EDITOR’S LETTER
Constructive paranoia
‘Stupidity’, observed the great Polish alpinist and pioneer of modern Himalayan climbing, Wojciech Kurtyka, ‘means falling prey to your own illusions’. During his long career of cutting edge ascents in the world’s highest mountains, it’s fair to say that Kurtyka probably learnt more than most about the consequences of being guided by ego instead of common sense in situations involving complex risks.
In her superb recent biography of Kurtyka, Art of Freedom, Bernadette Mcdonald recalls an episode on Manaslu in 1986, when Kurtyka insisted on going down due to the extremely high avalanche risk. ‘[The slope above us] was loaded with ominously sparkling snow, silently waiting in the hot sun. It was like Russian roulette, but the gun was loaded not with one but with three bullets’ Kurtyka recalled. His climbing partners continued on for a while, until they too were forced to retreat due to the unjustifiable conditions. ‘[Wojciech] couldn’t agree to this approach to avalanche danger’, Mcdonald writes. ‘He knew that if you played [that] game too often, the bullet would eventually find its mark.’
What strategy, exactly, was Kurtyka deploying there? I'd argue it's a concept formulated by the renowned polymath Jared Diamond: a system for minimising exposure to objective danger which he calls ‘constructive paranoia’. This approach is, he claims, based around the attitude of native New Guinean people, with whom he made numerous expeditions into the remote New Guinea highlands. Diamond noticed how native New Guineans exercised a hyper-sensitive environmental intelligence when travelling to mitigate any conceivable hazard. For example, they would not sleep under a dead tree, no matter how small it was. The thinking behind this is simple: if you camp in the forest for hundreds of nights a year, you’ll know that dead trees often fall over, and you don’t want to be camping under one when it does.
Diamond first understood the importance of this concept of constructive paranoia, he claims, after a boat accident in New Guinea in which the canoe he was travelling in between islands capsized, due to the boatman driving too fast and flooding the hull. He and his companions were rescued in the nick of time, shortly before sunset, whilst clinging to the upturned canoe miles offshore in a remote part of Indonesia.
He subsequently met a man who had been scheduled to travel in the same canoe, but decided against it due to the unstable nature of the vessel and the inexperienced, gung-ho boatman. Diamond then realised he had not used the New
Guinean technique of constructive paranoia when deciding whether or not to travel in the boat; he had simply boarded it, despite whatever reservations he may have had about the safety of the canoe. Diamond’s principle of constructive paranoia can apply, I think, to virtually any situation where there is a degree of direct exposure to real risk, whether on an 8000 metre peak or when choosing whether or not to board an unstable boat.
For my own part, I’ve probably spent enough time exploring the no man’s land between acceptable and unacceptable risk to understand what you need to do in order to be in a position to exercise constructive paranoia in the first place: you need to be able to identify the primary source of the risk itself. It could be a dead tree, an unstable boat - or possibly your own ambition.
This psychological process of becoming hyper-aware of potential hazards can, I think, be applied to all adventure sports. Free soloing - climbing without ropes - was once an important discipline for me; the sense of freedom and control it gives is second to none. But I consciously moved away from practicing it regularly due to the increased probability, with every climb completed in this style, that something goes wrong.
One of the last big climbs I free soloed, on a perfect June afternoon in Snowdonia a few years ago, was Joe Brown’s 1953 masterpiece, The Grooves, on Cyrn Las; it’s one of the finest mountain rock climbs in Britain. On the final section of the route, I glanced down. Almost five hundred feet of mountain air separated me from the scree. Up there, I was a lone dancer in a vast auditorium of silence and space. As I pulled over the top of the crag, all the reasons I used to solo regularly came flooding back - the unreal thrill, the sense of solitude, the light and space. Yet I was also reminded of all of the other reasons why I’ve now stopped soloing almost entirely.
These reasons, I think, are best summed up by a striking phrase formulated by the American sociologist Diane Vaughan, in her book The Challenger Launch Decision about the 1986 Challenger Shuttle disaster. Vaughan identified a process she calls the normalisation of deviance as crucial to the evolution of the disaster. During the developmental phase of the Space Shuttle Program, Vaughan shows how the acceptance of deviance resulted in a critical, dangerous design flaw in the design of the joints on the solid rocket boosters of the spacecraft. The design team conducted analysis to find the limits and capabilities of joint performance, but evidence initially interpreted as a ‘deviation from expected performance’ was then reinterpreted as ‘within the bounds of acceptable risk’.
To interpret Vaughan’s concept more generally, the normalisation of deviance is any process by which we do something that does not follow the accepted rules of good safety procedure (like climbing without a rope, or getting into an obviously unseaworthy boat), and which we then get away with. Then, believing it’s safe to make the same safety shortcut a second time, we do the same thing again. And again. Repeat this process indefinitely, and something will eventually go wrong.
The normalisation of deviance first came to my attention when reading about the death of diver Guy Garman in 2015 in his attempt to break the world depth record on opencircuit scuba. With only four years of deep diving experience, Mr Garman believed he ‘knew more about technical diving than anyone else on the planet’ [as quoted by his dive team, Scuba TEC]. This, clearly, was not the case. Instead, the practice Garman had ‘normalised’ of doing increasingly deeper dives and getting away with it had led him to believe, incorrectly, that he was a diving genius. This perception created interconnected illusions of invulnerability and of skill. These twin misconceptions ultimately cost Garman his life, and they reinforce Wojciech Kurtyka’s earlier point about how dangerous it is to fall prey to your own illusions.
Such illusions can be equally risky in all adventure sports. In climbing, the problem with free soloing is that it can be hard to know - and even harder to anticipate - all of the variables that may affect your climb. And it’s the variable you don’t anticipate that usually catches you out. Or as Donald Rumsfeld memorably quipped, ‘it’s the unknown unknowns that get you’.
Some of the most pragmatic adventure safety guidelines I've encountered are John Willacy’s three tips for safe sea kayaking (Willacy once set a round Britain kayaking record). His simple rules define the concept of constructive paranoia. First, if in doubt, don’t go out. Second, remember what you see from the beach is 2-3 times smaller than what you get once you’re out there. And third, accept the weather forecast for what it is, not what you want it to be.
What I like about Willacy’s kayaking guidelines is the way they reinforce how you have to be tuned in to your emotions to stay safe - because fear and apprehension can tell you a great deal. And I like the way Willacy points out you must have an awareness of your own limits, together with an innate respect for the wilderness and the weather, to succeed on your mission. You’ll learn a lot more about this fascinating process in this issue of BASE, both from extreme skier Tom Grant’s account of an expedition to Alaska, and also in Will Copestake’s Back to Base column, in which he explains how listening to the quiet voices of reason in our heads can keep us safe out there.
Diane Vaughan’s concept of ‘the normalisation of deviance’ is, I'd argue, the psychic opposite of Jared Diamond’s concept of ‘constructive paranoia’. By setting the two against each other, the real differences between recklessness and pragmatism in a wilderness environment become obvious. Experimenting with the former for too long might kill you in the end, but practising the latter could keep you alive and well in a dangerous situation. The intriguing relationship between these different states of mind is a dynamic worth thinking about whenever you're heading out there into the wild, and whatever you're doing.
Before you do, I hope you’ll find multiple points of inspiration in this second edition of BASE; you’re in for quite a ride. Enjoy the issue.