I Now Fancy Myself Capable of Vocational Training

I’ve been at a friend’s house all day, celebrating the opening of a magnificent new barbecue area. Val Prieto’s neighbor Pat has been laboring for months, carrying sacks of concrete and wheeling in loads of slate, and now he has a fantastic bar and grill setup in his yard. I kept offering to help, but fortunately Pat never took me up on it. So I got the gain but none of the pain.

Tonight I thought I’d write a bit about mystification. This is one of my many, many pet peeves. It describes the process of greatly exaggerating the difficulty and complexity of something, in order to impress people. An Internet source says the idea is to convey the impression that a subject is “unknowable.” That about sizes it up.

Here’s an example. You decide you want to learn how to make toast. And you have a friend with six months of community college under his belt, and he owns a toaster, and you ask his advice. And instead of saying, “Put the bread in and push the button,” he makes fun of you for thinking YOU of all people could ever learn to make TOAST, and then he tells you to give up and leave it to geniuses like him.

Here’s another example. A blogger named Steve, who has a degree in physics and a law degree, goes completely insane and decides he may be smart enough to learn how to make his own pistol ammunition. And he buys a progressive press, on the theory that single-stage presses are slow and–for this type of work–outmoded. I mean, progressive presses cost more for a reason, correct? And he complains that he is having trouble because the press’s manual is a piece of crap. And some people who already make ammunition respond by being as helpful as they can, but others heap abuse on him and tell him how crazy he was to presume to intrude on the purview of the high-and-mighty few, the nearly-GED-having Illuminati of the gun range, the camo-underpants-wearing Knights Templar of 65th-percentile pistol shooting performed with $3500 custom 1911s baptized in Col. Jeff Cooper’s urine…the established reloaders.

Oh, fool. To think that YOU had intellectual horsepower sufficient to entitle you to skip the ten-year learning curve and apprenticeship period and secret handshake aided by case lube!

Please.

You know what we’re talking about here? The kind of thing they teach in vocational school. You know how that works. “Not college material? Right this way. We’ll learn you how to earn fifty dollars an hour running a milling machine.” Dignified, useful work. Skilled labor. Something to be very proud of. But not rocket science. Not the kind of thing they look for on a MENSA application.

It seems like this happens to me every time I try to do anything new. Oddly, I always succeed anyway. Well, except for the times I’ve tried to grow tomatoes. I guess you have to have a research fellowship at MIT to do that.

Anyway, I emailed Kim du Toit about the supercilious cranks who were blaming me for my problems, and referring to his wife, he said, “Connie has a name for their computer systems incarnation. She calls them ‘mystics’ — people who withhold information from others so that they keep an ‘advantage.’ Mostly, these are insecure people.” And I wondered if she was familiar with the term “mystification,” because if not, it’s a truly wonderful coincidence.

I am reminded of one of the reasons we crushed Saddam Hussein’s gigantic army in about a month. It is said that when his officers and soldiers received information that could be useful to people serving beneath them, they collected it and destroyed it. For example, the army would get some high-tech system or other for tanks, and there would be manuals for each tank, and each tank commander would collect the manuals and throw them out, keeping one copy of each for himself. So nobody could break his rice bowl. He would be the indispensable magical negro everyone could go to when the system went on the fritz. He would be Jeeves. His job was secure, and he looked like a genius to everyone above him, and all the people beneath him looked like morons, because they could not do what he could do. So they were less of a threat. The only down side was that nobody could fix anything. And fighting Saddam’s army was a lot like fighting a herd of angry poodles, half of them in heat.

Not to take anything away from the brave combatants who defeated them. I exaggerate for comic effect. But let’s face it. Pound for pound, Saddam’s troops were pretty sad. There are plenty of smaller armies that would have hurt us much, much worse.

When I take on new skills, I am trying to improve myself. Has that occurred to any of the reloading Operating Thetans? Has it occurred to them that I’m not trying to steal their blinding glory? That my efforts to enlarge my own capabilities are not a direct attack on their status as ballistic deities? I very much doubt it. Clearly, my sole motivation was to emasculate the amazing people who have stunned humanity by learning how to shove a piece of lead into a brass cylinder.

I have a nutty idea. It’s bizarre, but hear me out. My idea is this: when someone has the gumption and the industry to put himself out in order to learn something new, maybe the correct thing is to try to help.

No, it’s too crazy. The world isn’t ready for hubris like that.

I can’t rewire human nature. I know it’s useless to complain. People will always be this way. A man who can see a quarter-inch past the end of his own nose is a true visionary.

I’ll tell you this. I’m going to win. You can’t prevent me from learning how to make ammunition. And then I’m going to salt the wound by learning to shoot better than you. Regardless of the fact that Jeff Cooper never peed on any of my pistols. I’ll do it without camo. I’ll do it without patches on my jacket. I’ll do it without target sights. With mass-produced guns. I’ll do it as eccentrically as possible, with maximal violation of the tenets of sheepdom, just to make you wet the bed.

Then you can say, “Man that guy who reloads for all his pistols and shoots twice as good as I do was a damn fool, thinking he could learn to run a progressive press.”

Thanks again, generous people who helped me out. You made things a hell of a lot easier.

As for the mystics, I’ll see you at the range. I’ll be the guy with the shiny Colt with abalone grips.