Zero-sum
blogMy only superstition — the one that I can’t seem to shake no matter how often I tell myself it is absurd — is that everything is governed by zero-sum game rules.
A zero-sum game is a situation in which one person’s win implies another persons loss. For instance, if we flip a coin and I correctly pick heads, you have necessarily lost. There is no way of us both winning.
In my head, zero-sum rules affect things like happiness, health and, most annoyingly, writing. Like all superstitions I am very selective with my evidence gathering. I notice that when I am super-healthy, Laura is poorly and vice-versa, as if we were two fluctuating weights on the scales. I notice that when I am productive in my writing, other people (oddly, it seems to be Wringham or Rhodri), tend to be quiet. When they are being funny and locquacious, I am wracked with self-doubt and indecision.
You might think that happiness is the very opposite of zero-sum, given the multifarious ways in which it can be acquired, but perhaps there is a grand scheme of happiness far beyond our daily apprehension. Who knows? says the superstitious man. What if it is true?
I have been influenced in this delusion by Will Self’s story The Quantity Theory of Insanity, wherein the sanity of certain groups (say, hairdressers in Grimsby) affects that of other groups (perhaps, electricians in Corby). Using the anti-psychiatry craze of the Sixties as a framework, Self imagines how the quantity theory of insanity could be turned into a therapeutic practice: giving some people LSD to allow others to be liberated. And I too often wonder if I could write better if, say, Rhodri and Wringham became addicted to computer games or infatuated with a woman who lives on the other side of the planet.
But it’s not true. Really it isn’t. I don’t think so, anyway. Occam’s Razor would suggest that there could be other factors that don’t involve a cosmic conspiracy. Can’t think of any at the moment, though . . .