How To Choose Your People Chapter 3

Chapter 3 — Apathy (0.05)

APATHY (0.05)

Apathy. 1. Lack of emotion or feeling. 2. Lack of interest in things generally found exciting, interesting, or moving; indifference.

– The American Heritage Dictionary

"I'm on a different trip now," my young friend said. "Nothing bothers me; I just take life as it comes. I've matured a lot in the last few months. I got all those wild dreams out of my system and now I'm ready to settle down to some serious study. That's where it's really at."

If I didn't know the tone scale, my friend's assertions of maturity might have convinced me. But I recalled his sparkling ebullience only four months earlier as he left for New York City. Confident of his talent, optimistic about the future, he departed with dreams of success. Somewhere in the intervening months, soundlessly and without fanfare, the bottom dropped out of his world. Someone or something took away his hope. The philosophic "realization" was a cop-out. He had given up. Apathy.

When a person suffers a severe loss and cannot express his grief, he restrains it and goes into Apathy where he may claim that he isn't affected at all. "I didn't want that part in the play anyway."

Apathy is turned-off. Turned-off to loving, living, hoping, crying, laughing, dreaming.

A person may drop to any low tone after a loss, but in Apathy he has not only lost, he knows he will never be able to win again.

This is the most serious of all tone levels. A dangerous state of mind bordering on death, it's often suicidal. Life is a herd of elephants and trampled him beyond help or hope.

THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF APATHY

If every person in this emotion were curled up in a ball on the floor of a mental institution and labeled "catatonic," you could identify him easily. But you are just as likely to find him lecturing in a large university and labeled a "brilliant intellectual."

Apathy breaks down into two levels. Deepest Apathy (sometimes called pretended death) is only a gnat's breath above death. He may be in bed, unable to care for himself, completely withdrawn and suffering hallucinations. People are usually in this state after an operation or severe accident. He's easy to recognize.

It's the higher level, walking-around-Apathy person we find more deceiving. He may be barefoot, bearded and freaked out on LSD. He could be wearing the portly businessman's costume and getting smashed on martinis every afternoon. He may commit suicide with a gun or wander listlessly across the street against the light, hoping someone else will do it for him.

I met a talkative Apathy person at a dinner party recently. His tone was reflected in nearly every remark. We were talking about cars. He disposed of the subject with: "The automotive business is dead. It's all over."

When the conversation turned to problems in the construction business, he said, "The small contractor is dead. He hasn't a chance."

Later we discussed a political problem: "Try to get something like that corrected and you're dead."

The clue to his tone was not only his absolute pessimism, but his frequent use of the word dead.

Although the Apathy person may be going to classes, doing housework, making movies, or holding a job, he is usually trying to destroy himself in some manner.

DRUGS AND ALCOHOL

The drug addict and the alcoholic are Apathy persons. Don't be misled by any surface belligerence, maudlin sweetness, or exuberance manifested when he's high. How is he when he's down? That's the feeling which drives him back to the chemical escape. He's committing suicide slowly. He's waiting to succumb, but he's going to stay stoned so it won't hurt so much. Meanwhile the people around him will be frustrated, concerned and desperately trying to do something for him. That's a good tipoff to Apathy; his associates are frazzled beyond endurance from trying (and failing) to help him.

BEYOND RIGHT AND WRONG

Now and then we find a person in Apathy who thinks he's in a state of serenity. Unable to acknowledge his own feeling of helplessness, he justifies it with scholarly discourse. I call this "Intellectual Apathy."

Bill, a college student, told me about his friend who studied many philosophies and religions until he evolved one of his own. The friend lengthily described his achievement of "ultimate awareness."

Deeply impressed, Bill said, "Now that you've reached this state yourself, I'm surprised you're not trying to help others to get there too."

"Why should l?" the friend replied. "They're all me anyway."

Everything is beyond right and wrong. He walks around in Apathy and thinks he's a god.

RESPONSIBILITY

There are certain philosophies (such as Eastern religions) based on the highest attitudes of the scale; but low-tone people can invert the meaning so that the end result is Apathy. When any individual or body of thought advocates less activity, less

HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR PEOPLE 18 RUTH MINSHULL

communication, less contact with people or less involvement with living, you can disregard the erudite labels. It leads toward Apathy.

Other studies and doctrines seem to invite an apathetic outlook. The fatalist clings to the belief that all events are preordained and human beings are powerless to change anything ("I'm not even responsible for myself" says Apathy). Their followers look to the stars, numbers, colors and crystal balls to indicate their destinies.

People in Apathy are perfect dupes for such hokum.

CAUSE AND EFFECT

When someone considers himself to be totally governed by influences outside himself, he sits in Apathy. He will accept grievous losses and say with a sigh, "It's God's will; nothing can be done." "If it was meant to be, it will be." (This is not truly a religious viewpoint, incidentally, for any religion worthy of the name, offers man a way out – a salvation.) The Apathy person considers himself less than the stars, the planets, the baseball scores and the flea on his leg. High on the tone scale a person feels dangerous to his environment (not full effect of it); he changes the environment to suit him; he's cause. But the more a person believes himself to be the effect, the closer he is to Apathy and death.

OWNERSHIP

Low-tone people have peculiar concepts of ownership. At Apathy, however, a person is close to feeling that he owns nothing. This may be literally true or he may own many possessions and still run around saying, "There's just no point in owning anything."

He also thinks others should own nothing. He lets all property decay and rot. He wastes your time, runs up your utility bills, leaves lights on and motors running, and casually uses your telephone to call New Zealand. He's quite bewildered if this bothers you: "You should get rid of all this anyway." A newly rich screen star says: "I should save money for my old age, but I don't. All the money I've made just slips away as if it didn't belong to me. I don't feel like doing anything to save myself. I just let everything happen ."

"I'M POWERLESS"

There are people who brag about not being affected by anything; they're the emotionally unemployed. This is most extreme in Apathy. Jim, a college student, felt that life was losing its sparkle; nothing turned him on anymore. He told his friend, George, he planned to try an LSD trip. Both boys knew that the drug could produce long-term mental disorders and, up to that point, they had opted to bypass the whole drug venture. George, however, was also in Apathy at the time, so he said only, "Well, I don't agree with what you want to do, but I know there is nothing I can say that will stop you." In a higher tone, George would not have felt powerless; he would at least try to do something about the situation . The sophisticated Apathy person will claim he's bored: "I'm fed up with life. Nothing is amusing. What can you do to create excitement in this superficial world?"

"THINGS ARE NEVER REAL"

One year after the first moon landing by American astronauts, a large U.S. newspaper chain sent reporters to conduct seventeen hundred interviews in communities across the nation, asking for opinions of the event. The newsmen reported that an extraordinary number of people doubted the reality of the Apollo feat. This was true particularly among the old and the poor. An elderly Philadelphia woman thought the moon landing was "staged" on the Arizona desert. An unemployed construction worker in Miami said, "I saw that on television, but I don't believe none of it. Man's never been on the moon." In a Washington, D. C. ghetto more than half of the people interviewed expressed doubts about the authenticity of the moon walk. One man, trying to explain away his emotional attitude, said, "It's all a deliberate effort to mask problems at home. The people are unhappy, and this takes their minds off their problems." Things are never real to the Apathy person.

THE GAMBLER

The compulsive gambler is at Apathy. If a person consistently wins he's higher-tone because he's cause over the game rather than effect. The compulsive gambler, however, cannot quit any game a winner. When a man gambles away the rent and grocery money every payday, he's manifesting the Apathy attitude about ownership: "I'd better not own."

A steamship on a cruise to South America received a report that another ship nearby was wrecked and on fire. The captain changed course and was the first to arrive at the flaming ship. Eight hundred passengers and crew members were in the water, floundering, wet and frightened. They'd lost everything but the clothes they wore. All of them were saved, however, and passengers crowded on deck where they watched and participated in the exciting rescue, some of them providing clothing, and warm quarters for the victims.

Throughout all this activity the gambling casino remained open. A certain number of hard-core players stayed there, eyes hypnotically fixed on the tables, apparently unaware and unaffected by the real-life drama occurring a few yards outside the door. That's Apathy. No other tone would be indifferent to such a moving experience.

"MAN NEVER CHANGES"

The youngster who understands the tone scale knows whether to accept advice and ideas from his elders. One day my seventeen-year-old son described a lecture given by one of his high school teachers, who declared, "Man never changes. He keeps making the same mistakes over and over. He never learns. He will never improve."

"Where's that on the tone scale?" I asked.

My son laughed and said, "Apathy, of course." This is another person using her years of education and experience to support an emotional attitude over which she has no control.

You can find history and documentation to support every attitude on the scale. If we fully accepted her "proof," however, no teacher would bother to teach, no scientist would continue to juggle his test tubes, and I would have stayed in bed myself today.

SUMMARY

No matter how brilliant he is, no Apathy person can be more than an imitation of the vitality we find in the higher tones.

Let's crawl up a notch...