Oil and Water

This idea of "Oil and Water" comes from one of my favourite novels, Vendredi ou Les Limbes du Pacifique by Michel Tournier.

Il s’avisait que l’intelligence et la bêtise peuvent habiter dans la même tête sans s’influencer le moins du monde, comme l’eau et l’huile se superposent sans se mêler (p228)

Which can be translated to : "He realized that intelligence and stupidity can cohabit in the same head without influencing each other in the least, as water and oil overlap without mixing"

How brilliance and irrational thinking co-exist within people is something I always find interesting to explore. There are many people I greatly respect and find very intelligent, but who sometimes reveal patches of absurdity or chaos that make me wonder: how can you be so brilliant and yet think of this in this way? The realisation does not come from a place of judgement, and can sometimes be beautifully comical.

It is engaging to notice patches of ignorance cast on a background of well-developed culture. There is a lot to be learnt about someone through what they do not know, not in a condemnatory way, but finding out how they came not to know, and how their life was crafted such that they never encountered that topic. It gets you to wonder how they came to never cross paths with this particular information, whether there ever was a "near-miss" in which they were close to learning it but never did, or whether they have just steered clear of this knowledge stream.

For example, I have heard an adult man teaching university courses in physics not know what an IUD is . Another example would be Kary Mullis believing that someone "travelled in the astral plane" to come save him from an overdose of laughing gas. Thee are probably also a lot of ways in which you and I are surprisingly ignorant or idiotic, giving what you could reasonably expect from the rest of what we know.