Noconvolutions!

“In our society any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death”.

This one profound sentence sums up the author’s perspective behind the creation of the character Meursault. Why The Outsider ?

An Outsider,because he is a non-stickler of the emotional behaviour defined by the society for example:- cry at one’s mother’s funeral.He chooses not to play the game i.e. he chooses not to lie.As the author says, lying is not only saying what isn’t true—it is also in fact especially,saying more than is true and,in the case of the human heart,saying more than one feels.

Meursault knows that he misses his mother and that’s all what is true.To cry during her funeral meant a hyperbole of the truth which is equivalent to lying.Meursault refuses to lie and lives [dies] for the absolute truth.So an outsider,by the conventional eyes of the society which exaggerates the truth with expressions like crying which is nothing but a lie.

Anyone who read Ayn Rand’s Fountain Head and liked it , will love this one.

The nexus between the two books is both are non-fiction and one of the topics in the introductory chapters of each is common i.e. the dramatic drop in the crime rate in New York City.

Statistics in the exact words :-

“In 1992, there were 2,154 murders in New York City. It tipped. Within five years murders had dropped 64.3 percent to 770.”–The Tipping Point[Published in 2000]

“…where murders would fall from 2,262 in 1990 to 540 in 2005.”– Freakonomics[Published in 2005]

The statistics isn’t the contradiction I’m talking about.

1- Dramatical improvement in the policing strategies.
2- Decline of the crack trade.
3- Ageing of the population.
4- Gun control.
5- Improvement in the city’s economy.

These are the logical reasons which quelled the murder rate dramatically. But both these books claim these reasons to be conventional and untrue. So this also isn’t about the contradiction.

The actual reason behing the dramatic decline in the murder rate in NYC according to each :-

“ What happened is that the small number of people in the small number of situations in which the police or the new social forces had some impact started behaving very differently, and that behaviour somehow spread to other would-be criminals in similar situations.Somehow a large number of people in New York got “infected” with an anti-crime virus in a short time.”–The Tipping Point

“It had taken shape more than twenty years earlier and concerned a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey who wanted an abortion.But in Texas abortion was illegal.McCorvey’s cause came to be adopted by people far more powerful than she.They made her lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit seeking to legalise abortion.On January 22,1973,the court legalized abortion throughout the US. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family is more prone to become a criminal.And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Norma McCorvey-poor,unmarried,and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get-were often models of adversity.They were the very women whose children,if born,would have been much more likely to become criminals.But because of McCorvey these children weren’t being born.”– Freakonomics

Well this is it.

It isn’t a co-incidence that Malcolm Gladwell’s praise for Freakonomics was printed on it’s cover page.

‘Prepare to be dazzled’ — MALCOLM GLADWELL[Author of The Tipping Point] .

FREAKONOMICS—A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
Necessarily the unconventional but self-proclaimed truth about the Hidden Side of everything.

THE TIPPING POINT—How little things can make a big difference
The big difference is that it only changed my opinion about both the books. I can’t get myself to go beyond the “INTRODUCTION”.

Why I wrote this post?—I had a whole Saturday to while away