“The person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it!” – Agent K, Men In Black

But let’s face it, we’re all, at one time or another, selfish, dangerous idiots. When we drive too fast on the highway we shake our head at all the idiots driving too slow as we pass them and then shake our fists at the lunatics passing us in turn. We give ourselves up to every degree of cognitive dissonance when we say, for example, we believe in nuclear energy … but not in my backyard (remember Carlin’s NIMBY?); let some other idiots deal with the mess. When we lose it’s because someone else cheated but when we win it’s because of our skill. Our children are perfect saints; your kids are spoiled brats incapable of even rudimentary biological functions. We might think everyone should pass a test to vote in an election, except us, of course, because we are reasonably informed and capable of rational decisions in all weighty matters.

We’re idiots, every one, and this book makes the case for it.

There’s a scene near the end of the book where they come upon the dead body of a woman whom, we learn, has killed herself because she has no prospects in life and cannot hope to provide for her child. All her friends and family have turned her out (why exactly we do not know) and so she drowns herself in the very same river our three idiot heroes drift along with not a care in the world. The scene serves as a stark reminder of our own callousness, even if we have no idea we are being cruel. Shūsaku Endō, in his novel Silence tells us “Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.”

The climax of the novel (if you could call it a climax in the traditional sense), is the literal shattering of a lie, in this case a trophy fish hanging on the wall that everyone claims was their miraculous catch. In the end we learn it wasn’t even a fish at all, just a piece of plaster art.

Yet the novel, funny as it is (and it’s very funny) is not just trying to make a point that lying is bad, either. Lying is good, too. Lying is good because it makes a story better, it makes life more enjoyable, more fun. If I told you I caught one fish that would not be an interesting story, however, if I say I caught 20 fish, and each one I battled with for over an hour upon a stormy sea, and they were all Sturgeons, then that’s a story. Even if you know I’m lying, it really only matters how well I tell the story. Without a good story life would be boring, there would probably be no real art, no comedy, no fun.

So how do we reconcile the two: lying vs. fun?

Well, we can’t really, at least not when we think about too much. We have to pick our battles, we have to be our own, as Einstein theorized, relativistic observer upon which everything else orbits. If we start looking at our lives through another person’s eyes then we might see what total idiots we are, see how callous we are, how rude and hostile, too. But how can we possibly go through life self analyzing ourselves through other people’s perception of us? We might as well toss ourselves in the nearest river!

The whole argument reminds me of what our parents always told us when we were eating dinner and hand’t finished, “There are starving children in Africa; don’t you know how lucky you are!”

Well of course I don’t know how lucky I am because I’ve never been a starving African child. How could I ever hope to relate! How could that child possible relate the other way back to me living in a world where we have so much food in the refrigerator that it blocks our view of more food in the back that we forget it’s there and it all goes bad. We have so much food it blocks our view of our food! It’s absurd all the way around.

Now I’m not suggesting the author had all this immediately in mind when he wrote this wonderful book, however, it does answer why the book feels so contemporary because even though it’s over a hundred years old, it speaks to that part of human nature that will never change, a selfishness we can’t really help and an absurdity in all of modern life.