Author’s note: sometimes writing Square Man is easy. I have the big idea for next week right after I post this week. When that happens, one week of my life is easy and stress-free.
Other times, like this week, I’ll go through 4, 5, 6 ideas — hours and hours of writing notes and full essays, deciding they’re not good enough, and throwing them away — and still not land on something I think is worth publishing. I almost didn’t post this week, for the first time in 2 years.
That’s a funny thing about writing: whether it took me 40 minutes or 20 hours, what the reader ends up seeing is just a piece. One piece.
Anyway, I reminded myself to stop being a pussy and figure it out. So I hope you enjoy this week’s piece. Cheers.
Once in a while you’ll meet someone in life who swears by essential oils or mystical teas or a multitude of herbs. Or their crystals, tarot cards, or horoscopes. They’ll swear by this or that magic they’ve discovered, even going as far as to forsake something useful like modern medicine.
There have been parents over the last century, at least in America, who have been charged with murder for ignoring modern medicine. For allowing their child to lie in the house and die while swearing that herbs or oils or God will take care of it.
Like that story of the man who was stuck in a flood:
A storm descends on a small town, and the downpour soon turns into a flood. As the waters rise, the local preacher kneels in prayer on the church porch, surrounded by water. By and by, one of the townsfolk comes up the street in a canoe.
"Better get in, Preacher. The waters are rising fast."
"No," says the preacher. "I have faith in the Lord. He will save me."
Still the waters rise. Now the preacher is up on the balcony, wringing his hands in supplication, when another guy zips up in a motorboat.
"Come on, Preacher. We need to get you out of here. The levee's gonna break any minute."
Once again, the preacher is unmoved. "I shall remain. The Lord will see me through."
After a while the levee breaks, and the flood rushes over the church until only the steeple remains above water. The preacher is up there, clinging to the cross, when a helicopter descends out of the clouds, and a state trooper calls down to him through a megaphone.
"Grab the ladder, Preacher. This is your last chance."
Once again, the preacher insists the Lord will deliver him.
And, predictably, he drowns.
A pious man, the preacher goes to heaven. After a while he gets an interview with God, and he asks the Almighty, "Lord, I had unwavering faith in you. Why didn't you deliver me from that flood?"
God shakes his head. "What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter."
We tend to look at those people who let their kids die, or who think that their garden has a solution for everything, as insane. Because they probably are. But that doesn’t mean that zero of their ideas are good. They just got carried away.
For example, there’s a plant that grows in Eastern Asia called jiaogulan. For centuries this plant, also known as poor man’s ginseng, has been used in herbal teas.
In the 20th century, the Chinese government got better at collecting statistics about its people. And they discovered something in the data. There were certain regions in China that had abnormal numbers of centenarians — people who were living to be a hundred years old. So they investigated.
Every time they went to one of these regions and talked to the people, they found that the people living there drank something called “immortality tea.” Which was a tea made with jiaogulan.
Whether you believe in herbal medicine or not, whether you believe in the natural, holistic lifestyle or not, you’ve got to admit that’s an interesting coincidence.
Drinking jiaogulan tea is probably an excellent idea. Using herbal supplements to promote digestive health and immune function is probably an excellent idea.
But it’s a tool, not a fix. It’s not going to literally make you immortal, of course. Or solve the problem of your long-term health. And it’s not going to save your child from a serious infection, or heal a broken arm, or cure an illness once you already have it. You have to be reasonable and have your tea as part of an otherwise-balanced breakfast. Or life.
Similarly, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a vegan who wasn’t grossly thin. I’m not trying to be mean, I’m just describing what I’ve seen. Nearly every vegan I see, who by the way usually has plenty to say to the rest of us about how unhealthy and “out of balance with nature” we are, looks extremely unhealthy. Even down to the texture and color of their skin.
Plenty of vegan ideas are good. But not when they unilaterally trump all other options, no questions asked.
I doubt those hundred-year-olds in China drank that tea and lived otherwise horrible lives. They drank that tea in addition to doing numerous other healthy, reasonable things. They took the good idea but no zealotry with it.
David Foster Wallace might have been crazy. If you watch some of his rare interviews it’ll be hard to think otherwise. He’s awkward, he’s extremely hard on himself intellectually, he’s thoughtful to the point of it being socially debilitating. His magnum opus, Infinite Jest, traumatized me. It was such an over-the-top, ridiculous book, I was personally offended that he would even publish it. When I finished the book, I was actually angry at him. And he’s dead. By suicide.
If you could put a bad acid trip into words, Infinite Jest would be what you ended up with. It was so complex that it was psychedelic. There were sentences that were 8 pages long. And these were large pages with small print.
It was insane. I worked harder at reading that book than I worked at my first three jobs combined.
But Wallace was a magician. He performed magic tricks with words. He performed acts with words that I did not know were possible. And, such a fan of language as I am, that made the trip arguably worth it. It taught me new things about language itself, which was really cool.
Conspiracy theorists are often called insane. And that’s not even controversial to say — everybody knows it out loud. Even conspiracy theorists themselves are often self-aware enough to acknowledge it.
But as the comedian Ron Funches said, “you don’t believe in any conspiracy theories? You think the government’s just battin’ a thousand and tellin’ us the whole truth? That’s a strong stance to take.”
Underneath huge piles of exaggeration and excess, there is usually something true and good. It isn’t that herbs aren’t useful at all, or that there are zero people conspiring to oppress you. It’s that the flawed human character takes those little bits of insight and turns them into exaggerated nonsense.
Another thing people generally think is insane is the Mormon church (along with other modern, allegedly Christian churches). Especially those who escape from it and analyze its impact on their lives and their psyches in retrospect. Its impact on their families.
That doesn’t mean the Mormon church is bereft of good ideas or goals for life and family. It just believes that the ends justify any means — that it’s okay to use bad ideas in service of good ideas. Which is almost universally untrue.
What would happen if we threw out all the intense people, the egomaniacs, the creeps and weirdos, along with their ideas?
We’d certainly never listen to Michael Jackson again. Which would be a shame, because The Way You Make Me Feel is one of my favorite songs. Michael Jackson wasn’t right about little boys, but he sure was right about music.
Mel Gibson wasn’t right to go on an antisemitic tirade, but his performance in The Patriot is one of very few things that threatens to make me cry.
Everyone knows that everyone knows that Kanye West is about as insufferable and self-satisfied as a human being can possibly get. And yet most of the people who have worked with him professionally will look you in the eye and tell you, “that man is a genius.”
It seems the price we pay for good art is that we have to have some damaged and belligerent people deliver it to us. The price we pay for amazing ideas is that they come from people with lots of bad ideas. Some of which cause collateral damage.
Sadly they’re right when they say to never meet your heroes. Because once you do, it becomes harder than ever to separate the idea from the person. The nuanced and useful from the extreme and exaggerated. And most people’s personalities, and most man-made structures of ideas, are not as perfect as we think they must be.
Even your favorite philosopher was a total moron in some ways. All of them.
The problem isn’t that we’ll be disappointed with our heroes themselves. The problem is, when an idea is attached to something that disappoints you, it poisons the idea itself in your own mind. It cuts a wonderful idea down to size and makes you say, “oh. I guess this is just another broken and imperfect thing just like everything else in life.” It makes you bitter and cynical.
And there isn’t a whole lot in life more tragic than that. For someone to no longer believe in their most cherished virtue, or art, or love, because the idea itself has been poisoned. By someone who failed to live up to their fantasies.
It would be nice if only the most transparent, admirable people were capable of creating anything great or having any good ideas. It would be nice if substance always matched style, form always function. Unfortunately, life is rarely that easy, and it’s up to us to do the parsing. We have to figure out what ideas are worth celebrating or looking into, even if they came from the mouth of someone we’d otherwise not listen to.
You’re allowed to call bullshit on someone’s personal life or their excesses. In fact, you probably should. But you’re also allowed to separate the person from the idea. In fact, you probably should.
And there isn’t one thing in life so good that it doesn’t also require the supplement of being reasonable.
Drink some water and don’t go on an ethnically-insensitive tirade.
JDR
“Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.” - Miguel de Cervantes
This reminds me of a question posed to me by someone who helped me recover from my obsession around drugs and alcohol. There's a AA club here in Denver, York Street, been around for ages. Guy there, over decades, had taken dozens of men through the 12 Steps, many of whom experienced permanent recovery. Guy dies, then folks come to find out he'd been drinking the whole time. So the question posed to me was: "Does the fact that he'd been lying for all those years change the impact that he had on those men, or in any way detriment their sobriety/quality of their sobriety?" Good lesson for me, early on in recovery, to separate the man from the message.
This is a thoughtfully written article. Your writing flows so well, it's such an easy read.
Personally, I have learned to live and let live. The contrast of the world's weirdo's is what makes life interesting. That said I guard my time carefully and keep strong boundaries from distracting me from living my best life. Looking forward to your next great masterpiece!