Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

She was starting to wish she’d listened to all her relatives in Iowa who thought of Seattle as being only one step above Mogadishu and who kept importuning her to get a concealed weapons permit and buy a handgun.

“Ever make a raccoon trap?” “No,” C-plus said. “I was told they carried rabies, and I couldn’t see why it would be desirable to catch one.” “You drill a hole into a tree stump, or something, big enough to admit the raccoon’s hand. But you drive some nails in around the edge of the hole and bend their heads inward so that he has to thread his little paw between them to get it into the hole. Then you leave a piece of bait in the hole. The raccoon insinuates his hand into this thing and grabs the bait. But he can’t pull his hand out between the nails unless he lets go of it. He ends up trapped by his refusal to let go, you see.” “Have you ever actually done that? I mean, I know you had a very rural childhood and everything, but…” “Of course not,” Richard scoffed. “What the hell was I going to do with a rabid animal welded to a tree stump?”

What he wasn’t so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn’t have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved.