Jon Ronson Quotes

Well, I had nightmares when I was doing the Klan story all the time. I had a recurring nightmare of basically being exposed as a Jew inside the Klan compound. Sometimes labeling is only useful, like with OCD. Once you're labeled you can be treated. On other occasions labeling leads to tyranny, like with childhood bipolar disorder in the U.S. Of course there are people who would like to eat breakfast without the screams of toddlers all around them, but those people should get over themselves and stop being stuck up and idiotic. I think if somebody is so set in their ways about what they feel about something - and you get this a lot in academia, of course, and also different sorts of journalism too - you're going to sweep under the carpet the facts that don't suit your thesis. And I think that happens quite a lot in the courtroom, for instance. I have thought sometimes that the sanest people, the people who are just very balanced, very happy, are probably lower achieving than other people. My kind of irrationality happens to be fear or anxiety. Discover the time of day when you write best, and write then. For me it's about 7 am to noon. For other people it's overnight. Try not to do anything other than write between those times. Trying to solve the mystery is what I enjoy most about writing. Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible. My paranoia never ends, but I haven't been paranoid about being spied on my shadowy forces for some time now. I'm not what you'd call a fearless type of person. I wasn't in any way a kind of soothsayer or not surprised when Sept. 11 happened. I was absolutely shocked. There's definitely evidence that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior. When you look at the worst corners of the American health insurance industry or the sub-prime banking market, it really feels like the more psychopathically someone behaves, the more it's rewarded. Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that. I write funny nonfiction adventure books about crazy, serious worlds. I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family. I heard a story about her once,' said James. 'She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn't know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them. Oh, you know what bloggers are like, they write and write and write. I don't know why, because they're not being paid. At the end of our conversation she (Martha Stout) turned to address you, the reader. She said if you're beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you're feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one. We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we'd never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them. Friends are the fruitcake of life - some nutty, some soaked in alcohol, some sweet. There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things. Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity? ��I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe. Twitter wanted to become a more egalitarian justice system, but instead it became a draconian one. Twitter hates tabloids, but Twitter is constantly acting like a tabloid, repeating the mistakes of the things we're hoping to better. On social media there's this thing where on many occasions, there's a single proscribed way of acting. Like if somebody dies, everyone has to say 'R.I.P.! R.I.P.!' Basically they're saying, 'Don't hurt me, I'm a good person.' It's not a good idea to define the boundaries of normality by tearing apart people who are outside of it. My ideal world was the early days of Twitter, where everyone was curious about each other and everyone saw it as kind of a window into people's lives where we could be compassionate and curious and empathetic and we could tell each other secrets. The laughing way we make damaged people our playthings, it's so dehumanizing. In the midst of a burning-hot shaming, calling for patience and context and understanding and empathy can really land you in trouble.