however, the tactical use of psychological warfare is the end game. It’s the reason they invited you to this particular outing, it’s the reason they engaged in all those private, training exercises with us, and it’s the reason they continue to call us a friend.

One popular tactical psych ops weapon is the Dumb-Fire Missile. The Dumb-Fire Missile has no targeting or maneuvering capability of its own, and it is often used to counter attack a counter attack. It can be something as relatively benign as:

“But I was only kidding,” they say when we effectively counter their assault with the meanest thing we can possibly think of to counter their act of revealing information about us. A fight starts of course, and during the aerial assault, they say, “You meant it, but I was only kidding. Sheesh!”

The stealth effectiveness of the Dumb-Fire Missile occurs when it goes beyond dismantling the defenses of its opponent to persuasively encouraging popular discontent against our counter attack. The interpretation is that when they engaged in a powerful attack against you, they were only kidding, or they weren’t aware that it meant that much to you. “You can call me dumb for not knowing that it meant that much to you, but your counter-attack was just mean.” When you counter-attacked, it was obvious to all that your comment was the result of wounded soldier, laying on the battlefield, desperately trying to salvage their standing. Used often enough, the Dumb-Fire Missile can effectively degrade an adversary’s ability to conduct, or sustain, future operations against them in the future.

The Dumb-Fire Missile is similar to the U-bend pipe defense in that it returns fire, but it is more effective in disrupting and confusing the adversary’s decision-making process by undermining their command and control with the idea that we might never know when they’re truly serious. Most of those who don’t regard normal human interactions as social psychological operations think that these soldiers aren’t serious, and they will attempt to laugh as hard as others, because they don’t take themselves all that serious, and they’re perfectly capable of laughing at themselves, because they’re wary of being perceived as too defensive or too sensitive.

A successful deployment of this strategy, followed by the Dumb-Fire Missile, has the potential to procure enjoyment of foreign forces to a point that the social psych ops adversary loses the will to fight. By lowering the adversary’s morale, and then its efficiency, these operations can also discourage aggressive reactions by creating disaffection within their ranks, ultimately leading to total surrender.

The integrated deployment of the core capabilities of social operations warfare, involve psychological operations, personal deception, and a display of security in concert with providing support. These attacks can be launched under the guise of the aggressor pretending that these attacks are performed in a humorous vein, and you shouldn’t get so upset at that which they deem to be insignificant. It is a passive-aggressive approach that they use to undermine our base that makes us feel foolish for believing that we see ulterior motives. Once we understand that this is not so serious, any furtherance will influence us to side with them while they are attacking us, in a manner that will disrupt our normal reactions, and corrupt or usurp our normal adversarial decision making processes all while protecting them from current or future attacks on the topic in question.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_Operations_(United_States)

Eat Your Meat! How Can You Show Appreciation for Life, If you Won’t Eat Your Meat?

RilalyLeave a comment

“You’d eat it if you were on the field of battle,” Dad said when I displayed preferences regarding the food he prepared. “You’d eat it if you were hungry, but you’ve never known hunger, not in the sense that others have.”

Convincing children to show appreciation for food is a time-honored concern that dates back to the cavemen. When the caveman’s children stated they were tired of eating Mammoth, their mother probably felt compelled to remind them of the sacrifice and danger their father faced to provide them with their meal of the day. In those days, acquiring food was much more perilous than a drive to the grocery store. We can assume what the tales were like, those stories of peril the hunters went through, but we can also assume that the stories eventually bored the children. Later in the timeline, parents informed their children of the lack of available preservation techniques: “Eat it all, or it will go bad.” Modern technology provides safer and easier access to food, as well as preservation techniques that have become so common for so many generations that most parents have never been hungry, not in the sense that others have, and they’ve taken food for granted for the whole of their lives too.

The trick to convincing children to appreciate food is more difficult today than ever before. Some parents inform their children of the plight of third-world children, hoping to instill appreciation for what’s on their plates. My dad knew little of that, but he knew the life of a military man. He knew C-rations, and he learned about the scarcity some endured during the Great Depression secondhand. He attempted to use that knowledge to stoke appreciation for food in his boys.

The theme of Dad’s stories was that the manner in which one eats is a window into their soul. He also believed it a testament to manliness and anyone who questioned his manliness need only look to the girth he carried for much of his life for answers. He was a human garbage disposal, and he expected as much from his sons.

“I never had to worry about you eating,” Dad said. “Your brother caused me some concern. He’s finicky.” That would prove to be one of the greatest compliments my dad ever gave me.

Finicky was the only F-word in my dad’s vocabulary. A finicky eater, to him, was that certain someone who thought they were so special that they took matters for granted. He considered them oddballs, and he viewed them in an unkind manner. My brother’s finicky nature reared its ugly head most often when onions appeared on his plate. His open disdain for them was a constant source of embarrassment for our dad.

Dad was Old World. He lived in an era when the gravest insult a man could heap upon a host was to leave a morsel of food on their plate. Most descendants of Depression-era-parents, the last American era in which food could was even remotely scarce, learned of the value of food. Any grown man that dared to display an eating preference disgusted them, because they could recite stories when such a luxury was not available to most. They also experienced their own limited selection in the military and the wars, and they hoped to instill an appreciation of food in the next generation. Our dad may have been more diligent in his efforts than others’, bordering on obsessed, but he considered it his legacy to pass this knowledge along to his boys.

Other than his concerns regarding my brother’s finicky nature, our dad was also concerned with the fact that he didn’t pay as much attention to his meal as our father felt was necessary. My brother was prone to pausing while he ate. He also enjoyed talking during meals, and he even had the audacity to glance at the TV set while we dined. This was anathema to our dad. When food was on the table, we were to nourish ourselves without distraction. Doing so, paid homage to all that went into the various lines of production that led to our bountiful meal food. An individual seated at my father’s table was to eat with time constraints similar to those of a soldier’s, who appreciates the fact that he has a limited amount of time to get the nutrients contained in those humble C-rations into his body if he wants the energize required to take on the day. He didn’t necessarily want us to eat fast, as much as he required diligence, because he believed it made a statement, a cherished response to eat as if we didn’t know where our next meal was coming from. Consuming food in that manner, at Dad’s table meant that we had deep respect and appreciation of those who gave up their lives to provide us the freedom to eat whatever we wanted.

He never had a problem with me in this regard, as I said, but my brother needed constant reminders. Dad tried everything to get through to his boy. Along with all of the aforementioned techniques, he endeavored to instill appreciation in my brother by informing him of the preparation process involved in the meal before him. My brother was not disobedient or rebellious, nor was he unappreciative or ungrateful. He tried to remain focused on his meal and he attempted to finish it to adhere to that paternal guidance, but he inevitably fell back to his methodical approach to eating. This provided our dad such consternation over the years that he developed a bit of a ballad, what we called the “Eat, Tono, Eat” song. This song, much to my father’s consternation, would become something of hit among friends and family, and it had the following lyrics.

“Eat, Tono, eat.

Eat, Tono, eat.

Eat, Tono, eat.

Oh … eat, Tono, eat.”

Anyone eavesdropping on one of his limited engagements might have mistaken Dad’s “Oh” crescendo with a pleasing and creative bridge to the fourth stanza, but aesthetics did not motivate the man. He was a former military man and tool man. He created utility to fulfill need. He composed no other lyrics for the song, and once it served its purpose and my brother began eating again, dad never sang it again. He may have sang the song a couple times, but the threat of it loomed forever more. He didn’t intend to be humorous, unless using humor furthered his goal of getting my brother to eat. As long he achieved that, my favorite single of all time could whither on the vine for all he cared. Whether or not a listener enjoyed the tune was on them, as far as Dad was concerned, but they would find themselves wanting if they called for an encore.

Taste did matter to dad. He enjoyed well-prepared, flavorful meals as much as the next guy, but anyone can eat a meal that tastes delicious. What separated one man from another, in my father’s worldview, was what that man did to a meal that was less than flavorful. Based upon his internal sliding scale of characterization, eating a foul-tasting, poorly prepared meal was a tribute to our ancestors who could afford little more than a meal of pork and beans on buttered bread. The pièce de résistance of his personal campaign to honor those who came before him arrived in the form of a flavorless, bare bones sandwich. This hallowed sandwich consisted of one slice of the cheapest bologna mankind has been able to produce, between two slices of bread so flavorless that I doubt any competitors in bread industry knew the manufacturer’s name.

Mustard and mayonnaise didn’t make it on dad’s sandwich either, for condiments were luxuries our ancestors never knew about, “back when times were hard”. My father wasn’t the type to pound a point home with a joke, but the thrust of his philosophical approach to eating was that if a man could eat a cheap, flavorless bologna sandwich, sans, condiments, it would put hair on their chest.

On the subject of humor, the reader might infer that part of Dad’s philosophical approach to eating involved at least humorous subtext. While many aspects of Dad’s philosophical approach to life were subject to interpretation that could lead to some unintentional humor, I can say without fear of refutation on this one subject, that the methods he utilized to pass on his deep appreciation of food were never funny to him.

With such a strict, uncompromising mindset drilled into one’s head over decades, one cannot help but feel disgust for those who display preferences. I didn’t draw a direct correlation to my dad’s philosophy for many-a-year, as we do not make connections to the conditioned responses we have. It did become an undeniable source of Dad’s repetitious conditioning, however, when it disgusted me that my brother and his wife allowed my nephew to subsist on a diet of macaroni and cheese, carbohydrates, and sugary sweets. I didn’t expect the young child to make informed, diverse choices, but I expected more of the grown man, my brother, inundated by our father’s unrelenting lessons and philosophical exercises. My concern was not limited to health, though that was part of it, but I couldn’t believe that my brother allowed his father’s grandchild to limit his diet to such a narrow list. I expected my brother, a student of our father’s no-excuses approach, to teach his son how to eat, and to drill into his son’s head the variations of what that meant. My nephew’s excessively short list of preferences disgusted me, but the idea that my brother allowed it percolated inside me until I had to say something.

Some part of me wanted to pass on the entire cannon of Dad’s philosophy, but I didn’t want to insult my brother in front of his wife and son. I bottled up most of the comments I wanted to make, and I drilled it down to one simple comment, “You don’t know how to eat.”

As soon as the words slipped out, I wanted to take them back. I wanted every thought and motivation behind that comment expunged from the record. Those words, along with the act of actually saying them, contradicted the worldview it took me decades to build. I abided by my father’s wishes, but I never did so in silence. I questioned him, analyzed his philosophies with words that could pierce and deflate, and often followed that up with ridicule and mockery.

I was the rebel in the household that swore my father’s ways were wrong, antiquated, and heavy handed. My life’s mission was to juxtapose myself to everything my father stood for, yet here I was attempting to pass on the most sacred tenet of my father’s gospel to his grandson. It was the most powerful encounter I would experience with the power of conditioning, and I shuddered within it.

Although my father never offered a philosophical pivot point for his beliefs on food in general or on and the appreciation thereof, I believe it all centered on individual preferences. Preferences, in his view, were an ostentatious display of luxury, and he chose to deprive himself, in a manner equivalent to a man who buys a moderate sedan when he could easily afford a luxury vehicle.

Another aspect of Dad’s code involved never calling another man out on his preferences. He recited tales of men with preferences, but he did so in the privacy of his own home, for the sole purpose of providing parables, to instill crucial lessons in his boys so we wouldn’t grow up to be like them. He was the product of an era that did not permit one man to comment on the ways and means of another, lest anyone interpret it as one seeking some form of superiority. When I dared to evaluate others failure to live up to dad’s credo, he scolded me for calling another man out like that.

That confused me, as I assumed that the mockery of others helped define the ideals our dad tried to teach us, but he would have none of it. “What a man does in the privacy of his own home is his business,” he said. Those days of appreciating the sanctity of one’s privacy are so far in the rear-view mirror now that no one remembers them anymore. In its place are endless lists of preferences and proselytizing of preferences, until one achieves the desired state of superiority.

This consideration for those beyond our address did not extend to his sons, however, for when we displayed preferences, his honesty was blunt, so much so that it might have appeared brutal to anyone outside our walls. Dad believed that what he did in his own home was his business.

The one asterisk in my dad’s otherwise strict and uncompromising rules on eating was that we could exhibit some preferences, as long as we preferred things in conjunction with an appreciation for the luxury afforded to do so. As long as we didn’t indulge in what he considered elitist preferences, and as long as we didn’t indulge in our preferences to achieve superiority and wander onto a plane of disgust for those of us who had no such luxury, he permitted our few discerning tastes.

“Those who had real-world concerns of the onslaught of Adolf Hitler and the subsequent spread of communism didn’t have the luxury of preferences,” Dad said on more than one occasion. “They had real-world concerns that plagued them to the point that anyone who engaged in such theoretical nonsense would be ostracized and castigated for the eggheads they were in my time.

“A person who engages in such trivialities has never known true scarcity and sacrifice. He leads the life of blissful ignorance, and we cannot blame him for that. He is a product of his time, but it is his parents, and grandparents, responsibility to inform him that his self-anointed superiority condemns not only those who don’t share his preferences but also those who might not have had the same luxuries afforded to him.”

The Thief’s Mentality

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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.