16 August

Over the next few weeks, leading up to our Courageous Conversation on 14 September, I thought it might be worthwhile to share a few ideas about what it means to enter into conversation with others. This is the first of these reflections.

In his book Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of a high-ranking CIA operative known as “The Mountain Climber”. During the Cold War, The Mountain Climber was the top name in the spy world. He built an impressive network of informants in Cuba under Fidel Castro and was successful in passing valuable information to Langley. His entire career and his promotions were built on this incredible feat. 

Fast forward a few years and The Mountain Climber, now a cemented legend in the CIA, is called to meet Florentino Aspillaga, his counterpart in Cuba and just as successful. Only now, Aspillaga wanted to defect to the American side. As a gesture of genuineness, Aspillaga revealed that all 48 people in The Mountain Climber’s network of informants had, in fact, been double agents all along. They had deceived him from the very start. Gladwell calls this one of the most humiliating moments in the CIA’s history, not to mention the personal embarrassment to The Mountain Climber himself.

Gladwell uses this as an example of how deception works when we talk with others. He notes that when we think of deception, we usually make three mistakes. First, we assume the person being deceived must be a fool or in a particularly vulnerable situation. Yet here, one of America’s best-trained spies fell for it. Second, we believe deception happens only once in a lifetime (“fool me once!”). But this happened to The Mountain Climber not once, but 48 times. Third, we often imagine the deceiver as an evil genius. Yet finding and training 48 evil masterminds to operate without breaking cover would have been impossible. 

Instead, Gladwell draws on the work of Tim Levine, who believes lying and deception are actually quite rare. According to Levine, evolution has made us naturally gullible, and that is a good thing. To build any meaningful relationship, we must let down our guard and trust people we do not yet know. We cannot collaborate, create, or build a community on a foundation of paranoia. We “default to truth” because we want to trust people.

Of course, trusting is always risky. Someone may take advantage of us. But for Gladwell and Levine, this is a risk worth taking. In many areas of life, we are called to believe in others, and that, they argue, is the best strategy for living meaningfully.

So yes, being vulnerable, trusting, and entering into conversation with others is courageous. But, at the same time, it is worth it.

This was a summary of a very funny and witty talk that Gladwell gave about his book. If you would like to hear the whole story, please follow this link:

Malcolm Gladwell | Talking to Strangers - What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know

Marius Louw