by Jon Ronson
It was a compelling theory, and I continued to believe this might be the solution to the riddle right up until the moment, an hour later, I had a Skype video conversation with Levi Shand, who, it was soon revealed, wasn’t an invention of Douglas Hofstadter’s but an actual student from Indiana University.
He was a handsome young man with black hair, doleful eyes, and a messy student bedroom. He had been easy to track down. I e-mailed him via his Facebook page. He got back to me straightaway (he’d been online at the time) and within seconds we were face-to-face.
He told me it was all true. He really did find the books in a box under a railway viaduct and Douglas Hofstadter really did have a harem of French women living at his home.
“Tell me exactly what happened when you visited him,” I said.
“I was really nervous,” Levi said, “given his prominence on the cognitive science scene. A beautiful young French girl answered the door. She told me to wait. I looked through into the next room, and there were more beautiful French girls in there.”
“How many in total?” I asked.
“There were at least six of them,” said Levi. “They had brown hair, blond hair, all standing there between the kitchen and the dining room. All of them stunningly beautiful.”
“Is this true?” I asked him.
“Well, they might have been Belgian,” said Levi.
“What happened then?” I asked.
“Professor Hofstadter came out from the kitchen,” he said, “looking thin but healthy. Charismatic. He took the books, thanked me, and I left. And that’s it.”
“And every word of this is true?” I asked.
“Every word,” said Levi.
But something didn’t feel right. Levi’s story, and indeed Deborah’s theory, worked only if Douglas Hofstadter was some kind of playful, dilettantish prankster, and nothing I could find suggested he was. In 2007, for example, Deborah Solomon of The New York Times asked him some slightly facetious questions and his replies revealed him to be a serious, quite impatient man:Q. You first became known in 1979, when you published “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” a campus classic, which finds parallels between the brains of Bach, M. C. Escher and the mathematician Kurt Gödel. In your new book, “I Am a Strange Loop,” you seem mainly interested in your own brain.
A. This book is much straighter. It’s less crazy. Less daring, maybe.
Q. You really know how to plug a book.
A. Well, O.K., I don’t know. Questions of consciousness and soul—that is what the new book was motivated by.
Q. Your entry in Wikipedia says that your work has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence.
A. I have no interest in computers. The entry is filled with inaccuracies, and it kind of depresses me.
And so on. Hofstadter’s work, I learned, was informed by two neurological tragedies. When he was twelve, it became clear that his young sister Molly was unable to speak or understand language: “I was very interested already in how things in my mind worked,” he told Time magazine in 2007. “When Molly’s unfortunate plight became apparent, it all started getting connected to the physical world. It really made you think about the brain and the self, and how the brain determines who the person is.”
And then in 1993 his wife, Carol, died, suddenly, of a brain tumor. Their children were two and five. He was left overwhelmed with grief. In I Am a Strange Loop he consoles himself with the thought that she lived on in his brain: “I believe that there is a trace of her ‘I,’ her interiority, her inner light, however you want to phrase it, that remains inside me,” he told Scientific American in 2007, “and the trace that remains is a valid trace of her self—her soul, if you wish. I have to emphasize that the sad truth of the matter is, of course, that whatever persists in me is a very feeble copy of her. It’s reduced, a sort of low-resolution version, coarsegrained. . . . Of course it doesn’t remove the sting of death. It doesn’t say, ‘Oh, well, it didn’t matter that she died because she lives on just fine in my brain.’ Would that it were. But, anyway, it is a bit of a consolation.”
None of this painted a picture of a man who might have a harem of French women and a propensity to create a complicated, odd conspiracy involving posting dozens of copies of strange books, anonymously, to academics across the world.
I wrote him an e-mail, asking him if Levi Shand’s story about the box under the bridge and the harem of French women was true, and then I went for a walk. When I returned, this was waiting for me in my in-box:Dear Mr. Ronson,
I have nothing to do with Being or Nothingness except that I’m mentioned in it. I am just an “innocent victim” of the project.
Yes, Mr. Shand came to my house and delivered a few copies of the odd book, but the rest of his story is sheer fabrication. My daughter was having her French lesson with her French tutor in the living room, so perhaps Mr. Shand espied the two of them and heard them speaking French. Also, I speak Italian at home with my kids, and for all I know, Mr. Shand may have mistaken the sound of Italian for French. The point is, there was certainly no “house filled with beautiful French women”—that’s utter rubbish. He wanted to make his mission sound mysterious and titillating.
It’s a shame that people do this kind of thing and post it on the Web.
Sincerely, Douglas Hofstadter
I e-mailed back. Much of Levi Shand’s tale didn’t ring true, I said, not only the business of the harem but also the story of how he found the box underneath the railway viaduct. Was it possible that Levi Shand was in fact the author of Being or Nothingness?
He replied:Levi Shand is certainly not the author of the small white book. I have been sent about 80 copies (70 in English, 10 in Swedish) by its author. They sit untouched in my office. Before the book existed, I received a series of extremely cryptic postcards, all in Swedish (all of which I read, although not carefully, and none of which made the least sense at all). People who are normal (i.e., sane, sensible) don’t try to open lines of communication with total strangers by writing them a series of disjointed, weird, cryptic messages.
From there on, it only got weirder—first several copies of the book were sent to me in a package, and then, some months later, about 80 copies arrived at my office, and then came the bizarre claim that a bunch of copies “were found under a bridge” on my campus, and then books started arriving at various universities around the world, sent to people in certain disciplines that were vaguely associated with Al, biology, etc. And then there were the scissored-out words (super-weird!), and the taped-in letter, addressed to me. All of it was completely nuts. I could say much more about it all, but I don’t have the time.
I have a great deal of experience with people who are smart but unbalanced, people who think they have found the key to the universe, etc. It’s a sad thing, but there are many of them out there, and often they are extremely obsessive. This particular case was exceedingly transparent because it was so exceedingly obsessive.
Yes, there was a missing piece of the puzzle, Douglas Hofstadter was saying, but the recipients had gotten it wrong. They assumed the endeavor was brilliant and rational because they were brilliant and rational, and we tend to automatically assume that everybody else is basically just like us. But in fact the missing piece was that the author was a crackpot.
The book couldn’t be decoded because it was written by a crackpot.
Hofstadter wrote:“Being or Nothingness” was written (and published) by a psychologist (or possibly a psychiatrist) in Göteborg, Sweden, who prefers anonymity and thus goes by the pseudonym of “Joe K.”
“Petter Nordlund?” I thought.
Was Petter Nordlund the sole perpetrator? It seemed unlikely that such a successful man—a distinguished psychiatrist and a protein chemist, whatever that was, and an advisor to a biotech company specializing in therapeutic peptide discovery and development, whatever that was, was actually, in Hofstadter’s words, extremely obsessive and unbalanced.
But at seve
n that evening I was face-to-face with him, and it became quickly obvious that he was, indeed, the culprit. He was tall, in his fifties, with an attractive face, the air of an academic. He wore a tweed jacket. He stood in his doorway with his wife, Lily, at his side. Immediately, I liked him. He had a big, kind, cryptic smile on his face, and he was wringing his hands like a man possessed. I frequently wrung my hands in much the same way. I couldn’t help thinking that—in terms of getting much too obsessed about stupid things that didn’t matter—Petter and I were probably peas in a pod.
“I’m surprised you’re here,” Petter said.
“I hope it isn’t too unpleasant a surprise,” I said.
There was a short silence.
“If you study Being or Nothingness,” Petter said, “you will realize that you will never find out the author.”
“I think I know the author,” I said. “I think it’s you.”
“That’s easy to . . .” Petter trailed off. “That’s an easy guess,” he said.
“Is it a correct guess?” I asked.
“Of course not,” said Petter.
Petter (and Petter Nordlund is not his real name, nor is Lily her real name) bounced up and down on his feet a little. He was adopting the demeanor of a man who had received an unexpected visit from a neighbor just as something was boiling over on the stove. But I could tell his air of friendly distraction was a mask and underneath he was feeling quite overwhelmed by my arrival.
“Petter,” I said. “Let me at least ask you this. Why were those particular people chosen to receive the book?”
At this, Petter let out a small gasp. His face lit up. It was as if I had just asked him the most wonderful question that could be asked.
“Well . . . !” he said.
“How would you know who got the book?” Lily quickly interrupted, a sharpness in her voice. “You only translated it.”
And, with that, the moment passed. Petter’s face once again took on the mask of polite distraction.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I really am sorry, but I’m going to have to end. . . . My intention was just to say hi and go back. I have said more than I should. . . . You talk to my wife now.”
Petter backed away then, smiling, back into the shadows of his house, and Lily and I looked at each other.
“I’m going to Norway now,” she said. “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” I said.
I flew back to London.
There was an e-mail waiting for me from Petter: “You seem like a nice man. The first step of the project will be over soon and it will be up to others to take it to the next level. Whether you will play a part I don’t know—but you will know. . . .”
“I would be glad to play a part if you give me some guidance as to how I might do so,” I wrote back.
“Well you see, that is the tricky part, knowing what to do,” he replied. “We call it life! Trust me, when your time comes you will know.”
Several weeks passed. My time didn’t come, or if it did come, I didn’t notice. Finally I telephoned Deborah and told her that I had solved the mystery.
I sat outside the Starbucks in the Brunswick Centre, Russell Square, Central London, and watched as Deborah turned the corner and walked fast toward me. She sat down and smiled.
“So?” she said.
“Well . . .” I said.
I recounted to her my exchanges with Levi Shand and Douglas Hofstadter, my meetings with Petter and Lily, and my subsequent e-mail correspondence. When I finished, she looked at me and said, “Is that it?”
“Yes!” I said. “It all happened because the author was—according to Hofstadter—a crackpot. Everyone was looking for the missing piece of the puzzle, and the missing piece turned out to be that.”
“Oh,” she said.
She looked disappointed.
“But it isn’t disappointing,” I said. “Can’t you see? It’s incredibly interesting. Aren’t you struck by how much action occurred simply because something went wrong with one man’s brain? It’s as if the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter’s brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere.”
The thought of this suddenly excited me hugely: Petter Nordlund’s craziness had had a huge influence on the world. It caused intellectual examination, economic activity, and formed a kind of community. Disparate academics, scattered across continents, had become intrigued and paranoid and narcissistic because of it. They’d met on blogs and message boards and had debated for hours, forming conspiracy theories about shadowy Christian organizations, etc. One of them had felt motivated to rendezvous with me in a Costa Coffee. I’d flown to Sweden in an attempt to solve the mystery. And so on.
I thought about my own overanxious brain, my own sort of madness. Was it a more powerful engine in my life than my rationality? I remembered those psychologists who said psychopaths made the world go around. They meant it: society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness.
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 told Deborah all of this. She frowned.
“That Being or Nothingness thing,” she said. “Are you sure it was all because of one crazy Swedish man?”
2.
THE MAN WHO FAKED MADNESS
The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99. It sits on the shelves of psychiatry offices all over the world and lists every known mental disorder. There are currently 374 known mental disorders. I bought the book soon after I’d returned from my coffee with Deborah and leafed through it, searching for disorders that might compel the sufferer to try to achieve a position of power and influence over others. Surprisingly, this being such a vast book packed with so many disorders, including esoteric ones like Frotteurism (“rubbing against a non-consenting person in a public transportation vehicle while usually fantasizing an exclusive, caring relationship with the victim, most acts of frottage occur when the person is aged 12–15, after which there is a gradual decline in frequency”), there was nothing at all in there about psychopaths. Maybe there had been some backstage schism in the psychopath-defining world? The closest I could find was Narcissistic Personality Disorder, sufferers of which have “a grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement,” are “preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success,” are “exploitative,” “lack empathy,” and require “excessive admiration,” and Antisocial Personality Disorder, which compels sufferers to be “frequently deceitful and manipulative in order to gain personal profit or pleasure (e.g., to obtain money, sex or power).”
“I could really be on to something,” I thought. “It really could be that many of our political and business leaders suffer from Antisocial or Narcissistic Personality Disorder and they do the harmful, exploitative things they do because of some mad striving for unlimited success and excessive admiration. Their mental disorders might be what rule our lives. This could be a really big story for me if I can think of a way to somehow prove it.”
I closed the manual.
“I wonder if I’ve got any of the 374 mental disorders,” I thought.
I opened the manual again.
And I instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.
General Anxiety Disorder was a given. But I hadn’t realized what a collage of mental disorders my whole life has been, from my inability to grasp sums (Arithmetic Learning Disorder) and the resultant tense homework situations with my mother (Parent-Child Relational Problem) right up to the present day, to that very day, in fact, which I had spent much of getting jittery with the coffee (Caffeine Induced Disorder) and avoiding work (Malingering). I suspect it was probably unusual to suffer from both General Anxiety Disorder and Malingering, unproductiveness tending to make me feel anxious, but there it was. I h
ad both. Even sleep offered no respite from my mental disorders. There was Nightmare Disorder, which is diagnosed when the sufferer dreams of being “pursued or declared a failure.” All my nightmares involve someone chasing me down the street while yelling, “You’re a failure!”
I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read the DSM-IV when you’re not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.
I knew from seeing stricken loved ones that many of the disorders listed—depression and schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder and so on—are genuine and overwhelming and devastating. But as L. J. Davis, reviewing the DSM in Harper’s, once wrote: “It may very well be that the frotteurist is a helpless victim in the clutches of his obsession, but it’s equally possible that he’s simply a bored creep looking for a cheap thrill.”
I had no idea what to make of it. I decided that if I was to go on a journey to try to spot mental disorders in high places, I needed a second opinion about the authenticity of the labels.
And so I asked around. Was there any organization out there dedicated to documenting the occasions psychiatrists had become overzealous in their labeling and definitely got it wrong? And that’s how I ended up having lunch three days later with Brian Daniels.
Brian is a Scientologist. He works for the British office of an international network of Scientologists called the CCHR (Citizens Commission on Human Rights), a crack team determined to prove to the world that psychiatrists are wicked and must be stopped. There are Scientologists like Brian in CCHR offices all over the world spending every day of their lives ferreting out stories aimed at undermining the psychiatry profession and getting individual psychiatrists shamed or struck off. Brian was incredibly biased, of course—Tom Cruise once said in a taped speech to Scientologists, “We are the authorities on the mind!”—but I wanted to hear about the times psychiatry had really got it wrong and nobody knew these stories better than he did.