All his life, he had been comfortable being alone. Interacting with others was so often frustrating. Every meeting with another person seemed like a collision.
If he were growing up today, they would likely give him some diagnosis on the Autism Spectrum or some related diagnosis and try to give him meds and force him to somehow fit in.
For as long as humans have existed, there have been those that don't connect well socially. We may label them and pontificate and categorize, but this has always been true and is not likely to change. Perhaps we should get over our arrogant idea of normal.
As someone who was diagnosed with Aspergers, and someone that greatly dislikes annoying, confusing, and overly excited people that rely almost entirely on certain forms of non-verbal social cues to communicate (to the point I think they're just as broken as I am, just in the exact opposite way; they seemingly lack the ability to use words and logic to convey ideas, preferring emotions and impulsivity to interact with the world and others)...
I actually understand the hermit to some extent. I do believe that he could easily suffer from something the DSM V considers on the spectrum. It is unfortunate that society's supports fell through for him.
I sent the article to my oldest son because it made me think of him. He replied with: I was sort of thinking about how, if I'd had a different life, I could see myself doing much the same. Maybe a bit more planned. Maybe not.
I was always okay with him being him and did not try to force him to be more social. I helped him figure out how to interact with society on his terms.
For example, he likes going to stores with self-checkout so he doesn't have to deal with a cashier. Self-checkout exists and many people use them for many reasons. One of his big motivators is that dealing with people is hard, even for just the brief interaction of paying for his purchase.
> annoying, confusing, and overly excited people that rely almost entirely on certain forms of non-verbal social cues to communicate (to the point I think they're just as broken as I am, just in the exact opposite way; they seemingly lack the ability to use words and logic to convey ideas, preferring emotions and impulsivity to interact with the world and others)...
>try to give him meds and force him to somehow fit in.
For the vast majority or people we tether between fear of social exclusion and over-confidence. In theory, social interaction it easy; its just people conversing about shared interests. If you are willing to take the chance at making friendship your life can be so much richer and they will most likely live longer. It's easy to find excuses not to interact but we all have to try. People like Christopher Knight are outliers and probably beyond help but it doesn't mean there shouldn't apply the slightest societal pressure to people to form relationships because not doing so means a deconstruction of society.
When forcing someone is used to make sure sex happens, they call that rape and list it as a crime in the legal code. In spite of what a lot of people think, the definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent, not how rough it was. Some acts of rape do not look very different from consensual sex in terms of mechanics, but it is a loathsome experience for the person who did not want this.
I think that principle generalizes pretty well. There are better ways to deal with people like this than forcing them to do something and insisting it is for their own good.
Friendship that is not based upon real respect is not genuine friendship.
Or just introvert. It was news to discover while reading "Quiet" that introversion is almost considered a disease in the US. Another shocking discovery was about top schools preferring extroverts to maybe smarter but introverted students.
I'm amazed at the way people are looking at this. I think we're very jaded when we lose our capacity to see just how remarkable homelessness is. Being homeless and living homeless is something amazing. Just because it is common, doesn't make it any less so. Just because it is common doesn't mean that we understand it.
The only thing that makes this more or less interesting than some tale of independence and "acceptable" survivalism is the contempt of the beholder.
One of my absolute favourite books as a child was The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by WH Davies. Perhaps it has coloured my vision, but I think we owe at least a grudging respect to people who can survive in the modern world (by any reasonable means) as such outcasts.
I don't understand why this guy is particularly more interesting or amazing than the countless other homeless people who have survived in our inner-cities for decades. The only thing that makes this guy different is the superficial aspects : the setting is more rustic, there's no drugs or begging involved, he lives in a forest instead of in an abandoned subway line, etc.
In some ways, this guy actually had a much easier time surviving than many of the inner-city homeless. He essentially had access to a low-security, well-stocked resort town in rural Maine - entirely to himself with no other criminal competition and a very small police force to worry about. He didn't have to worry about getting killed by other desperate homeless people or by police, or having to constantly search for a different place to sleep every night.
Also, he wasn't even forced into homelessness. He just made a willful decision to live this kind of parasitic lifestyle. Perhaps he was mentally ill in some way, but regardless, I can't be particularly sympathetic without further information about his motivations.
At least from my perspective, this wasn't a matter of remarkable vs unremarkable, it was about the expectation the title set.
Maybe it was the "into the woods", maybe it was the "alone" part, but I just wasn't expecting a story of some person stealing from others and getting caught after 27 years.
No one here interested in the concept of not having direct human interaction for 27 years? Regardless of how he achieved it?
There is much to learn from this case. I suspect only a few handfulls of humans in history have completed that epic journey.
I personally know poeple who have solo nonstop sailed around the world, speaking on the radio every day, and even that has a huge impact and is less than a year.
Perhaps we can put aside the moral aspects with how he achieved it and focus on the rest of this astonishing edge case?
This story... doesn't really strike me as that worthy of contemplating for too long. Really, how is this guy really particularly different from someone who is basically just homeless? I mean, instead of living on the outskirts of summer resort towns in Maine, he could be homeless living on the outskirts of Bayonne, New Jersey, sifting through trash or breaking into 7-11s at night. The whole "into the woods" thing is sort of almost beside the point here. The guy didn't actually live as some sort of pre-Columbian hunter-gatherer. He was just basically a homeless guy who robbed houses. I'm not sure why anyone thinks we can learn something from him... other than, perhaps, how to break into houses.
I stopped reading when I got to the bit where he starts stealing stuff to survive. He's just a homeless guy who lived in the bush instead of under a bridge. There's actually a lot of them that live in the bush on the outskirts of towns/cities. I've run into a few south of Sydney when I used to live there and hike/camp lots.
The title made it sound like he's a survivalist-type who sustained himself naturally. That would have been way more interesting.
Yeah, really. This is a shallow guy with a philosophy that amounts to a shrug and a "whatever" who would have starved if not for people with philosophies that actually produce useful results, from whom he simply stole.
There are countless people who could work but prefer to "survive" by just taking from others instead. It's called "welfare" (not talking about people who need it, for whom it is intended, but people who don't but just take it anyway), and even they don't usually endanger others by breaking and entering, but this guy, well, shrug & "whatever, I'd rather just take people's stuff".
Of course, maybe he was mentally ill. If so, this might not have been his fault, but even in that case, there usually isn't that much to learn from people whose definition of "totally turn their back on society" is to go on being a part of society every single day as takers but totally turning their backs on helping others in return.
True. He did live in social isolation though. And the theft fits with the cat burgler/jewel thief stories, perennially popular here on "hacker" news. Where "hacker" doesn't mean hacking into systems, but it does mean not doing things in the conventional manner.
In a previous story on him, there was some nice phrasing on his freedom, moon and season:
> Chris became surprisingly introspective. "I did examine myself," he said. "Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free." http://www.gq.com/story/the-last-true-hermit?printable=true
It changes the story from "man in the wild beyond civilization for 27 years" that you would imagine from the headline to "reclusive homeless man breaks into homes without talking to the people he spots weekly."
What really struck me was his ability to build a house, survive on his own set of tools and his contributions to science by keeping accurate logs on local climate and wildlife
Yeah the headline caught me but the article disappointed. I don't think there is any honor in being homeless and stealing from others. Had he been self-sufficient that would have been interesting to me; however if you've read Into the Wild you know how that ends.
I've read similar stories of people setting up semi-permanent homes in hidden urban spaces.
It's the hacking aspect that makes it interesting. Living within a community off the books. If his stealing hurt people, then his bad, but I kinda feel like it didn't. The urban legend itself had a value to the community.
There have been billions of 'pre-Columbian hunter-gatherers', this is different.
All theft hurts someone. People have this conception that home/store owners are millionaires. That is more often than not incorrect. The margins on products sold can be as low as 1 - 3%. Thus you have to sell 34 to recoup the cost of a single stolen item. The business owner would likely increase prices in order to respond to the theft, thus hurting the community as a whole. Now imagine you are a single mother attempting to feed your child, are you happy to pay higher prices so this guy can live " off the grid"?
In more primitive society this person would have simply been killed for this transgression of the social contract. This isn't a hack, its sociopathy.
This isn't that different from what many other homeless people on the fringes of cities/towns accomplish. They setup some kind of make-shift shelter, and subsist via varying degrees of cleverness, begging or charity. The only difference with this guy is he never begged (he just stole), and the setting was slightly more rustic than usual. But for some reason people read this story and desperately try to make it more than it is, by awkwardly infusing this "wilderness survivalist" aspect into it, which really doesn't reflect what actually happened at all.
I'm sure that after the first 100 burglaries it became evident to him that it wasn't possible to live/survive without help from other human beings.
In that case I'm wondering why not take the more legal approach of resupplying at a local church / shelter from time to time rather than continue stealing.
More than 1000 burglaries over 27 years is still a frequency of nearly 1/week. Stealing is the hacking equivalent of breaking someone's fingers to tell you the password, or getting lucky and finding their sticky note under the desk.
There's the story of Daniel Shellabarger[1], aka Daniel Suelo, who while not a complete hermit, has lived off the grid in the Gila wilderness among other places.
It depends on your perspective on property. When a hunter kills and eats a deer does he not steal from the deer family? Id bet that a bear doesnt think kindly of some human showing up to pick all those berries that the bear has been waiting to rippen. This man decided to step out of society, so much so that our rules were no longer his.
Remember also that not too long ago "hunting and gathering", poaching, was a hanging crime far greater than petty theft. Our rules change regularly. I wouldn't applaud this man's behavior, but i do respect his thought process. A tweek here and there and i might call him some sort of artist. His story, which i have read about many times, broadens our perspective. That's art. Good art breaks rules. The best art denies them entirely.
Exactly. And you don't "survive" anywhere 20 years. You live there. After some period of time, it's not some miracle you've somehow managed it, it's your way of life.
So what happens with the IRS if you disappear into the Alaskan wilderness for 20 years (or get hooked on meth and become homeless or whatever) and subsequently want to reintegrate into society? Do you get tossed in the slammer for failure to file?
There's a strong constitutional argument that if you don't actually owe the IRS money, and you're otherwise a regular Joe, you don't have to file.
This is different than the tax protester argument regarding the 5th Amendment.
Going back to the SCOTUS debate over Obamacare, remember that one of the conservatives' theories on its unconstitutionality hinged on an obscure concept in the Anglo-American common law that the law cannot in the first instance impose affirmative (positive) duties on a person, as opposed to prohibitions (negative duties). It most often comes up when discussing why under the common law there historically could never be an affirmative duty to provide assistance to a stranger in peril, and why courts traditionally struck down laws which created such a duty. A person must first take some significant affirmative step with the knowledge (usually implied) that he's subjecting himself to positive law. Thus, while you have no duty to help a complete stranger in peril, if you begin to help him you may have opened yourself up to legal obligations that govern your help, including whether you can withdraw it. (If you're a licensed doctor, OTOH, arguably the law could impose such a burden, but only because you first _chose_ to become a doctor, with the implicit understanding that the act of joining a highly regulated profession might attach certain obligations.)
The two big exceptions in this abstract theory are 1) taxation and 2) military service.
If you remember, Chief Justice Roberts' concurring opinion upholding Obamacare was based on his finding that the penalty for violating the individual mandate was a tax. Roberts, too, put stock in this distinction between positive and negative duties. It was difficult from an analytical standpoint not to accept that theory. If the conservative justices claimed the scope of the Commerce Clause didn't encompass the individual mandate, which thus exceeded Congress' enumerated powers, then logically neither could the Commerce Clause, e.g., support Federal prohibitions against growing and smoking marijuana in the privacy of your own home. None of the conservative justices were willing to sacrifice the War on Drugs for their principles. (Were Rehnquist and O'Connor still on the bench Obamacare would have been struck down because they dissented in the famous marijuana case 10 years earlier.) Thus, if Roberts wanted to save Obamacare while preserving the ability to reject similar but more onerous future obligations, he had no choice but to classify the penalty as a tax. He was the only justice on either side to do so. (Note that the individual mandate law was intentionally written, in part, to make the tax argument plausible. It's just that it was almost universally thought that it would live or die according to the scope of the Commerce Clause.)
Participating in commerce is another affirmative activity that allows the government to impose positive duties, and taking income for labor could arguably be considered commercial activity. Paying taxes might be another activity that could attach reporting obligations. But there are reasonable ways to differentiate those activities. Everybody, theoretically, has to work (they certainly have a right to work, at least) and if choosing to undertake simple remunerated labor opened you up to endless government regulation it wouldn't be very fair; there wouldn't be any real freedom not to subject yourself to government regulation. Similarly, because taxation is the big exception, if taxation alone could indirectly attach a bunch of ancillary obligations you're not really free to refrain from subjecting yourself to other positive law.
So, theoretically, if you're just an average working stiff who dutifully pays their taxes, there's a strong case to be made that you don't have to file with the IRS.
Until Obamacare, this facet of legal theory was mostly a curiosity which really only functioned to preserve the fiction that an individual, like in the case of this secluded Russian family, could theoretically live in some sort of state of nature free from government control.
Readit News
If he were growing up today, they would likely give him some diagnosis on the Autism Spectrum or some related diagnosis and try to give him meds and force him to somehow fit in.
For as long as humans have existed, there have been those that don't connect well socially. We may label them and pontificate and categorize, but this has always been true and is not likely to change. Perhaps we should get over our arrogant idea of normal.
As someone who was diagnosed with Aspergers, and someone that greatly dislikes annoying, confusing, and overly excited people that rely almost entirely on certain forms of non-verbal social cues to communicate (to the point I think they're just as broken as I am, just in the exact opposite way; they seemingly lack the ability to use words and logic to convey ideas, preferring emotions and impulsivity to interact with the world and others)...
I actually understand the hermit to some extent. I do believe that he could easily suffer from something the DSM V considers on the spectrum. It is unfortunate that society's supports fell through for him.
I was always okay with him being him and did not try to force him to be more social. I helped him figure out how to interact with society on his terms.
For example, he likes going to stores with self-checkout so he doesn't have to deal with a cashier. Self-checkout exists and many people use them for many reasons. One of his big motivators is that dealing with people is hard, even for just the brief interaction of paying for his purchase.
Hello, ADHD here.
However, you didn't write anything offensive and have your own point which is valid. Nothing to down vote IMO.
Deleted Comment
For the vast majority or people we tether between fear of social exclusion and over-confidence. In theory, social interaction it easy; its just people conversing about shared interests. If you are willing to take the chance at making friendship your life can be so much richer and they will most likely live longer. It's easy to find excuses not to interact but we all have to try. People like Christopher Knight are outliers and probably beyond help but it doesn't mean there shouldn't apply the slightest societal pressure to people to form relationships because not doing so means a deconstruction of society.
I think that principle generalizes pretty well. There are better ways to deal with people like this than forcing them to do something and insisting it is for their own good.
Friendship that is not based upon real respect is not genuine friendship.
Deleted Comment
The only thing that makes this more or less interesting than some tale of independence and "acceptable" survivalism is the contempt of the beholder.
One of my absolute favourite books as a child was The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by WH Davies. Perhaps it has coloured my vision, but I think we owe at least a grudging respect to people who can survive in the modern world (by any reasonable means) as such outcasts.
In some ways, this guy actually had a much easier time surviving than many of the inner-city homeless. He essentially had access to a low-security, well-stocked resort town in rural Maine - entirely to himself with no other criminal competition and a very small police force to worry about. He didn't have to worry about getting killed by other desperate homeless people or by police, or having to constantly search for a different place to sleep every night.
Also, he wasn't even forced into homelessness. He just made a willful decision to live this kind of parasitic lifestyle. Perhaps he was mentally ill in some way, but regardless, I can't be particularly sympathetic without further information about his motivations.
Maybe it was the "into the woods", maybe it was the "alone" part, but I just wasn't expecting a story of some person stealing from others and getting caught after 27 years.
Deleted Comment
There is much to learn from this case. I suspect only a few handfulls of humans in history have completed that epic journey.
I personally know poeple who have solo nonstop sailed around the world, speaking on the radio every day, and even that has a huge impact and is less than a year.
Perhaps we can put aside the moral aspects with how he achieved it and focus on the rest of this astonishing edge case?
I guess we could also ask Thomas Silverstein. From his wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Silverstein):
> He has been in solitary confinement since 1983, when he killed prison guard Merle Clutts at the Marion Penitentiary in Illinois.
I'm betting there are other people in US prisons who have been in solitary confinement for 10+ years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/us/herman-wallace-held-41-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/us/for-45-years-in-prison...
A big "lesson" here is: everything's easier when you have no problem with stealing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8205993
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M23j1U0esvc
The title made it sound like he's a survivalist-type who sustained himself naturally. That would have been way more interesting.
There are countless people who could work but prefer to "survive" by just taking from others instead. It's called "welfare" (not talking about people who need it, for whom it is intended, but people who don't but just take it anyway), and even they don't usually endanger others by breaking and entering, but this guy, well, shrug & "whatever, I'd rather just take people's stuff".
Of course, maybe he was mentally ill. If so, this might not have been his fault, but even in that case, there usually isn't that much to learn from people whose definition of "totally turn their back on society" is to go on being a part of society every single day as takers but totally turning their backs on helping others in return.
In a previous story on him, there was some nice phrasing on his freedom, moon and season:
> Chris became surprisingly introspective. "I did examine myself," he said. "Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free." http://www.gq.com/story/the-last-true-hermit?printable=true
https://usnews.newsvine.com/_news/2013/04/10/17691737-hermit...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJKd0rkKss
Dead Comment
He steals in that too.
This guy is not homeless. He had a home.
I've read similar stories of people setting up semi-permanent homes in hidden urban spaces.
It's the hacking aspect that makes it interesting. Living within a community off the books. If his stealing hurt people, then his bad, but I kinda feel like it didn't. The urban legend itself had a value to the community.
There have been billions of 'pre-Columbian hunter-gatherers', this is different.
In more primitive society this person would have simply been killed for this transgression of the social contract. This isn't a hack, its sociopathy.
In that case I'm wondering why not take the more legal approach of resupplying at a local church / shelter from time to time rather than continue stealing.
More than 1000 burglaries over 27 years is still a frequency of nearly 1/week. Stealing is the hacking equivalent of breaking someone's fingers to tell you the password, or getting lucky and finding their sticky note under the desk.
[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/03/homeles...
Remember also that not too long ago "hunting and gathering", poaching, was a hanging crime far greater than petty theft. Our rules change regularly. I wouldn't applaud this man's behavior, but i do respect his thought process. A tweek here and there and i might call him some sort of artist. His story, which i have read about many times, broadens our perspective. That's art. Good art breaks rules. The best art denies them entirely.
Deleted Comment
This is different than the tax protester argument regarding the 5th Amendment.
Going back to the SCOTUS debate over Obamacare, remember that one of the conservatives' theories on its unconstitutionality hinged on an obscure concept in the Anglo-American common law that the law cannot in the first instance impose affirmative (positive) duties on a person, as opposed to prohibitions (negative duties). It most often comes up when discussing why under the common law there historically could never be an affirmative duty to provide assistance to a stranger in peril, and why courts traditionally struck down laws which created such a duty. A person must first take some significant affirmative step with the knowledge (usually implied) that he's subjecting himself to positive law. Thus, while you have no duty to help a complete stranger in peril, if you begin to help him you may have opened yourself up to legal obligations that govern your help, including whether you can withdraw it. (If you're a licensed doctor, OTOH, arguably the law could impose such a burden, but only because you first _chose_ to become a doctor, with the implicit understanding that the act of joining a highly regulated profession might attach certain obligations.)
The two big exceptions in this abstract theory are 1) taxation and 2) military service.
If you remember, Chief Justice Roberts' concurring opinion upholding Obamacare was based on his finding that the penalty for violating the individual mandate was a tax. Roberts, too, put stock in this distinction between positive and negative duties. It was difficult from an analytical standpoint not to accept that theory. If the conservative justices claimed the scope of the Commerce Clause didn't encompass the individual mandate, which thus exceeded Congress' enumerated powers, then logically neither could the Commerce Clause, e.g., support Federal prohibitions against growing and smoking marijuana in the privacy of your own home. None of the conservative justices were willing to sacrifice the War on Drugs for their principles. (Were Rehnquist and O'Connor still on the bench Obamacare would have been struck down because they dissented in the famous marijuana case 10 years earlier.) Thus, if Roberts wanted to save Obamacare while preserving the ability to reject similar but more onerous future obligations, he had no choice but to classify the penalty as a tax. He was the only justice on either side to do so. (Note that the individual mandate law was intentionally written, in part, to make the tax argument plausible. It's just that it was almost universally thought that it would live or die according to the scope of the Commerce Clause.)
Participating in commerce is another affirmative activity that allows the government to impose positive duties, and taking income for labor could arguably be considered commercial activity. Paying taxes might be another activity that could attach reporting obligations. But there are reasonable ways to differentiate those activities. Everybody, theoretically, has to work (they certainly have a right to work, at least) and if choosing to undertake simple remunerated labor opened you up to endless government regulation it wouldn't be very fair; there wouldn't be any real freedom not to subject yourself to government regulation. Similarly, because taxation is the big exception, if taxation alone could indirectly attach a bunch of ancillary obligations you're not really free to refrain from subjecting yourself to other positive law.
So, theoretically, if you're just an average working stiff who dutifully pays their taxes, there's a strong case to be made that you don't have to file with the IRS.
Until Obamacare, this facet of legal theory was mostly a curiosity which really only functioned to preserve the fiction that an individual, like in the case of this secluded Russian family, could theoretically live in some sort of state of nature free from government control.