The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence (7 page)

The problem, I told the audience at the CIA, is that I made up those signals. I did it to demonstrate the risks of inaccurate information. I actually know nothing about kangaroo behavior (so forget the three signals if you can—or stay away from hostile kangaroos).

In our lives, we are constantly bombarded with kangaroo signals masquerading as knowledge, and our intuition relies on us to decide what we will give credence to. James Burke says, “You are what you know.” He explains that fifteenth-century Europeans
knew
that everything in the sky rotated around the earth. Then Galileo’s telescope changed that truth.

Today, Burke notes, we live according to still another truth, and “like the people of the past, we disregard phenomena which do not fit our view because they are ‘wrong’ or outdated. Like our ancestors, we know the real truth.”

When it comes to safety, there is a lot of “real truth” to go around, and some of it puts people at risk. For example, is it always best for a woman being stalked by an ex-husband to get a restraining order? This certainly is the conventional wisdom, yet women are killed every day by men they have court orders against, the often useless documents found by police in the purse or pocket of the victims. (More on this in
chapter 10
.)

Perhaps the greatest false truth is that some people are just not intuitive, as if this key survival element was somehow left out of them.

Cynthia is a substitute schoolteacher, a funny, beautiful woman totally unlike the dull and much-harassed substitutes most of us recall from our school years. One day while we were having lunch, Cynthia bemoaned to me that she just wasn’t intuitive. “I never see the signs until it’s too late; I don’t have that inner voice some people have.”

And yet, I reminded her, several times a week she enters a room full of six and seven year-old children she’s never met before and quickly makes automatic, unconscious assessments of their future behavior. With amazing accuracy, she predicts who among thirty will seek to test her the most, who will encourage the other children to behave or misbehave, whom the other children will follow, what discipline strategies will work best, and on and on.

“That’s true,” she says. “Every day I have to predict what the kids will do, and I succeed for reasons I can’t explain.” After a thoughtful pause she adds: “But I can’t predict the behavior of adults.”

This is interesting, because the range of behavior children might engage in is far, far greater than it is for adults. Few adults will suddenly throw something across the room and then break into uncontrolled laughter. Few women will, without apparent reason, lift their skirts above their heads or reach over to the next desk at work and grab the eyeglasses right off someone’s face. Few adults will pour paint on the floor and then smear it around with their feet. Yet each of these behaviors is familiar to substitute teachers.

Predicting the routine behavior of adults in the same culture is so simple, in fact, that we rarely even bother to do it consciously. We react only to the unusual, which is a signal that there might be something worth predicting. The man next to us on the plane for five hours garners little of our attention until, out of the corner of one eye, we see that he is reading the magazine in our hand. The point is that we intuitively evaluate people all the time, quite attentively, but they only get our conscious attention when there is a reason. We see it all, but we edit out most of it. Thus, when something does call out to us, we ought to pay attention. For many people, that is a muscle they don’t exercise.

At lunch, I told Cynthia I’d show her an example of listening to intuition. We were at a restaurant neither of us had been to before. The waiter was a slightly too subservient man whom I took to be of Middle-Eastern descent.

I said, “Take our waiter, for example. I’ve never met him and don’t know a thing about him, but I can tell you he’s not just the waiter—he’s actually the owner of this restaurant. He is from Iran, where his family had several successful restaurants before they moved to America.”

Because there was no expectation that I’d be right on any of this, I had simply said what came into my head. I thought I was making it up, creating it. More likely, I was calling it up, discovering it.

Cynthia and I went on talking, but in my head I was tearing apart the theories I had just expressed with such certainty. Across the room I saw a print of an elephant on the wall and thought, “Oh, he’s from India, not Iran; that makes sense, because an Iranian would be more assertive than this guy. And he’s definitely not the owner.”

By the time he next visited our table, I’d concluded that all my predictions were wrong. I reluctantly asked him who owned the restaurant.

“I do.”

“Is it your first place?”

“Yes, but my family owned several successful restaurants in Iran. We sold them to come to America.” Turning to Cynthia he said, “and you are from Texas.” Cynthia, who has no Texas accent whatever, asked how he knew.

“You have Texas eyes.”

No matter how I so accurately guessed his status at the restaurant, his country of origin, and his family history, and no matter how he knew Cynthia was from Texas, we did know. But is that methodology something I’d bet my life on? I do it every day, and so do you, and I’d have done no better with conscious logic.

Cynthia also talked about what she called “car body language,” her ability to predict the likely movements of cars. “I know when a car is about to edge over into my lane without signaling. I know when a car will or won’t turn left in front of me.” Most people gladly accept this ability and travel every day with absolute confidence in their car-reading skill. Clearly they are actually expert at reading people, but because we can’t see the whole person, we read his intent, level of attentiveness, competence, sobriety, caution, all through the medium of the tiny movements of those big metal objects around them.

So, we think: We can predict what kangaroos and children and cars might do, but we cannot predict human behavior to save our lives.

▪ ▪ ▪

China Leonard’s story is not about violence. It is, however, about life and death, and about the denial of intuition. She and her young son, Richard, had just settled into the pre-op room at St. Joseph’s Hospital, where Richard was soon to have minor ear surgery. He usually had a barrage of questions for doctors, but when the anesthesiologist, Dr. Joseph Verbrugge Jr., came into the room, the boy fell silent. He didn’t even answer when Dr. Verbrugge asked if he was nervous. “Look at me!” the doctor demanded, but Richard didn’t respond.

The boy obviously disliked the abrupt and unpleasant doctor, and China felt the same way, but she also felt something more than that. A strong intuitive impulse crossed her mind: “
Cancel the operation
,” it boldly said, “
Cancel the operation
.” She quickly suppressed that impulse and began a mental search for why it was unsound. Setting aside her intuition about Dr. Verbrugge in favor of logic and reason, she assured herself that you can’t judge someone by his personality. But again, that impulse: “
Cancel the operation
.” Since China Leonard was not a worrier, it took some effort to silence her inner voice. Don’t be silly, she thought, St. Joseph’s is one of the best hospitals in the state, it’s a teaching hospital; it’s owned by the Sisters of Charity, for Christ’s sake. You just have to assume this doctor is good.

With her intuition successfully beaten down, the operation went forward as scheduled, and Richard died during the minor procedure. It is a sad story that teaches us that the words “I know it” are more valuable than the words “I knew it.”

Later, it was revealed that Dr. Verbrugge’s colleagues had also been concerned about him. They said he was inattentive to his work, and, most seriously, there were at least six occasions when colleagues reported that he appeared to be sleeping during surgeries. For the hospital staff, these were clear signals, but I can’t be certain what China and her son detected. I know only that they were perfectly accurate, and I accept that as good enough.

There were people right at the operating table who heard and then vetoed their intuition. The surgeon told Verbrugge that Richard’s breathing was labored, but Verbrugge did nothing effective. A nurse said she was getting concerned with the boy’s distress but “chose to believe” that Verbrugge was competent.

One of the doctors who reviewed how people had performed in that operating room could have been speaking about denial in general when he astutely said: “It’s like waking up in your house with a room full of smoke, opening the window to let the smoke out, and then going back to bed.”

▪ ▪ ▪

I’ve seen many times that after the shock of violence has begun to heal, victims will be carried in their minds back to that hallway or parking lot, back to the sights, smells and sounds, back to the time when they still had choices, before they fell under someone’s malevolent control, before they refused the gift of fear. Often they will say about some particular detail, “I realize this now, but I didn’t know it then.” Of course, if it is in their heads now, so was it then. What they mean is that they only now accept the significance. This has taught me that the intuitive process works, though often not as well as its principal competitor, the denial process.

With denial, the details we need for the best predictions float silently by us like life preservers, but while the man overboard may enjoy the comfortable belief that he is still in his stateroom, there is soon a price to pay for his daydream. I know a lot about this; I spent half my childhood and half my adulthood practicing prediction while perfecting denial.

“I am capable of what every other human is
capable of. This is one of the great
lessons of war and life.”
—
Maya Angelou

Before I was thirteen, I saw a man shot, I saw another beaten and kicked to unconsciousness, I saw a friend struck near lethally in the face and head with a steel rod, I saw my mother become a heroin addict, I saw my sister beaten, and I was myself a veteran of beatings that had been going on for more than half my life. The stakes of my predictions back then were just as high as they are today—life and death—and I viewed it as my responsibility to be sure we all got through those years alive. We didn’t, and for a long while I viewed that as my responsibility too, but my point in telling you all this is not about me; it is about you. It is about you because, though triggered by different occurrences, you felt the exact same emotions that I felt. While some were painful and some were frightening, no experience of mine had any more impact on me than those of yours that had the greatest impact on you.

People sometimes say they cannot imagine what a given experience must have been like, but you can imagine every human feeling, and as you’ll see, it is that ability that makes you an expert at predicting what others will do.

You want to know how to spot violently inclined people, how to be safe in the presence of danger. Well, since you know all about human beings, this expedition begins and ends in familiar territory. You have been attending your academy for years and to pick up your diploma in predicting violence, there is just one truth you must accept: that there is no mystery of human behavior that cannot be solved inside your head or your heart.

Nicholas Humphrey of Cambridge University explains that evolution gave us introspection specifically so we could “model other human beings and therefore predict their behavior.” To succeed at this, we have to be what Humphrey calls “natural psychologists.” We have to know, he says, “what it’s like to be human.”

Way back when she was still anonymous, I assisted a young prosecutor named Marcia Clark on her brilliant prosecution of assassin Robert Bardo. Bardo had killed actress Rebecca Schaeffer, and Clark sent him to prison for life. When I interviewed him there, his relative normalcy took me out of the safe realm of
US
and
THEM
—experts and assassins—and into the world of our shared humanness. It may be unwelcome news, but you and I and Bardo have much more in common than we have in contrast.

Distinguished psychiatrist Karl Menninger has said, “I don’t believe in such a thing as the criminal mind. Everyone’s mind is criminal; we’re all capable of criminal fantasies and thoughts.” Two of history’s great minds went even further. In an extraordinary correspondence, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud explored the topic of human violence. Einstein’s letter concluded that “man has in him the need to hate and destroy.”

In his reply, Freud agreed “unreservedly,” adding that human instincts could be divided into two categories: “those which seek to preserve and unite, and those which seek to destroy and kill.” He wrote that the phenomenon of life evolves from their “acting together and against each other.”

Proving the opinions of Einstein and Freud is the fact that violence and homicide occur in all cultures. In their book on the origins of violence,
Demonic Males
, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson say that modern humans are “the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million year habit of lethal aggression.” Those scientific explorers who set out to find communities that would disprove man’s universal violence all came home disappointed. South Pacific islanders were romanticized as non-violent in Margaret Mead’s
Coming of Age in Samoa
. The Fijians, correctly perceived today as the friendliest people in the world were not that long ago, among humanity’s most violent. The Kung of the Kalahari were called “the harmless people” in a book by the same title, but Melvin Konner, whose search for the answers took him more than once to study hunter-gatherers in Africa, concluded that “again and again, ethnogrophers have discovered Eden in the outback, only to have the discovery foiled by better data.”