German Man Cuts Belongings In Half For Divorce Settlement

a reply to: halfoldman

Cutting stuff in half is destructive.

I did say "if someone told him", you're the one who said he was overly literal.

a reply to: daskakik
He was very exact in that he held the system to the same exact standards as it expected from the people beneath them.
There's no longer a law that says spouses must remain married until death, and that would be a chosen belief.
With divorce settlements the law does get involved and that can be interpreted in different ways.
But you're right, the guy in the article clearly also lost the plot, and if true, this was also an act of rage.
There's also a calm and collected way to use bureaucracy against itself, or to hold it to its own literal standards.

a reply to: halfoldman

I'm just saying that there are a lot of things that a literal person can take literally. Her getting "half" of your stuff is one and "till death do you part" being another, nothing more nothing less.

a reply to: daskakik
I can't really disagree, depending on whether one literally believes something (like death do us part) or it's enforced by a Kafkaesque system.

Literalism coupled with rage or some other violent traits/cultural attitudes is very dangerous, and could probably lead to honor-type killings and so forth.

My friend Marco had already learnt a clever way to expect consistency from the system and thereby taking the mickey out of it, whereas we were younger and dumber, and still lashing out in ways that only got us in trouble (inspired by some of the political rhetoric at the time), and made our own lives more difficult.
So yeah, particularly unreflected literalism can be quite dangerous.

I suppose in very over-regulated societies people do become very literal about the laws to protect themselves, and some become retentive about it.
Like going to court because your neighbor's car was in your driveway, or his bean-bush is touching and therefore "damaging" your fence (there was a case like that in Germany that became a national joke, and even a country song was written about it that became a hit).