Mailvox: MPAI in action

A reader encounters a pair of Jordaneticians on an airplane:

You may find this interaction I had with a random couple interesting.

While on a plane flight, a couple across the aisle were both reading 12 Rules for Life.  I waited for the flight to land to ask them what they thought about the book so far.  Both of them were only a couple chapters into the book.  The husband responded with:

“Oh my God I love it, it’s just so good.”

As much as I wanted to just sit down and have a lengthy conversation with them about how he’s a charlatan, I recognized this was not the time or place and they were complete strangers.  So instead I told them, “the more I read and study JP, the less I like him.  And that the book is just completely incoherent, how do gorillas having black sclera have anything to do with his rules?

The husband paused for a second and acknowledged that JP does go on too many irrelevant tangents.  But his wife had another answer in mind:

“But that’s just how JP thinks! His mind is just wired that way, not only does he write that way he speaks that way too!  He’s just on a completely different level than us!”

At this point the people in front of me started leaving, so I gave my pleasantries and walked away.  But while walking through the jet bridge I can hear the wife continue to talk to her husband about how JP is just too smart, and that his mind is just too difficult for us to understand.

Now it was only a 2-minute conversation, but what would you have done?  Is there some good rhetoric or elevator speech that can enlighten these lost men?

I would have said something like: “He’s on a different level, all right. The psychopathic level. You know he admits to dreaming about killing and eating the cousin he still thinks was the most beautiful woman in the world, right? You’re taking advice about life from Hannibal the cannibal. Why not just watch Silence of the Lambs while you’re at it?”