The question this suggests to me, fwiw, is whether what matters is the actual irrationality/weirdness of whatever is doing the confronting, or the nature of the confrontation ?

OK, that's not as clear as I hoped, so to put it another way; if the weirdness being confronted is actually following a rationally explicable paradigm of its own, but in ways that the person in question has absolutely no idea of and experiences as entirely weird and irrational, does that feel to have the same sort of weight to you ?