The Holy Fool

Extract from Malcolm Gladwell's Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't

“In Russian folklore there is an archetype called yurodivy, or the ‘Holy Fool.’ The Holy Fool is a social misfit – eccentric, off-putting, sometimes even crazy – who nonetheless has access to the truth. Nonetheless is actually the wrong word. The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted. In one Russian fable, a Holy Fool looks at a famous icon of the Virgin Mary and declares it the work of the devil. It’s an outrageous, heretical claim. But then someone throws a stone at the image and the façade cracks, revealing the face of Satan.

Every culture has its version of the Holy Fool. In Hans Christian Anderson’s famous children’s tale ‘The Emperor's New Clothes,’ the king walks down the street in what he has been told is a magical outfit. No one says a word except a small boy, who cries out, ‘Look at the king! He’s not wearing anything at all!’ The little boy is a Holy Fool. The tailors who sold the king his clothes told him they would be invisible for anyone unfit for their job. The adults said nothing, for fear of being labelled incompetent. The little boy didn’t care. The closest we have to Holy Fools in modern life are whistleblowers. They are willing to sacrifice loyalty to their institution – and, in many cases, the support of their peers – in the service of exposing fraud and deceit.

What sets the Holy Fool apart is a different sense of the possibility of deception. In real life, Tim Levine reminds us, lies are rare. And those lies that are told are told by a very small subset of people. That’s why it doesn’t matter so much that we are terrible at detecting lies in real life. Under the circumstances, in fact, defaulting to truth makes logical sense. If the person behind the counter at the coffee shop says your total with tax is $6.74, you can do the math yourself to double-check their calculation, holding up the line and wasting thirty seconds of your time. Or you can simply assume the salesperson is telling you the truth, because on balance most people do tell the truth.”

“The Holy Fool doesn’t think this way. The statistics say that the liar and the con man are rare. But to the Holy Fool, they are everywhere.

We need Holy Fools in our society, from time to time. They perform a valuable role. That’s why we romanticise them…But the second, crucial part of Levine’s argument is that we can’t all be Holy Fools. That would be a disaster.”
~Malcolm Gladwell, ‘Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t’