HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 5, 2026 – Years ago, long before I was reborn, I learned an important lesson in survival. This lesson isn’t taught in taekwondo classes or military training or other programs tailored specifically for self-defense, but it should be. And because it’s not taught, most people have to learn it the hard way, like I did – by personal experience.

Here’s what I learned.

I was hitchhiking through Europe one summer, alone. I got picked up on a highway onramp in France by what seemed like a nice middle-aged man. In my best Canadian middle-school French, I thanked him for stopping and told him where I was heading. He nodded pleasantly, motioned me into the car, and we rolled onto the highway.

The speed limit on French highways at that time was 200 km/h. To me, a Canadian, that was super fast – double the highway speed limit in Canada. I grew increasingly nervous as the needle on the speedometer climbed higher and higher until resting on the 200 km/h mark, but I calmed myself by thinking that the man was probably used to driving that fast and so I had nothing to worry about. Besides, he seemed like a good steady driver, with both hands firmly on the wheel and both eyes fixed firmly on the road in front of him. I decided I was going to try to enjoy the ride, despite what seemed to me to be excessive speed.

After some chitchat, we settled into what I thought was a comfortable silence. That’s when he removed one of his hands from the wheel and started fiddling with his pants zipper. Both of his eyes were still fixed firmly on the road and the speedodometer was still hovering at 200 km/h, but now the man had his penis in one of his hands, pleasuring himself as we sped along.

To say I was thoroughly disgusted is to understate the raw emotion welling up inside me. I told him to stop. He didn’t. I told him to pull over and let me out. He didn’t. He just kept pleasuring himself. I repeated my requests louder and more urgently. He studiously ignored me, seeming to enjoy my obvious discomfort and rising fear. Through it all, he kept both eyes on the road, though now he had only one hand on the wheel. That’s when my innate self-defence mechanism kicked in.

I grabbed the wheel and yanked it hard to the right. The car swerved dangerously onto the shoulder, heading for the ditch. The man erupted in a torrent of what I assumed was French curse words as he grabbed the wheel now with both hands and swerved the car back onto the road. I reached for the wheel again, yanking on it hard and refusing to let go. The torrent of curses turned into a tidal wave. He abruptly pulled over to the side of the road and pushed me out of the car, shouting expletives as he roared off.

Mission accomplished.

Here’s what I learned the hard way that day: You have to out-crazy the crazy. Driving along a highway at 200 clicks while pleasuring yourself and holding someone hostage in your vehicle is not just this side of crazy, it is crazy. You can’t argue that’s not crazy. I had inadvertently gotten into a car driven by a crazy person, which meant I’d inadvertently put myself under a crazy person’s authority.

You can’t reason with crazy. You can’t successfully plead with crazy. You can’t scream and cry and expect the crazy person to respond with compassion and give into your demands. It’s best to avoid crazy—giving it a wide berth—but if you find yourself in a situation where you’re forced to deal with crazy, your best defense is to out-crazy the crazy. This I did by grabbing and holding onto the wheel. I didn’t think it through, I just grabbed the wheel. But that act of uber-craziness was sufficient to snap the driver out of crazy mode and into self-preservation mode. Self-preservation, for him, was getting me out of his vehicle as fast as he could, which was also my goal.

So, as I said, mission accomplished.

Again – you can’t reason with crazy, you can’t plead with crazy, you can’t cry and whimper and expect sympathy from crazy, because crazy has none to give. All you can do is out-crazy the crazy, so that the crazy will want to get away from you as quickly as possible and have nothing to do with you.

In my situation, out-crazying the crazy meant grabbing the wheel from the driver of a speeding vehicle and refusing to let go. In political terms, out-crazying the crazy might look something like this:

You gotta out-crazy the crazy. That’s the only way to deal with them.