Helpfulness and helplessness

Another Sunday. I guess I might be one of the few people on earth who looks forward to Monday. I am a charter member of the TGIM club. The MSM, including both TV and print, seem to believe passionately in the idea that Sunday is a day of rest, so trying to find any news on Sunday is pretty much a lost cause. Thus, confronted with the horrors of having to watch TV for anything but the news, I have spent the day in one of my favorite pastimes: thinking about the peculiarities of human behavior.

I have been struck by the fact that human beings, however awful they may be in some respects, are almost universally helpful. How many times have you asked someone for help and been refused. I don’t believe I have ever been refused help, no matter what the problem was. You’re lost and you ask directions, people go out of their way to help, sometimes going so far as to actually accompany you part way until it is clear what you need to do. You’re at a gas station and you can’t work the pump. Someone will show you. You can’t work some machine at the automat. Someone will help you. You don’t know what kind of wine goes with turkey. Someone will help you. People, no matter how grouchy they seem, will almost always help you do whatever it is you need to do. You can even avoid problems with language by presenting an aura of helplessness. I lived for an entire year in Germany with only one phrase, Ich warte auf my Frau (I’m waiting for my wife). Anyone who asked me a question or tried to engage me in conversation (in a language I could not speak) would hear this, nod sagely, and move on to someone else.

Helpfulness seems to be a near universal human response to helplessness. If you present yourself as helpless, someone will help you. This is no more true anywhere than in doing anthropological fieldwork. Indeed, I believe I would be prepared to argue that helplessness in the field is the key to success. Think of it, you find yourself in a strange culture where you do not know the rules or customs or whatever. You stand or sit there helpless when confronted with even the simplest of tasks. Someone always helps you. This is one of the main ways you learn. What I find even more fascinating about this, is that it seems to be universal. That is, it doesn’t matter if you are in the New Guinea Highlands, the depths of South America, the suburbs of Rio or Istanbul, the slums of Chicago, or wherever, the people will almost always react to your helplessness and aid you in your endeavors, whatever they may be. Having discussed this with some of my colleagues who have worked in various parts of the world, this seems to be the case. One friend, who did work in Newfoundland, suggested that without depending upon this human tendency to help the helpless, anthropological fieldwork would necessarily fail. This may well be true.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon how to look at it), unscrupulous and shameless people like me can use helplessness as a strategy to get through life. Thus my helplessness, real or feigned, has allowed me to successfully negotiate life with a minimum of frustration and angst. Being helpless, or appearing to be helpless, has resulted in maneuvering my wife, bless her, into doing all sorts of things I do not wish to do. For example, when some bureaucratic or other problems crops up, as with the phone company, the insurance company, the bank, the doctor or dentist, calling the plumber, taxes, or whatever, my wife ends up taking care of it as she believes I am too helpless to succeed at it. Even problems around the house lend themselves to this strategy: stopped up sinks or toilets, dirty windows, dishwashing, vacuuming and dusting, you name it, are nothing to me, as my wife has been convinced over the years that I am too helpless to be depended on to fix or do them. Even if we have a flat tire while driving she will automatically attempt to take care of it (please, I am not actually so shameless as to allow her to do this). She does, however, automatically pump the gas, wash the windshield, and deal with the credit card operated pumps (these pumps, along with ATM’s, are far too complicated for me. I never insert credit cards or money into strange holes in machines that I do not understand or trust). Helplessness and procrastination have served me very well over the years. Not only is my wife convinced that I am basically helpless in the face of life, she also believes I am unable to learn. She has given up even trying to teach me even simple living skills. While she may be disappointed in me, I am triumphant. I get away with this because I am otherwise loving and kind. The secret to a successful marriage, I have learned, is to say “yes, dear,” with sincerity. One thing, though, I have never been able to get her to take out the garbage (she is not at all stupid, she knows perfectly well what I am doing, and for whatever reasons, tolerates it, another of the Great Mysteries that fascinate me).

LKBIQ:
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe