Seven Types of Ambiguity

  “I was the first member of my family even to go to university let alone to get a Ph.D., and where had it gotten me? Helping my parents manage a trailer park. Despite everything that has happened to me since, I still remember how hard it was to hold my head up at the time. Education, intellect, were of no value and, since I could not paint a house like my father could, I could not even join the men who had replaced him. I was useless.

  “It was all a little surreal. The weather was warm and sunny and everyone went around in shorts and T-shirts. It was like a summer vacation, only one that I watched, not one I participated in. I was working, but it was not my real life. Most of the time my mind was off somewhere else, and eventually my parents came to understand this. It took a huge argument, though, one that saw me clear the kitchen table with my forearm, leaving everything smashed on the floor. My parents had taken to introducing me to the townspeople as Dr. Mitchell, my father even calling me “Doc.” They had not understood how much I had meant it when I pleaded with them not to do it, not even to mention to anybody the fact that I had a doctorate, to forget about it. They were just being good parents, proud as parents could be. But I was embarrassed and angered by the title; embarrassed because doctors, doctors of anything, do not manage trailer parks, and angered because learning and research will not furnish even a single room. Only the market will, and not just any market, the stock market. I know what you will say about the stock market—that you are appalled by what you see to be its mad randomness, its essential immorality. To you it’s just a giant casino. But there’s one thing about it you can’t deny. As crazy as it might be for the activity of that casino to be what determines the economy, it isn’t crazy for you to try to get a job as a croupier there. In fact, it might be argued that you would have to be crazy not to.

  “I got to driving my parents’ pick-up truck to the Working Men’s Club, getting drunk, sleeping it off in the front seat, and driving home just before dawn. I was doing this a couple of times a week and that is when I first saw Patricia, the woman I married.

  “She was German, a tourist backpacking with her cousin, a couple of Bavarian cowgirls delaying the rest of their lives. She was pretty. I needed someone pretty, and she needed some local color to write home about. Neither of us at the time had any idea how much the other really needed. She had recently acquired a diploma in physical education, and before getting a teaching job she had set off with her only slightly less attractive cousin to see the world. Her parents, more particularly her mother, had made quite a bit of money through a chain of ice-cream shops. Her father was an inspector of schools with the department of education.

  “Because of me, Patricia and her cousin stayed in Mildura and got jobs picking oranges. After a while her cousin got bored and moved on. Patricia remained at the trailer park, shacking up with the young manager, the owners’ son. That was not the way she put it when she finally wrote home to her mother. Needing something to impress her with, to beat her with in their ongoing war, she told her mother she had become involved with a local physicist, a Ph.D. whose parents were in the hospitality industry. In her next letter she told her she was pregnant.

  “In the summer heat, with everyone telling me how pretty she was, no plans of my own, no genuine self-esteem to base any plans on, and Patricia wanting badly to have the child, as if to prove something to her mother, we married hastily before the child was born. I was never a practicing Catholic but my parents were, and with them fearing the disapproval of a small town, it made just enough sense for just long enough for me to marry her. I want you to understand that.

  “The marriage made it impossible to keep real life on hold. I was back in it with a vengeance, married to a pregnant German tourist with all sorts of needs and demands she was only learning to articulate. If you want to tell me what an idiot I am, now might be an appropriate juncture.”

  “Dennis, I’ve heard of people doing far more self-destructive things than marrying someone impulsively out of a sense of obligation and perhaps out of a need for esteem.”

  “What do you mean, ‘need for esteem’?”

  “You said Patricia was very pretty?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, in addition to being attracted to her, I am assuming that her attraction to you added to your self-esteem, particularly given the choice of men that she would have had and would have been used to having.”

  “Yes.”

  “It would also have felt good to have your parents and everyone else around you see how well you had done, the all-conquering hero, at least in one area. Didn’t it feel good to bask in the reflected glory of her attractiveness when you went out somewhere with her?”

  “Yes. Yes, it did . . . at first. I had almost forgotten about that.”

  “You see, however much of a mistake you’re going to tell me it was to marry her, however much hindsight suggests that, atypically for you, you didn’t properly think through what you were getting into, I want to suggest how understandable it is.”

  “I don’t know that not thinking properly is so unusual for me, Alex.”

  “Come on, Dennis. You’ve got a Ph.D. in physics. You must have the capacity to think extremely well. You have to admit that.”

  “A lot of good it’s done me.”

  “We’ll get to that. You see, though, how all your roads lead you to self-blame and guilt?”

  “Yeah, so? What are you trying to say? Are you saying I’m depressed?”

  “Well, we have to consider the full battery of criteria, and I don’t yet know whether they’re met in your case, but—”

  “But that’s what you think, isn’t it?”

  “Dennis, let me put it this way. Depression is the most underdiagnosed illness in the Western world.”

  “How do you know that if it’s so underdiagnosed?”

  “Do you still think your reasoning is faulty?”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “How do I know depression is the most underdiagnosed illness in the Western world? Occasionally I take public transportation. Nobody who has ever taken the Glen Waverley line for even fifteen minutes could dispute it. But I want to get back to you. You mustn’t be afraid to be diagnosed as depressed, or as having been depressed. If you are ashamed or afraid of the label we’ll have to break that down as quickly as possible because that denies you even the possibility of relief, as for that matter does ignoring the mitigating factors in your apparently flawed decision to marry Patricia.”

  “It’s in your interest to say that everyone is depressed and it’s in your interest to excuse me for marrying someone I didn’t really know. You shouldn’t marry someone you don’t know. It’s that simple.”

  “Yes, you shouldn’t marry someone that you don’t know, I’ll grant you that, but in return I ask you to suspend judgment on whether, at least in your case as you’ve described it, it is really that simple. Dennis, you use all the power of an admirable intellect to attack us both. When you refer to my ‘interest’ you’re referring to my economic interest. You don’t really mean that. You have told me that you weep like a child. Maybe I can help you; I think I can. Maybe I can’t. But either way you must know that your pain is not my investment. I have no chance of helping you if you suspect I’m trying to cheat you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s quite all right. Let’s return to your marriage. I think you’re being too hard on yourself. You shouldn’t blame yourself too much for deciding to marry Patricia, given your circumstances at the time. Your reason was overridden by your emotion. It happens to all of us on occasion. Let me put something to you which, although obvious, might nevertheless help you see your decision to marry her in a kinder light.

  “People tend to assume that there is a dichotomy between emotion and intellect. In fact, it’s really more of a continuum, with emotion at one end and intellect at the other.

  “As we move along this consciousness continuum, away from the emotions, we move further toward the self. T
he self is highly personalized, highly individualized. It consists of one’s inner world, one’s thoughts, memories, interpretations of memories, assessments of past events, and of people one has met; it consists of all the information you have managed to retain. It includes extrapolations of the past that you use to predict future events and the outcomes of your interactions with the world. The further along the continuum we go, the less one’s consciousness has in common with anyone else’s. That’s why no two people can have identical minds.

  “There is, however, an irreducible emotional component present even at the cognitive end of this continuum. The structures fashioned by years of experience, contemplation, and introspection will always be at least a little damp with emotion.”

  “Why the fuck are you telling me this?”

  “Bear with me, please. It might help. While there’s an emotional component even at the cognitive end of the continuum, there’s hardly any rational component at the emotional end. When you’re frozen by panic, when you’re wildly ecstatic, when you’re driving and suddenly someone cuts you off, you’re completely swamped by emotion. The more refined workings of your mind are so soaked that it might be said that, for an instant, you have lost your mind.”

  “Are you saying that I had lost my mind when I decided to marry her?”

  “Not quite. That’s a little extreme. All I’m saying is your capacity to reason was certainly impaired by emotion.”

  “How many years of study does it take to come up with that sort of wisdom?”

  “Dennis, you were devastated after you got your doctorate to find that you couldn’t get a job as a physicist. Your self-esteem was shot. And you were frightened. You were frightened for the future, your professional and your economic future. Fear is still fear even when it is fear of humiliation or of impoverishment. It doesn’t have to be fear of being eaten by a wild animal.

  “Then along comes Patricia. Prettier than most, she flatters you. She excites many things in you—lust, hope for a better future. Her existence excites you out of your cognitive mind. When she tells you she is pregnant, all that is left of your functioning or rational mind is your sense of obligation to a vulnerable young woman far from home whom you have made pregnant.”

  “This is a waste of time. This continuum of yours, this consciousness continuum, would allow you to excuse everybody’s behavior, and predict nobody’s. What you’ve constructed is a simplistic fiction, and not a very useful one at that.”

  “Dennis, I really am just trying to help you. Whether this continuum construct is useful or not is one thing. But as for it being a fiction, so what? It’s probably no more a fiction than are your constructs in physics.”

  “Hey, wait a minute. That’s not true. Constructs in physics, the fundamental ones like length, time, mass, charge, and so on, are all ultimately defined by specific operations and measurements.”

  “Okay. Give me an example. How does it work? How do you define, say, mass, that way?”

  “Mass? Well, there’s Mach’s operational definition of mass. It’s quite complicated, though. Do you really want me to try to—?”

  “No, I don’t, but you do make it sound like it’s an elaborate abstraction rather than something you can point to or touch.”

  “Well, I suppose in a way, yeah.”

  “And what about your elementary particles, your electrons and whatever?”

  “Alex, that’ll take forever.”

  “I only want a vague idea.”

  “All right, let me see . . . I guess they’re ultimately by-products of quantum fields.”

  “Okay, and what exactly are quantum fields?”

  “They’re mathematically very abstract constructs which . . . Do you really want me to go into this?”

  “No, that’s okay. But Dennis, aren’t you telling me now that the supposed ultimate constituents of reality are also only elaborate fictions?”

  “I’m not saying that at all.”

  “Look, it doesn’t matter really. My point is that many sophisticated sciences employ constructs that are essentially elaborate fictions. That shouldn’t present a problem; it doesn’t stop us using these theories to explain or predict. On the contrary, it’s through the operations and measurements that define these constructs or fictions that these theories connect with the real world.

  “The problem in psychology is not that the constructs we have are fictions but that they’re not really measurable and that, consequently, you can’t establish empirical relationships between them. I have to say it’s not for want of trying.

  “Unfortunately, Dennis, psychology is still pre-Newtonian. In its defense, though, you will admit that the behavior of a person is a lot harder to predict than the behavior of a rock in space.”

  “Okay. Okay. Will you stop? I apologize for the fiction jibe. And yes, I’ll admit rocks are more predictable than people. But even apart from prediction, this continuum of yours, with emotions at one end and the cognitive self at the other, still has a serious problem. As I said before, it allows you to excuse everybody’s behavior.”

  “I’ve told you, I’m a psychiatrist, not a judge or a theologian. I’m not interested in blame. Dennis . . . why . . . why are you crying? Dennis, why . . . Do you know why? Wouldn’t it be a relief, even for a moment, to be free of blame? Do you blame yourself for all that has happened to you?”

  “You haven’t heard the half of it.”

  4. “So, tell me what happened. What happened after you married Patricia?”

  “We moved back to Melbourne and she gave birth to our son, James. Needing a good job urgently, I started to apply outside physics for anything that paid well. Nondisclosure of my Ph.D. proved a winning move, and I quickly got a job as a money-market trainee. Things looked as though they might be starting to improve.”

  “What exactly is a money-market trainee?”

  “I was being trained to be a dealer in the short-term money market.”

  “Is this some kind of banking? Were you being trained to be a banker?”

  “Yes, in a way. I was a middleman buying and selling cash, bonds, commercial bills, that sort of thing. What’s wrong? You look confused.”

  “I’m not much of an investor, Dennis.”

  “It’s quite simple, really. At the end of every trading day some corporations have excess funds, money they don’t need for immediate trading purposes. Other corporations may have an acute debt. They may need funds urgently to cover some contingency, some debt that’s fallen due. We operated in the middle, borrowing from the corporations in surplus at a certain rate and lending to the ones in deficit at a higher rate. The margin, the difference between the borrowing rate we paid and the lending rate we got paid, was our livelihood. The lenders don’t know where their money is going, and the borrowers don’t know where their money has come from. The loan might be for twenty-four hours, and the rate could change during the course of the day. You didn’t trade only with corporations. You could often make your best money from other dealing houses.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Your last chance to negotiate a deal was three o’clock in the afternoon. That is when the deals had to be in. It’s ten to three and you’ve borrowed too much. You’ve got surplus cash that you haven’t been able to lend. Another dealer from another house calls you in a panic. He’s desperate. He has a client who needs funds urgently. He’s been calling around, but he can’t find anyone who has any available. You tell him you borrowed at eighteen percent, and so you’ll be charging him nineteen or twenty percent when you really borrowed at fifteen percent. Now not only do you no longer have to lose money when you pay back the lender from whom you borrowed at fifteen percent but you’re going to come out four or five percent on top. You’d go for more if it was really close to three and he sounded desperate. The trick in this situation is to make the other dealer really believe you borrowed at eighteen percent.”

  “Couldn’t he check?”

  “He doesn’t have time to cal
l around to too many other dealers. You have to persuade him, get him to believe you.”

  “So you’re lying?”

  “Yes, you’re lying, every day. The better you do it, the more successful you are. That’s the way it works. Of course, not everyone lied every time. Many dealers were straight, and if you were a straight dealer yourself these were the first people you would call when you got into trouble. Of course the straight dealers didn’t stay; they didn’t last.”

  “Why not?”

  “The market didn’t tolerate them.” “Did it tolerate you?”

  “No, I was too straight. There were no disasters. I did okay, but I just didn’t have it in me to hustle. I couldn’t say things I knew weren’t true, not in a confident way. The best of these guys, they live on their nerves. They drink too much. Ninety percent of their marriages fail. My marriage failed, too, but that was not because of what I did for a living. It was because of who I chose to marry.”

  “Is that when you started gambling?”

  “No, I started gambling before I was married. Why did you think that?”

  “Well, you talked about living on your nerves. I would have thought serious gambling requires living on your nerves.”

  “No, it’s a totally different thing in many ways. If you’re a dealer in the short-term money market, you’re still an employee. What distinguishes the employee from the individual trader, which is what a gambler is, is the capacity to be terminated not merely by the market but at the whim of another human being. It’s a special kind of humiliation over and above losing money. Anyway, I was a different kind of gambler. I told you about that teacher who sparked my interest in gambling?”

  “Yes.”

  “Later, when I was at university, I read about these guys, physicists from California, who tried to use physics in Las Vegas casinos to predict where the ball was going to land on a roulette wheel.”