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How Chris McCandless Died

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Re: How Chris McCandless Died

#121

Post by base698 »

kamaal wrote: post #108
base698 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe sheep is overused when a huge population of people are pursuing material gains for people who don't care. The short list of what this leads to: depression, hopelessness, addiction, dietary diseases, and other first world problems. All trying to keep up with the Joneses. There are more meaningful pursuits.

>>people are pursuing material gains What is so wrong with that? >>The short list of what this leads to: depression, hopelessness, addiction, dietary diseases Do you think poor people don't fall ill? Or that when they fall ill they don't need pay hospital bills? >> There are more meaningful pursuits. Like? Care to give examples?

Here's a short list: Spending time with your family, building your business, learning a trade, volunteering, learning to surf, hiking, learning to cook, learning to fly a quadcopter, volunteering in a soup kitchen, learning a new language.

People consume more when they are filling a void and it consumes them exacerbating their problems.

Re: How Chris McCandless Died

#122

Post by grecy »

rdtsc wrote: post #117
chris_wot wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a stupid insult.

Guy goes into the wilderness unprepared. Dies. People say he is a dumb ass. Most agree. Other guy climbs a mountain that others have climbed, also unprepared -- hero, pushing the boundaries, expanding humanity's reach. Please...

> Other guy climbs a mountain that others have climbed, also unprepared

You're saying he's unprepared because he didn't take every single possible device to aid him (oxygen).

What about all the people that take every single thing possible, spend years and years training, are extremely prepared, and still die anyway.

Are they dumb asses?

Re: How Chris McCandless Died

#123

Post by comrade_ogilvy »

wwweston wrote: post #34
Zimahl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The previous comment is the reason why McCandless is such a polarizing figure. Those who prepare and go on a quest without suffering negative consequences are somehow derided for not being independent thinkers, somehow cheapened for not risking enough. "Adventure is just bad planning." - Roald Amundsen

The good admiral has a point, but I don't think it gets to the heart of the McCandless drama. For that, I think I'd look to Norman Maclean's _Young Men and Fire_ where he talks about smoke jumpers: "It is very important to a lot of people to make unmistakably clear to themselves and to the universe that they love the universe but are not intimidated by it and will not be shaken by it, no matter what it has in store.…

Smoke jumpers are taking on a job that offers a boon to others, so I politely give them the benefit of the doubt. Thus it is an exercise in adult behavior, even if the details of their personal motives are more ambiguous.

I do recognize a degree of courage in a young man going into the wild to heal the angst and alienation plaguing his soul. Yet I bristle at the suggestion such is automatically heroic or independent thinking, and (implicitly or explicitly) the less wounded amongst us can be dismissed as "sheep", as some admirers have done in this discussion.

I am sorry, but I see no evidence that McCandless ever had a single original thought in his head. He never completed the "hero's journey" in either the literary or practical sense -- he failed to achieve enlightenment and return with his boon, to help himself and/or others. He failed. He may have had some courage to admire, but he ultimately failed when it came to the big important stuff.

McCandless was an adolescent in a man's body -- he was not proven capable of handling adult responsibilities. That is not necessarily a negative in itself -- we are where we are in life, and being honest about it and doing something about it is a fine thing. But I am not going to be patient with people lecturing genuine adults about how this adolescent has deep insights into life. Sorry, but that is just wishful thinking by people who mistake ignorance and low intellectual standards for originality.

Re: How Chris McCandless Died

#124

Post by Gormo »

jere wrote: post #73
aaron695 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the article has no point. Well, it's point is Christopher McCandless is a celebrity, lets work out how he died. There is little science going on here, other than using science to work out how celebrity McCandless died. Image if those scientists used their knowledge for real pressing issues that affect many people. Not saying scientists should be boring and not allowed to do superficial things like all people. But…

>It’s been estimated that, in the twentieth century, more than a hundred thousand people worldwide were permanently paralyzed from eating grass pea. Sounds like this issue isn't that superficial... it has affected a lot of people.

It wasn't grass pea - the author of the article was making a comparison between the symptoms of ODAP poisoning in people who had consumed grass pea and the symptoms displayed by McCandless. The plant that he was eating was wild potato, not grass pea, and it was McCandless's death that motivated some researchers to examine the wild potato plant to see if it contained the same toxin; that toxin turned out to be present in the plant, which had not previously been known.

According to the article, McCandless was using a reference book to determine which plants were safe to eat; the book listed wild potato as non-toxic, because it was not yet understood that it contained ODAP. If it had been known, McCandless would not likely have eaten wild potato, would not have been poisoned, and would likely not have died in the way that he did.

Re: How Chris McCandless Died

#125

Post by Goladus »

jlgreco wrote: post #76
jere wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>he went into the Alaskan bush unprepared and died of malnutrition. If he brought a map he could've walked to safety when he started to realize his plight. Did you actually read the article? That's not what it says. It suggests he became paralyzed by a neurotoxin, an event which no one could have foreseen at the time. Having a map wouldn't have cured his paralysis. I'm not even convinced he was lost.

The neurotoxin killed him in his weaken state. A weakened state he found himself in because he was starving already, basically from rabbit-starvation. Because he was unprepared. Yes, had he not eaten the seeds, he (possibly) would still be alive... but he still would have been an idiot.

> Because he was unprepared.

Only if you stretch the term "unprepared" beyond what people understand the Park Ranger to mean.

Maybe "less than optimally prepared" for the scope of what he was trying to do, but "unprepared" is not fair. "Unprepared" basically puts him in the same category as people who die from hypothermia because they wear cotton clothes.

Re: How Chris McCandless Died

#126

Post by Goladus »

sliverstorm wrote: post #98
grecy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily there are plenty of people that don't agree with you, who are willing to try and push the limits of what humanity can do. We're all going to die, you know. Stats on deaths with/without oxygen: http://faculty.washington.edu/hueyrb/pdfs/jama.pdf

Problem is this completely ignores the native peoples who view the mountain as sacred, and the workers that attempt to either save you or remove your remains from the mountain. Yes, what a noble way to go! Except for the poor saps that have to deal with your mess after you're gone.

> workers that attempt to either save you or remove your remains from the mountain

The Sherpas are paid to maintain the mountain for the tourists who climb there. Customers negotiate for whatever services the Sherpas are willing to provide. If you want to find injustices you'll have to look deeper than a simple choice to attempt to summit without oxygen.

Re: How Chris McCandless Died

#127

Post by Goladus »

Zimahl wrote: post #20
lrm242 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me a break. The guy was most certainly not an independent thinker. Nor was he a critical thinker. Nor did he have any respect for the challenge he was taking on. He was an angst ridden teenage boy captured in an twenty something's body that never learned the difference between fantasy and reality. Most importantly, he never learned that in the real world there are consequences for stupid actions.

This. The previous comment is the reason why McCandless is such a polarizing figure. Those who prepare and go on a quest without suffering negative consequences are somehow derided for not being independent thinkers, somehow cheapened for not risking enough. "Adventure is just bad planning." - Roald Amundsen

> Those who prepare and go on a quest without suffering negative consequences are somehow derided for not being independent thinkers, somehow cheapened for not risking enough.

Who is "deriding them for not being independent thinkers?" Maybe others who go on quests are independent in their own way, none of the comments here are trying to say one way or the other. What the comment DOES imply though, is that there are a lot of people who don't try anything like that at all, no matter the level of preparation.

Re: How Chris McCandless Died

#128

Post by Goladus »

untog wrote: post #33
base698 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe sheep is overused when a huge population of people are pursuing material gains for people who don't care. The short list of what this leads to: depression, hopelessness, addiction, dietary diseases, and other first world problems. All trying to keep up with the Joneses. There are more meaningful pursuits.

There are more meaningful pursuits. Like Chris McCandless's one that resulted in death? Seriously, you can't hold him up as an idol of a 'better life' when his life was cut short very, very prematurely. I'm not qualified to judge whether depression and dietary diseases are better than death, but I think it's at least worth debating. And few people pursue material gains for the purpose of simply having them. Like I sa…

> Seriously, you can't hold him up as an idol of a 'better life' when his life was cut short very, very prematurely.

You can still respect the attempt, consider the ideals, and identify specific mistakes (which most of his intellectually stunted detractors fail to do).

Re: How Chris McCandless Died

#129

Post by Goladus »

Evgeny wrote: post #103

Call me a cynic, but this is about the guy who went to live into the wilderness underprepared and full of noble ideas and died, either from poisoning or from hunger. Now he has his own wikipedia page and inspires people. I mean, wouldn't one rather admire someone who tried a similar thing, but was prepared and succeeded ?

I mean, wouldn't one rather admire someone who tried a similar thing, but was prepared and succeeded?

Do you have any examples? Ted Kaczynski doesn't count.

I have one: Sooyong Park.

You know why he's not widely admired? Because people don't know much about him because no one's been able popularize a good narrative about him. Some it it is just marketing, and the extent to which he succeeded or not is a minor detail.

Also, what Park did was dangerous, too, filming tigers in the Siberian wilderness. He easily could have died accidentally in similar fashion to McCandless. He was prepared be he still could have been killed many times.

Re: How Chris McCandless Died

#130

Post by jlgreco »

Goladus wrote: post #125
jlgreco wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The neurotoxin killed him in his weaken state. A weakened state he found himself in because he was starving already, basically from rabbit-starvation. Because he was unprepared. Yes, had he not eaten the seeds, he (possibly) would still be alive... but he still would have been an idiot.

> Because he was unprepared. Only if you stretch the term "unprepared" beyond what people understand the Park Ranger to mean. Maybe "less than optimally prepared" for the scope of what he was trying to do, but "unprepared" is not fair. "Unprepared" basically puts him in the same category as people who die from hypothermia because they wear cotton clothes.

I don't think "sufficiently prepared that you are not operating at a significant caloric deficient for prolonged periods of time" is a high standard. He was in the same category of people who fail to dress properly. Those people have insufficient clothing, and he was unable to obtain sufficient food. This was all before the potato seeds became an issue.
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