"The Mind Reader" by John Doble
An outspoken bar patron runs an experiment to see if the world can be divided into the “weak” and the “strong” in attempt to prove he’s not an authoritarian fascist.
“Short Stories For Long Discussions…”
Mission Statement: After Dinner Conversation is an independent, nonprofit, literary magazine that focuses on short story fiction that encourages philosophical and ethical discussions with friends, family, and students. ADC believes humanity is improved by values grounded in truth discovered through intentional reflection and respectful debate and, to facilitate that process, each story comes with suggested discussion questions.
Letter From The Editor
So, the poll from our last email was a huge success with 222 people answering the underlying question from the story, “Idle Horns,” about a daemon who has second thoughts about punishing a bike thief. This week, our story is about the propensity of people to follow, or not follow, an authoritarian leader; something the story calls an “f-scale.” It’s a fascinating concept and I hope to read some wonderful comments/discussions below.
As always, you can subscribe via our website (digital or print), or via substack. ~Kolby
Weekly Story Related Poll
“The Mind Reader” Related Poll (This Week)
“Idle Horns” Related Poll (Last Week)
"The Mind Reader" by John Doble
It happened so long ago you’d think I’d just forget it. But I haven’t, I can’t; it’s nested in my mind, coiled and twisted into my memory like a serpent I can’t get rid of. I remember it at odd moments: when I’m eating breakfast or riding the train to work. Once I thought of it while I was making love. And each time I do, it remains as awful, as sinister and stunning as it was that night. But for reasons that keep changing. Different, elusive reasons I never fully understand.
It was the winter of 1973 and I was still in college. The country was at war in Southeast Asia, and in the summer, there were riots in the cities. Events that were deadly serious, yet with an unreality about them too. As if they weren’t all they seemed to be, not something to take at face value. I remember anti-war protests that felt as serious as a rock concert: the air filled with music and the smell of marijuana, kids wearing red bandanas, waving Viet Cong flags, and chanting rhymes about how Ho Chi Minh and the National Liberation Front, the NLF, were going to win, like children sticking their tongues out or saying dirty words at dinner to see what reaction they could provoke. Even the young black rioters interviewed on television seemed to pretend to feel angry when what they really felt was scorn, and perhaps a queer sort of pride that someone was paying attention. It was theater, a way of showing off. It wasn’t real, not to the kids on campus, or the ones in the ghetto, maybe not even to those who told the police to shoot to kill. But of course it was all real. And serious, deadly serious. I just didn’t see it, didn’t understand.
It was a Thursday night; we were in a college hangout called the Waystation, an old stucco building that had been there since the Revolution. Once it was a carriage house on the road from Philadelphia to Baltimore. The stage, then the train, would stop while passengers got out to stretch or eat a meal. I used to think about them, trying to imagine what they were like: gentlemen farmers, merchants, salesmen, immigrants, perhaps an occasional Congressman who knew Henry Clay. No one knew who used to sit in that room, their boots drying in front of a fire, with a mug of ale and a trencher filled with stew. But now the place was run down, seedy-looking; there was talk of tearing it down. The outside was cracked and peeling; hunks of stucco had been patched so often, they looked like tumorous sores. Inside, the great fireplace had been long ago bricked over and the planks on the floor were stained and worn, more gray than brown, with dust so thick you could move it with your shoe. People said it was owned by a speculator, that the university wanted the land for a new dormitory, and that only the price and some protestors from the historical society were holding things up. But students, being students, had made the place their own despite, or because of, the dirt and wear, the off-color draft beer, and the jukebox that played so loud it rattled your rib cage.
It was nearly nine o’clock and I was at the bar. The room was crowded; it was always crowded on Thursdays. Students and former students and those who never were, mingled with a handful of faculty members, the younger ones, and a couple of “townies” looking for girls who believed in free love. They sat around cheap metal tables with red Formica tops, on chairs with rusted chrome legs and red plastic seats, laughing and talking and arguing about politics, philosophy, religion, and sex. And below the surface, beneath the loose talk and the laughter, lay a reality that few of them knew or cared about. I was like the rest of them. Jeffrey was not.
“People can be divided into two types?” Jeffrey was saying. “The weak and the strong?”
We were talking about psychology, my field of study, and a paper I was writing, and he was repeating what I’d told him about a personality test. The test had been developed after World War II by a group of psychologists who, shocked by what happened in Nazi Germany, had tried to understand how doctors and lawyers and bankers and businessmen--a population of law-abiding, God-fearing, ordinary people--could have taken part in it all, or at least stood there, watching it unfold, without trying to stop it, without crying out in protest. The philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the “banality of evil” to describe men like Adolph Eichmann who could be kind to children and animals, yet be part of a totalitarian machinery that murdered 12 million people: six million Jews from across the continent, and also homosexuals, gypsies, Russians, Ukrainians and other East Europeans; civilians: old men, women, children. The psychologists had developed a test to discover what kind of person could do such things. In the psychology literature, it is called the “F-scale” the “F” standing for fascist. Elegant in its simplicity, the test consists of only five questions with which a person either agrees or disagrees. An extreme response, strong agreement or disagreement, on all five items, reveals, according to the test-makers, that a respondent has an authoritarian bent or fascist tendencies, and, inferentially, that he might well fall in behind someone like a Hitler or a Mussolini. Jeffrey had asked me what the five questions were and, when I’d told him, he latched onto one of them.
“People can be divided into the weak and the strong? Now I’m supposed to tell you whether I agree with that or not? And depending on my answer, you can tell if…what’s the jargon you used? If I have an ‘authoritarian personality?’”
It occurred to me later that I may have upset him, that what he did was a defense, a way of protecting himself from what he felt as an attack. But none of that occurred to me then. All I saw was that he was distorting what I’d told him, deliberately oversimplifying. I was sorry I’d brought the subject up.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to After Dinner Conversation - Philosophy | Ethics Short Story to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.