On being cuter than Michael

As you’ve no doubt noticed, Pattersons tend to be terrible at interpreting the motives of other people when what they do inconveniences them. While John sees people as the stereotype that makes the most sense to him and while Elly frets about the big conspiracy to hold her down, Mike is a different animal entirely in that he has no idea whatsoever motivates people to do what they do. We see this coming into play when, after having our noses rubbed in the fact that his landlady Mrs Dingle had a miserable, windblown past in which happy experiences were conspicuous by their absence, an unhappy present of collecting rent from kids who were going to have a better life than she did and a horrible future of anonymous and unmourned death, Mike had no clue whatsoever as to why she was so short-tempered and unyielding. Clearly, he thought, she was just being mean for no other reason than to be mean.

This blankness of mind would be irritating enough in itself if it didn’t begin and end with making him a lousy brother who assumed Lizzie deliberately plotted to ruin his life because of his nitwitted inability to understand cause and effect. Sadly, being a moron who thinks along those lines owing to

Axiom 4e:

1) Michael is incapable of understanding what cause and effect are.

2) This results in his being haunted by the delusion that if a phony cause to his problems could be made to vanish somehow, something that would happen anyway would not happen.

is only the beginning of why he’s a really irritating person. This is because a man who simply cannot understand why people do what they do has decided to inflict his insight-free version of reality on the world as a pretentious incompetent of an author. He really thinks that it’s his idea to blight the world with crap like ‘and the living buried the dead’ because he doesn’t understand that  he’s been steered to a career that he’s not suited for by a mother who needs to live through him. Since people are a black box to him, he can’t understand

Axiom 1x:

Elly can only picture her children following careers she doesn’t have the courage, stamina or brains to follow. Following a different path leaves her cold.