- Home
- About Us
- Contributors
- Departments
- Topics
- Back Issues
- Weekly Archives
- AmSpecBlog
- Subscribe
- Newsletter
- Advertise
- Donate
- Contact Us
- Daily Digest
- Templeton Essays
Another Perspective
A Defense of Quiet Loners
With every high profile murder one expects to read somewhere in the news accounts some rattled neighbor saying the suspected killer was "a quiet man who kept to himself." In fact, the whole neighborhood figured the suspect was a ticking time bomb as evidenced by the way he minded his own business, never played his stereo too loud, and was disinclined to comment on the weather.
Just take this headline from a recent issue of the Hartford Courant: "Stephen Morgan: From Quiet Loner To Accused Killer." Morgan, as you know doubt have heard, allegedly slayed Wesleyan University junior Johanna Justin-Jinich on May 6. The subtext seems to be if Morgan had gotten out more, schmoozed a little, learned the fine art of small talk, if only he had been more of a "playa," he would be a candidate for Time's Man of the Year and not the FBI's Most Wanted.
Why is it we seem to notice only the fact that office shooters and homicidal maniacs are quiet and keep to themselves? What is it about these personality traits that so unnerves the populace? The rattled neighbors never seem to mention, for instance, that the alleged killer tended to wear sandals with socks, enjoyed Harry Belafonte records, refused to water his lawn, or drove a Pinto. It is only his supposed anti-social behavior they notice, that is, his taciturnity and shyness. He may own a large collection of chainsaws, and sport hockey masks off-season, but it is only his bashfulness that is attention-grabbing.
History books are riddled with harmless, unindicted men of genius who were not constantly inviting the neighbors over for barbecue and brewskis. One wonders if Henry David Thoreau's neighbors in Concord considered him the Victorian equivalent of The Unabomber, particularly when they overheard him muttering things like: "I never found the companion so companionable as solitude." Nathaniel Hawthorne spent his best years alone in garret composing tales about witches and pilgrims and no doubt terrifying his neighbors with his close approximation. ("I had very few acquaintances in Salem," Hawthorne said, "and during the nine or ten years that I spent there, in this solitary way, I doubt whether so much as twenty people in the town were aware of my existence.") The same can be said for Kant, Kafka, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and countless other intellectuals who kept mainly to themselves. Emerson called solitude the stern friend of genius, and the bachelor Voltaire, certainly no solitary man, told Frederick the Great that "the happiest of all lives is a busy solitude."
On the other hand, I could come up with hundreds or thousands of homicidal maniacs who were anything but quiet and who seldom kept to themselves. Jesse James was rowdy. Charlie Manson charismatic. Al Capone a celebrity. I remember reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Of the two killers in that book, only one (Perry Smith) might be called moody or somewhat introverted. The other, Dick Hickock, was a high-living, woman-loving rambler. Few homicidal maniacs were creepier than John Wayne Gacy, and yet here is how Gacy is described by his biographer Martin Gilman Wolcott: "John Wayne Gacy was never a loner, never someone who kept a low profile and lived a secluded, quiet life." Take a quick glance at the FBI's Top Ten List and near the top (after Usama bin Laden) one finds Jason Derek Brown, wanted for murdering an armored car guard. Does Brown sound like a quiet man who keeps to himself to you?
Brown speaks fluent French and has a Masters Degree in International Business. He is an avid golfer, snowboarder, skier, and dirt biker. Brown enjoys being the center of attention and has been known to frequent nightclubs where he enjoys showing off his high-priced vehicles, boats, and other toys. He has been described as possibly having bisexual tendencies. Brown has ties to California, Arizona, and Utah. In the past, he has traveled to France and Mexico.
And yet being a quiet man who keeps to himself remains the scariest label you can pin on a young or middle-aged man -- especially if he is a bachelor -- and that is unfair. Most murder victims, we know, are acquainted with their attacker. Many times it is a crazed husband who butchers his wife. Or the wife who poisons her husband's chowder. Doubtless the reason it took police nearly two decades to apprehend Dennis Rader, the notorious BTK Killer, was that they were looking for a quiet man who kept to himself and not a husband and father who was a cub scout leader, actively involved in local government, and president of his Lutheran church's Congregation Council.
Sadly the suspicion automatically attached to quiet men who keep to themselves will not be undone by a single contrarian essay; the bias is too deeply ingrained in our collective unconscious. Perhaps what is needed is a campaign to raise awareness. I propose a Rally at the Lincoln Memorial. Perhaps on a National Day for Persecuted Quiet Men Who Keep to Themselves. The only question is, will anyone attend?
Comments
Leave a Comment
Andrew B| 5.14.09 @ 8:34AM
Let's hear it for quiet loners! I was, until the age of 40, just such a person. I was a bachelor who worked insanely long hours. I was up before dawn and home after dark, so my neighbors hardly ever saw me. Yet, despite all these dreadful danger signs, I never abducted anyone, sent threats through the mail and I invite anyone to dig up my basement without the fear of them finding any human bones.
If I had a choice in the matter, I would prefer to have a whole neighborhood of loners like my old self. At least it would be better than the drunken party animals I live beside now. At least loners seldom blast their car stereos at 3am or vomit on someone else's lawn.
Jonny Mardling| 5.14.09 @ 9:06AM
It comes back to the age old problem of attempting to categorise individuals as being part of a certain segment of society. Will we ever learn that these blanket generalistions (apologies for the English spelling!), are frankly ridiculous?
Robert Pinkerton| 5.14.09 @ 10:42AM
Many social forces in this country try to push individuals into a sociocentricity intense enough to be tantamount to morbid dependency on the peer group. On the other hand, I once read a quote from Adolf Hitler in -- IIRC -- Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich "Apes kill one of their number who tries to live apart." That Hitler quotation represents, on its surface, a lack of ability to distinguish between Asocial and Antisocial. (IMHO, people in deep need of a crowd around them most of the time, are useful to the Powers That Be for two reasons whereof I can think right now: Imprimis they are more amenable to being "massified." Secundus, a peer-group and its demands -- implicit or explicit -- for conformity, act as a secondary reflector for advertising, especially on people shallow enough to believe that one's entire person is only the sum of one's possessions. A peer-group which is an arena of narcissistic competition conducted by conspicuous consumption is an advertiser's wet-dream.)
Is a literate person with a high-level private library that much of an actual loner? I say, No: He enjoys the company of his favorite thinkers. Too, is someone whose long-time friends are scattered all over the country, and who keeps in touch with a high volume of correspondence, paper-postal or electronic (Do please remember that, earlier in the age of our Republic, correspondence was considered a fine art.), actually the loner he might appear to his physically-proximate neighbors?
Life is with people? Perhaps. However, on the other hand, Eric Hoffer reminds us: "Woe to the nonconformist who fails to conform with nonconformity."
Bilwick| 5.14.09 @ 11:01AM
There's a very interesting, fun book called A PARTY OF ONE: A LONER'S MANIFESTO, by Anneli Rufo, written by a loner in defense of loners. One chapter is a refutation of the "dangerous loner" cliche. She points out that a lot of these famous killers were not so much "loners" as socially inept weirdoes whose neediness and general dorkiness caused people to avoid them.
An interesting philsophical aspect of the book is that the author shows a connection between lonerness (or whatever you'd call it) and Western individualism. In one chapter she talks about visiting Africa, and found that the very concept of the individual, as we understand it in the West, is not only virtually unknown in Africa, but to the extent that it is known (probably through contact with European civilization) feared and loathed. A loner, by their cultural standards, is pretty much by definition a sociopath.
I wonder if thatanti-individual bias was carried over to America by African slaves, and if, carried through generations post-slavery, is why African-American, particularly among the less educated classes, seem to have shy away from individualim (the constant talk of "the community." "community organizing," etc.) and also seem generally drawn to collectivist political parties and candidates. One might have expected the experience of slavery and racism ("the most primitive form of collectivism," Ayn Rand called it) would have produced a reaction toward a libertarian individualism, but obviously it hasn't worked out that way. It would be interesting to see if Thomas Sowell has addressed this problem.
Appleby| 5.14.09 @ 11:09AM
Double Ditto for women. In the olden days the most dangerous and perverted thing you could be was a spinster. Many of the so-called Witches who were burned at the stake by Americas Taliban were women who were self-supporting and unmarried and were happy and successful, quietly, at both. Such women were a bad example to wives who had been brainwashed to believe such a woman was not only unnatural, but dangerous. She could not be a real woman; ergo, she was a WITCH! Today they change one letter but the accusation remains the same.
The other scary thing about people who mind their own business is that they/we typically expect other people to do the same. I used to work with a woman who would canvass the office every day to find someone who could go to lunch with her; the idea of taking a book with her instead of a person was terrifying. And I was briefly engaged to a man who became upset when I would read in the car or look out the window instead of jabbering (or listening to him jabber).
There are too many people who simply cannot stand the silence. But then, there always have been. I recall in the movie Lawrence of Arabia, a confused King Faisal asking Lawrence, *Why are English so in love with the desert? There is nothing IN the desert!*
Perhaps those who shun the silence of the desert are most afraid of what they may hear from within.
Sean| 5.14.09 @ 11:49AM
I can't blame people for wanting to be a loner. Today's average conversation can bore one to death. The things that adults should be interested in and talking about is now taboo such as politics and religion.
Dave| 5.14.09 @ 1:35PM
Get out of here and leave me alone!
Mike| 5.14.09 @ 1:45PM
Very nice article, a "voice in the wilderness".
Lars Walker| 5.14.09 @ 1:51PM
I appreciated this column very much. I suffer from a shyness disorder, and the pervasiveness of the "moody loner as psycho" idea does nothing to help me find and cultivate relationships.
Nick| 5.14.09 @ 2:02PM
As a lifelong loner, I never could understand why Tom Hanks wanted to get off that island. Talk about bliss!
KyMouse| 5.14.09 @ 2:35PM
Appleby, I think you're over the top about spinsters. It's likely that almost every American family has at least one unmarried woman in it somewhere; familiarity with my own family history going back many generations certainly illustrates that. In most cases, they've lent a helping hand in raising young relatives, and haven't been considered wierd at all. Pitied, maybe, but not feared. By the way, no one was burned during the Salem witch trials. Most were hanged; Giles Corey was pressed to death, if memory serves.
Spicy Joker| 5.14.09 @ 4:35PM
It seems society has a schitzophrenic view of loners. On the one hand, loners are (or at least used to be) the heroes of Westerns, cop movies, and vigilante movies. On the other hand, society deems unmarried men in their 40s to be psychos and losers.
schizoid| 5.14.09 @ 7:57PM
I for one welcome the stereotype. If people think I'm dangerous they leave me alone, which is how I like it.
PB| 5.14.09 @ 7:58PM
"
Sean| 5.14.09 @ 11:49AM
I can't blame people for wanting to be a loner. Today's average conversation can bore one to death. The things that adults should be interested in and talking about is now taboo such as politics and religion."
I'm assuming that comment was ironic?
Surely (Shirley?) you jest.
Far from being taboo, the most basic problem with communication in the Internet age is now that everyone thinks they have to have - and voice - their opinions on every political and religious issue. And, of course, there is now an inverse relationship between the amount of knowledge a person has on politics or religion and their desperate need to share their brilliance on the issue.
Taboo? You gotta be kidding. Does "Carrie Prejean" ring a bell.
We can't get away from petty politics and polarizing religion long enough to have a decent discussion with a fellow human being. The only creature I know that doesn't babble incessantly about politics is my dog.
He's a libertarian, by the way.
Bob| 5.14.09 @ 8:20PM
I live at the lonely end of the IQ spectrum. Most of society appears as appealing to me as conversing with chromosome-deficient apes.
whiskey| 5.14.09 @ 8:29PM
The "American Taliban" was in fact comprised of young women (who made the accusations) and greedy, ambitious wives who furthered the prosecution of relatively friendless women who had property to seize. It was stopped when Witchery accusations hit the Governor and his wife. Nevertheless, women were in it up to their eyeballs.
As for the real Taliban, women are silent on that, like the recent poisoning of 84 girls for the crime of learning while female. What women object to is not things like that (they're always silent) but ordinary men. Whom most women find both competitors in the marketplace and bearers of unwanted desire. Women certainly don't object to the nutty religion of Gaia Worshipping Global Warming scams. Or Muslim polygamy or honor killings in America. Heck most women would whole heartedly support legalized polygamy and welfare for each wife. Since the enemy of women is not the Taliban (they support them) but Joe Average.
And it's women and the feminized media that goes after the "loner types" like Richard Jewell. Whose crime was being a loner, fat, socially inept and not powerful. While the media and women protect, for example, a guy like John Edwards. Who cares if he fathered a kid by some bimbo while his wife is dying of cancer? Women LOVE that stuff, he's the powerful Alpha man.
Rule: Women will excuse anything, and I mean anything, as long as a man is a socially dominant Alpha male. If you're not, you are a suspect "loner" and belong in jail.
American Hero C| 5.15.09 @ 1:41AM
Published remarkably without regard to sex, lifestyle, race, color, creed, physical handicap, or national origin.
HHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHH!!!
Alan Brooks| 5.15.09 @ 2:35AM
bob, you are only too modest what with your lonely highend IQ
Andrew B| 5.15.09 @ 7:57AM
Appleby--
Two points: First, no woman was ever burned at the stake for witchcraft in America. That was a (continental) European passtime. Secondly, most women accused of witchcraft in America were wives or widows, and many if not most were accused by other women.
Sorry, but history does not bear out your theories.
Michael| 5.15.09 @ 4:01PM
To Appleby and Andrew B. , also no women were executed for witchcraft in Spain. In fact, they said it had no basis in fact.
Patrick| 5.17.09 @ 1:05AM
Appleby,
If I remember my history correctly, most of the accusations came from other women. Secondly, I believe I remember an outbreak of ergot fungus in the local rye crop. Ergot fungus can cause hallucinations not much unlike its chemical relative, LSD.
Even so, some of us lone, white men actually long for some peace and quiet. Come to think of it, not a day goes by when I don't consider selling it all off and joining a monastery. Vow of silence preferable.
J.J.| 5.18.09 @ 1:13AM
Hey, Bob. I'll bet it's not your super deluxe IQ that makes your end of the scale lonely. I think it may have something to do with your utter douchebaggery.
Lee Ann Lambert| 6.10.09 @ 4:16PM
An interesting article leading to interesting comments. Thanks for all of it!
Jim| 6.11.09 @ 3:58AM
I agree with Bob and his high-I.Q. boredom with average people. Many loners are put off by society's default superficiality and ignorance, thus end up avoiding people altogether, unless they can find exceptional ones. Many loners do have a few good friends, but don't make a scene of it.
Most "cool" (i.e. social) people are dull to us because they only say what they're expected to. Break the generic rules of conversation and they give you blank stares, e.g. if you talk about AGW instead of beach weather (don't worry us with that!)
Deep as a puddle intellects cannot sustain the interest of brighter minds. Most people spend too much time talking about making money and how they're going to spend it, or which team of overpaid wife-beaters has the best prospects, or which new B movie is better than the other.
There is a propensity among average people to keep everything light, which automatically kills the "heavier," more interesting conversations. The only time you get real depth out of extroverts is when they're drunk or drugged, but they'll forget it the next day.
Lingerie| 9.17.09 @ 9:37PM
sexy lingerie wholesale lingerie
Hugo| 11.12.09 @ 4:31AM
I don't know about being smarter than most people, but people in general bore me, which is part of the reason I like to be a loner. Most likely contributing to my loner status is my distaste for many popular things, sports in particular. It just baffles me how the entire country, nay, the WORLD, can be enamored by the prospect of grown men throwing rubber/plastic spheres around. The fact that approximately 50% of TV is spent highlighting this only magnifies my dislike.
In general, I tend to shun society, and society returns the favor. And no, I don't suffer from a social disorder of any sort. I simply prefer my solitude. As the article has aptly demonstrated, this causes most people to view me as a weirdo or freak, an accusation I happily embrace. All the more reason for them to leave me be.
Murderer, though? Please. As much as I distrust people in general, I'm a rather bright fellow. I tend to help people in public, hold doors open, assist seniors, and in general most of the things people would expect of a Boy Scout. Sure, I've had FANTASIES of beating in someone's head, but who hasn't? We all have that one person who treats us as inferior. As much as it would please me, I could never go through with it. Loathe though I am to admit it, I view life as a precious thing. Hardly anything is worth taking that away.
It's a funny thing. Despite my extremely low opinion of the world, I constantly strive to defend it. Children are a rather strong weak point for me. Still being young, I try to steer fledglings in the right direction, even if they're random strangers. I suppose deep down I have a resilient hope, which is the last thing one expects of a loner. Hehe, figures.....