Obsessive Constrictive Disorder

From the age of 16 I have been obsessed with quantum mechanics (QM). Apart from a few years working with cryptography and public key infrastructures I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to understand it - and even then I still dabbled with the quantum stuff.

Then something odd happened to me in 2016. I was working on quantum game theory at the time (this is the notion that if you play quantum games you can get different Nash equilibria compared to the classical version of the game). I became aware of a bit of a kerfuffle surrounding Halloween costumes at Yale.

If you haven’t seen this I recommend searching for the videos on YouTube (if they’re still up) in which a Yale Professor (Nicholas Christakis) was confronted by a large group of angry students in one of the quads. He spent a couple of hours trying to discuss their issues with them. He displayed heroic levels of patience, calmness and rationality in the face of what I can only describe as childish petulance.

One visibly upset student even went so far as to claim she was fighting for her very existence. Really? At Yale? I wondered what on earth was going on. Did Professor Christakis have a weekend hobby of travelling to small villages and machine-gunning the residents? What could possibly have inspired such angst?

Halloween costumes. That’s what did it.

The students were angry that Prof Christakis would not condemn his wife’s open letter (she was also a faculty member at Yale) in which she wondered whether it was the university’s place to impose guidelines on the appropriateness, or otherwise, of certain Halloween costumes. It’s a beautifully-written, very thoughtful, and thought-provoking letter.

And this, this, is what caused such outrage?

I knew then something was very, very deeply wrong. To witness the emotional turmoil of these students, amongst the most privileged people on the entire planet, over such a trivial issue was alarming to me. Of course, as I later learned, they felt it was serious because of some systemic something or other.

Quantum theory became a secondary obsession as I began to grapple with all sorts of things even more bizarre than QM. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, the patriarchy, rape culture, white privilege, de-colonization, cultural appropriation, the explosion of different genders, and so on (and on and on and on and on).

I’d been living in a quantum bubble and had no idea the world (for some) had so radically shifted. I even tried to read some post-modern theory. I don’t recommend it. It is, in my view, the biggest load of pseudo-intellectual pretentious gibberish ever committed to paper.

I was astonished to learn that many of these things had been bubbling away in academic circles for decades. Have a read of McIntosh’s paper on white privilege (Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack) written in 1989. It’s an evidence-free opinion piece that belongs in some radical publication - and absolutely not a scholarly work.

The pernicious “wokorona” virus had finally been triggered in the general population sometime prior to 2016 after laying dormant and infecting only weird academics for decades.

I tried to warn my daughters that something very unpleasant was coming - but they dismissed my concerns. Dad, they said, you need to spend less time worrying about some weirdos on the internet. My youngest daughter no longer feels this way. After another one of the monthly struggle sessions at work in which she is asked to address her “white guilt” in the name of diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) she doesn’t know how much longer she can pretend. But she needs her job and wouldn’t easily find another that would enable her to meet her financial commitments (trivial things like a mortgage and food).

Sound familiar? How many people have been pressured into taking the Goo because they’re worried about how they would survive without their jobs? How many people have been pressured into going along with mandatory woke struggle sessions for fear of losing their jobs?

This is what happens when you allow your focus to become so constricted, so all-consuming. You end up sounding like a complete fruit-loop.

We’ve heard about mass formation psychosis, and that may be true, but I would argue that the Wokorona virus laid the foundation for the mass hysteria we’ve witnessed over covid. People have become obsessed with safety - and worse than that, emotional safety (whatever that is). Your employer has a duty to make you feel safe at work, they say. An employer certainly has an obligation to make your work environment as safe as possible - from things like falling file cabinets and arc welders and the like. But safe from things that make you feel uncomfortable?

Here’s a bunch of people infected with the Wokorona virus making outdoor diners feel safe

The poor lady in the pink top wouldn’t show her devotion to the cause (in this case BLM) and so she was harangued and castigated by the mob. They really made her feel safe didn’t they? Why does this sort of stuff only ever work one way?

Sound familiar? Those who won’t show appropriate devotion to the Glorious Goo are similarly castigated and made to feel unsafe because other people feel unsafe because of their choice not to be vaccinated.

We have some serious problems - and they go much, much deeper than the psychotic reaction to covid.

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