Jumper Johnson and the Radioactive Mulch Heap

In the interest of disclosure, let me immediately point out that the Johnson Jumper is a species of small spider native to California and the radioactive mulch heap wasn’t.

I encountered my neighbor John at our shared garbage bins, where he told me excitedly he had just killed a black widow spider.  “No kidding!  Are you sure?” I asked him.  I thought black widows preferred a more arid environment; we live in Northern California and the only time I had ever seen one was near Prescott, Arizona.  Not only that, but our usual spider season in this area is not until August, and it was only March.  Nevertheless, John swore he had killed a black widow spider complete with the characteristic red mark on its back.

A few minutes later he called me over to see for myself; he had found two more right there on our shared path.  John seemed a little freaked out—in fact, he told me he gets freaked out by spiders—so I sought to reassure him that this was not a poisonous species.  I told him it was probably either a wolf or a jumping spider; the red markings on the back were definitely not that of a black widow.

The specimens we were looking at were especially not dangerous, I added, since they were both dead and in the process of being eaten by ants.  “I think that one’s still alive,” John said cautiously.  “Look, the legs are still sort of moving.”  They were moving because the ants swarming around the spider were tugging on its legs.  I didn’t mention that in case John had, or was about to get, an ant phobia, as well.

Instead, I talked about the two species I figured we were looking at -- where they typically lived, what kinds of webs they built, how they hunted.  The information I provided was aimed at assuaging worries he had expressed about being bitten by poisonous spiders.  Rather than trying to explain how I knew all this – which was a complicated story - I just said I had taken a nature course once.

To my utter surprise, John not only seemed to believe what I was telling him but said, “My, you certainly seem to know about a lot of different things.”  And, while this was true, I was so taken aback at actually being complemented for that fact I stammered something ungracious like, “Yes, and look where that’s gotten me, discussing dead spiders on a sidewalk over garbage cans.”

What really flummoxed me was why John took what I said at face value when I had had a very similar conversation with another acquaintance – let’s call her Kathy, my friend with the radioactive mulch heap – where my ratiocinative approach to allaying her anxieties was a stunning failure. Kathy believed that the pile of mulch landscapers had dumped adjacent to her apartment building was dangerous; probably radioactive and at very least toxic. (You can read more about the mulch heap here.)

I ran through the same kind of reasoning I did with John based on facts I personally knew to be true and even explained why I personally knew those facts to be true.  I could see Kathy struggle between her desire to believe what I was saying because she knew me to be a truthful person, on the one hand, and her need to believe a story that put a tangible shape on whatever private demons she was facing at the moment, on the other.

If I tell you that Kathy struggled with mental illness and was on antipsychotics, you might like to think that fact neatly explains any delusions she might have.  I’m not so sure.  For one thing, I’ve run into other people who had similar delusional episodes who, while perhaps under stress and anxious, stayed well this side of a DSM diagnosis.  For another, many of the apparently deeply paranoid tales (usually of a leftist political bent) Kathy would tell me and I’d then write off would, four to six months later, pop up as news stories.  Conspiracy? No. She was indeed tapped into leftist political policy networks, and just framed her discussion of her interests in characteristically paranoid terms.

The one consistent thing between John’s case and Kathy’s was me believing that they could be reasoned out of their anxious feelings by what I said.  It’s my particular delusion that you can solve any problem by reasoning it to death.  Naturally, I can adduce any number of reasons why that strategy works well, as well as note specific occurrences in which that strategy has failed and explain why it probably did so.  What I cannot do is account for why other people seem to find my insistent ratiocination on such issues so irritating – even, in some cases (!) dreadfully dull. Oh, is that your friend over there? Of course! I understand. We can pick this up later; I have a graph I can show you.