The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence (12 page)

Having just said that intuition is always right, I can imagine some readers resisting, so I’ll clarify. Intuition is always right in the ways I noted, but our interpretation of intuition is not always right. Clearly, not everything we predict will come to pass, but since intuition is always in response to something, rather than making a fast effort to explain it away or deny the possible hazard, we are wiser (and more true to nature) if we make an effort to identify the hazard, if it exists.

If there’s no hazard, we have lost nothing and have added a new distinction to our intuition, so that it might not sound the alarm again in the same situation. This process of adding new distinctions is one of the reasons it is difficult at first to sleep in a new house: Your intuition has not yet categorized all those little noises. On the first night, the clinking of the ice-maker or the rumbling of the water-heater might be an intruder. By the third night, your mind knows better and doesn’t wake you. You might not think intuition is working while you sleep, but it is. A book salesman I know who often returns late at night from out-of-town trips: “I can drive into the garage, open and close the back door, walk up the stairs, open the bedroom door, toss down my luggage, get undressed, and get into bed—and my wife won’t wake up. But if our four-year-old opens the door to his room in the middle of the night, my wife bolts out of bed in an instant.”

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Intuition is always learning, and though it may occasionally send a signal that turns out to be less than urgent, everything it communicates to you is meaningful. Unlike worry, it will not waste your time. Intuition might send any of several messengers to get your attention, and because they differ according to urgency, it is good to know the ranking. The intuitive signal of the highest order, the one with the greatest urgency, is fear; accordingly, it should always be listened to (more on that in
chapter 15
). The next level is apprehension, then suspicion, then hesitation, doubt, gut feelings, hunches and curiosity. There are also nagging feelings, persistent thoughts, physical sensations, wonder, and anxiety. Generally speaking, these are less urgent. By thinking about these signals with an open mind when they occur, you will learn how you communicate with yourself.

There is another signal people rarely recognize, and that is dark humor.

In one story which offers an excellent example, all the information was there like a great unharvested crop left to dry in the sun. The receptionist was off that day, so Bob Taylor and others at the California Forestry Association sorted through the mail. When they came upon the package, they looked it over and chatted about what to do with it. It was addressed to the former president of the association, and they debated whether to just forward it to him. When Gilbert Murray, the current president arrived, they brought him in on their discussion. Murray said, “Let’s open it.”

Taylor got up and cracked a joke: “I’m going back to my office before the bomb goes off.” He walked down the hall to his desk, but before he sat down, he heard the enormous explosion that killed his boss. Because of intuition, that bomb didn’t kill Bob Taylor.

All the information he needed was there and dismissed by the others, but not before Taylor’s intuition sent a signal to everyone in the clearest language: “I’m going back to my office before the bomb goes off.”

I have learned to listen to the jokes clients make when we are discussing some possible hazard. If, as I stand to leave the office of a corporate president, he says, “I’ll call you tomorrow—if I haven’t been shot,” I sit back down to get more information.

Humor, particularly dark humor, is a common way to communicate true concern without the risk of feeling silly afterwards, and without overtly showing fear. But how does this type of remark evolve? One doesn’t consciously direct the mind to search all files for something funny to say. Were that the case, Bob Taylor might have looked at this package addressed to a man who’d resigned a year earlier and more cleverly said, “It’s probably a fruitcake that’s been lost in the mail since Christmas,” or any of thousands of comments. Or he could have made no comment at all. But with this type of humor, an idea comes into consciousness that, in context, seems so outlandish as to be ridiculous. And that’s precisely why it’s funny. The point is, though, that the idea came into consciousness. Why? Because all the information was there.

That package sent by the Unabomber to the California Forestry Association was very heavy. It was covered with tape, had too much postage, and aroused enough interest that morning that several people speculated on whether it might be a bomb. They had noted the Oakland firm named on the return address, and had they called directory assistance, they’d have found it to be fictitious. Still, it was opened.

A few weeks earlier, advertising executive Thomas Mosser received such a package at his New Jersey home. Just before he opened it, he was curious enough to ask his wife if she was expecting a parcel. She said she was not. Mosser had asked a good question, but a moment later, he ignored the answer he’d sought. He was killed when he opened the package (also sent by the Unabomber).

Postal Inspector Dan Mihalko: “I’ve heard many times that people would make a comment, ‘This looks like a bomb,’ and still open it. That’s one for the psychologists to answer. Perhaps they don’t want to call the police and be embarrassed if it turns out to be nothing.”

The Unabomber himself has mocked some of the 23 people hurt by his bombs. Two years after being injured, Yale computer scientist David Gelenter received a letter from the Unabomber: “If you had any brains you would have realized that there are a lot of people out there who resent the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world and you wouldn’t have been dumb enough to open an unexpected package from an unknown source. People with advanced degrees aren’t as smart as they think they are.”

In fairness to the victims, I note that mail-bombs are very rare and aren’t the type of hazard one is normally concerned about, but the point is that these victims
were
concerned enough to comment on it. Anyway, people are just as likely to make jokes about more common crimes before sacrificing themselves to some avoidable harm.

While a group of employees at the Standard Gravure plant sat eating lunch, they heard sounds from outside. Some thought they were firecrackers, but one made a quip about an angry co-worker: “That’s probably just Westbecher coming back to finish us off.” A moment later, it was indeed Joseph Westbecher who burst into the room spraying bullets, one of which hit the man who’d made the joke. Listen to humor, particularly dark humor. It can be good for more than a laugh.

The first messenger from Kelly’s intuition was apprehension. China Leonard got the unheeded message about her son’s surgery through a strong persistent thought. Michael Cantrell had nagging feelings about his partner’s recklessness. Bob Taylor’s survival signal about the bomb package came through dark humor. Robert Thompson got the loudest signal—fear—when he entered and then exited that convenience store.

That’s the same messenger a young woman named Nancy heeded as she sat in the passenger seat of a parked sports car. Her friend had left the car running when he got out to withdraw money from an ATM. Suddenly and without knowing why, Nancy felt great fear. She felt in danger, but where from? To her credit, she didn’t wait for an answer to that question. Her breathing stopped and her arms started: She scrambled to find the door locks, but it was too late. A man opened the driver’s door, got in, put a gun against her stomach, and drove the car away, kidnapping Nancy.

She hadn’t seen the man, so why the fear signal? A tiny image in the side-view mirror on the opposite side of the car, a glimpse of a three-inch section of denim—that was her signal that a man in blue jeans was too close to the car and moving too fast. That was her accurately interpreted signal that he might imminently get into the car with sinister intent. All this was gleaned from a tiny patch of blue, meaningful only in context, which she had no time to figure out but which her intuition already had figured out. If one had tried to convince Nancy to lock the car on the basis of just this fleeting blue image, she might have argued, but fear is far more persuasive than logic.

Nancy survived her five-hour ordeal by following another intuition: She engaged the dangerous stranger in constant conversation. Inside her head, she heard the repeated word “calm, calm, calm.” Outside, she acted as if she were speaking with a close friend. When her kidnapper ordered her out of the car behind a remote warehouse miles from the city, Nancy felt he wouldn’t shoot a person he had come to know, and she was right.

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I have spoken at length about the warning signs that can help you avoid being a victim of violence, but even if you make excellent predictions, you might still find yourself in danger. Though I am often asked for advice on how a person should respond to a robber or car-jacker, for example, I cannot offer a checklist of what to do for each type of hazard you could encounter, because cookie-cutter approaches are dangerous. Some people say about rape, for example,
do not resist
, while others say
always resist
. Neither strategy is right for all situations, but one strategy is: Listen to your intuition. I don’t know what might be best for you in some hazardous situation because I don’t have all the information, but you will have all the information. Do not listen to the TV news checklist of what to do, or the magazine article’s checklist of what to do, or the story about what your friend did. Listen to the wisdom that comes from having heard it all by listening to yourself.

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The stories in this chapter have been about dangers posed by strangers, but what about dangers that might come from those people we choose to bring into our lives as employees, employers, people we date, and people we marry? These relationships do not start with the first meeting—we meet many people we don’t keep in our lives.
Our relationships actually start with predictions
, predictions that determine—literally—the quality and course of our lives. So it is time to take a look at the quality of those predictions.

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile
the moment a single man contemplates it,
bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
—
Antoine De Saint-Exupery

See if you can imagine this: It is the year 2050, and predictions about people are perfect. They are made with a high-tech chemical test. You can accept a ride from a total stranger, you can ask a homeless person you’ve never seen before to watch your house while you are out of town. You can do this free of fear that they might harm you because predictions of intent and character are totally reliable.

You are skimming along in your hover-craft one afternoon, taking your six-year-old daughter to the park, when you are paged to come to an urgent business meeting. You go to the park anyway and look around for some stranger with whom you can leave your daughter. There is a middle-aged woman sitting on a bench reading a book, and as you sit down next to her, she smiles. Using a device nearly everyone carries these days, you conduct an instant high-tech test on her, as she does on you, and you both pass with flying colors. Without hesitation, you ask if she’ll watch your daughter for a few hours while you skim over to a meeting. She agrees, you exchange some information about how to reach each other, and off you go without any concern, because you have predicted to your satisfaction that this stranger is emotionally healthy, competent, drug-free and trustworthy.

The story sounds far-fetched, but in our time we already make every single one of these predictions about baby-sitters. We just don’t do it as quickly or as accurately.

With present-day technology, how much time would you have to spend with a stranger before she wouldn’t be a stranger anymore? How many of your low-tech tests would a baby-sitter have to pass before you’d trust her? We undertake this common yet very high-stakes prediction by reviewing an application and asking a few questions, but let’s really look at this prediction. For starters, we wouldn’t just interview a woman we met in a park. No, we’d want someone who was recommended by a person we know, because we like to rely on predictions made by others. Our friend Kevin is so bright and honorable, we think, that if he endorses somebody, well, that person must be okay. What often happens, however, is that we attach
Kevin’s
attributes to the person he recommended, and we don’t listen to our own uncertainty. As we drive away from home, leaving our child behind with someone we met just a half-hour ago, there is that tug that says, “You never really know about people.

In our interview with the baby-sitter, we watch her attentively for any signs of… of what? Drug use? Well, that can be tested with great reliability; tens of thousands of drug-screen tests are done every week by employers who have less at stake than parents do when hiring a baby-sitter. Though most people believe the drug question is a critical one, have you ever heard of a parent requiring a drug screen of a baby-sitter candidate? Or a Breath-alyzer test to see if she’s been drinking? Most parents don’t even contact all the baby-sitter’s references, so it’s no wonder they drive away feeling, “You never really know about people.”