Here Again to Tell You More About the Story of Paranoia

As told by particles

Andy Grove showed how silent inaction can morph into a loud consequence.

Large companies dismissed the up-and-coming ones because they were deemed to be too big to fail. The Titanic, however, was a moniker for all companies that thought they could never hit their iceberg, the one which would send them to Bikini Bottom.

Microsoft, for instance, is the iceberg that sank many companies in their monopolistic waters. Others continue to change the game in the same spirit.

The point Andy Grove had in mind was how paranoia helps to keep an eye out for new ideas. Imagine the damage COVID-19 did to IMAX cinemas. Such entertainment gatherings had to think fast if they were to continue making revenue.

On the other hand, streaming options such as Netflix and Showmax took off. A completely different way of delivering the same content that Imax had dominated a few months prior to the global pandemic.

But that was about companies.

There’s more to say about particles. They too have their own stories of the paranoid surviving. For them, paranoia is a critical ingredient without which we would probably never survive.

The not-so-paranoid have it easier

Warren Buffett prefers creating a moat between him and his competitors. The aim, from there on, is to widen the moat. The point is to make your business so successful, that even if you occasionally fail, your competitors cannot still get to your level.

It’s freedom.

As for particles, some are paranoid and those not quite so. But to understand this, we have to start with the premise of:

All particles are organisms.

This is the conclusion made from the theory of Organismal Selection. For clarity, the theory doesn’t factor in what is living or not. It only uses a two-pronged criteria to describe what an organism is.

Two things — physical existence and a tendency to avoid annihilation. These two features are seen in living organisms as identified in whichever way a scientist wishes to identify them. It also applies to physical particles — atoms, molecules, electrons, quarks, and even black holes.

If we accept this premise, it means a certain group of atoms has it ‘easier’. These are the noble gases. Conveniently named.

Comparatively, noble human families don’t have to pray for stray rats not to eat the money one has stashed under the mattress. They have it easier than most. They can sit back and chill.

Similarly, noble gases are often not used as much in chemistry labs because they are not ‘reactive’. They are not exciting. Helium, the second most abundant element in our shared universe, was exciting probably once.

It then led to the formation of some of the other elements in the periodic table such as beryllium and carbon. It did that through mergers.

Mergers are one of the ways companies strive to avoid complete death. The employees might think otherwise, but the acquired companies change strategies, bosses and even a culture one has been used to.

Mergers result in emergent organisms. This emergent one comprises the primary constituents and the resultant merger, which is held intact by the bond created by these constituents.

For this reason, mergers are anything that keeps entities intact. It could be a bond, a complete acquisition, or even a complete selling of the company’s rights for certain actions.

Helium can merge to form beryllium and then merge to form carbon. Mergers are what entities do when they are paranoid of complete annihilation.

But noble gases hardly form bonds. They are the noble ones on the table. The periodic table. Neon practically lights up and that’s all. Argon gas is used to give an inert environment for creating other elements like titanium. Helium may be of interest in superconductivity, but what else?

Inert is the word. Because they are not as reactive as the alkali and alkali earth metals, noble gases are not ‘exciting’.

There’s excitement and its absence.

Our minds are not wired to see the continuous. We see contrasts. Zeros and ones. It’s either reactive or not. Inert or not. Therein lies a problem.

When we view them from the lens of the theory of Organismal Selection, they become exciting. They are the not-so-paranoid gases that don’t have to resort to mergers every now and then like the other atoms to continue existing.

They have a strong innate ability to avoid annihilation. Among living organisms, the equivalent are archaea and bacteria. They can stay for millions of years, inert, unmoved, and still avoid annihilation. They have been existing for billions of years, and don’t have to force mergers now and then for them to survive.

Unlike the organisms who are reading this piece. You. And me. We need mergers.

Some, like me, need glasses to function properly. Glasses also need me to continue being produced by companies. Males also need a female partner to produce a baby. Even with our sophisticated technology, we still need a sperm and ovum donor for test tube babies to form.

Noble gases, however, can do without, regardless of the environment. The only mergers they stick with are the subatomic ones. In large numbers, they use gravity and form dust clouds that might collapse into stars. That is how they avoid annihilation through the merger of gravitational force.

If they could speak, I would wish to learn from them how to avoid death so elegantly.

Recall that Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe. It has a wide moat. It doesn’t need to react with other elements like sodium or potassium. Probably the ones who have it really bad are the halothanes.

They were close to tasting this noble life but didn’t. It’s like struggling all your life to attain that coveted position, only for you to fail at the last trial. It’s more painful than failing at the beginning.

As Charlie Munger likes to call it, they super-react because they felt they were denied this opportunity. Deprival super-reaction tendency.

Halothanes are just as reactive as the alkali metals. They form the branch of particles we call the paranoid ones.

The paranoid ones

On the flip side, we have the paranoid ones.

I’ve already mentioned the halothanes and the alkali metals.

Alkali metals are on the extreme end of where the noble gases are. They define what reactivity is.

I remember our chemistry teacher taking a piece of potassium and suspending it in water and it caught a fit. It reacted, turning into a lilac flame.

You, the one reading this piece don’t react so furiously. You might even take it and drink it. Potassium, however, lights up. The opposite of how noble gases behave. But it’s not ignoble for them to behave as they do. If they don’t, they die.

Particles die through complete annihilation.

But since particles are organisms, they resort to mechanisms that will further their existence. Potassium or sodium will readily react with another super-reactor, a halothane like fluorine or chlorine. It’s an active process of creating mergers.

Mergers sustain.

The result is compounds that are more stable than the individual elements by themselves. Sodium chloride is more stable than sodium or chlorine. Potassium iodide is more stable than potassium or iodine independently.

Oxygen was once considered the active part of the air. It still is, according to elementary textbooks. It too reacts. In our bodies, they can react violently to create radicals. The description is fitting because, like the radicals they are, they destroy so many cellular structures.

They can cause disease to vital organs such as the eyes, kidneys, or liver. Their need to survive is so potent, that they don’t care much about where they are.

If they were not so paranoid, so super-reactive as to seek mergers in the name of bonds, they would die faster.

You might think this only happens at the atomic level, but there’s another deeper level.

Subatomically, quarks strive to avoid death by holding onto their mergers with intense tenacity.

Let’s say you’re a teenager and your parents don’t want you seeing that guy or that girl. They can insist on it and very easily execute it. Well, not completely, but just efficiently enough.

Quark lives, however, are the quintessential example of separation avoidance. The more you struggle to separate a quark from another, the more energy you’ll need. They hold onto their bonds with an admirable tenacity, the kind I have only seen when a mother holds on to a baby to protect it. Or when the girl runs back to kiss the guy in the rain in your favourite romantic movie.

But on steroids.

This paranoia of quarks, halothanes, alkali metals, and oxygen radicals is necessary. It’s not just a rule of life.

You might think that this is only seen at the particulate level, but it’s not. Its limitations aside, one study shows single individuals risk dying earlier than those without, in various contexts, however. Support structures such as family are also mergers, and it’s difficult to separate these from romantic relationships.

One simple explanation is that bonded couples behave like sodium chloride, while individuals tend to be like sodium and chlorine. The bond makes it difficult to die.

Emergent entities are stronger. They tend to last longer than solitary individuals. Emphasis, tend.

Even if temporary, the mergers postpone death for these elements and couples. It’s how families help others survive. It’s why eusocial species are dominant species. It’s why divide and conquer works.

For the paranoid, mergers are a sure bet. It’s why the paranoid survive.

There’s another way the paranoid ones survive — through motion.

You might think that mergers are the only solution particles resort to.

You’d be wrong.

They do another thing — stay in motion.

Particles that stay in motion stay longer than those that aren’t. We, however, have never seen a particle that isn’t in motion.

The kinetic theory of matter states that matter is in a constant state of random motion.

Motion sits at the heart of particles, including light particles for unexplained reasons. Until the development of the theory of Organismal Selection.

This theory states that a particle tends to avoid annihilation. Motion is one of them. By keeping in motion, they delay their death.

Einstein’s theory makes the case that stationary objects have time elapsing faster than moving ones. Particles, thus, without knowing who Einstein was, resorted to this universal hack to delay their death.

It’s what paranoia can do to you.

It’s important to make this distinction — small particles have this option. We don’t. Our interconnectedness with so many molecules makes it a hindrance if we are in constant motion. That is, you cannot always be running. You’d expire faster than you should.

But you can schedule time for running.

I don’t want you to misunderstand the point. Running can help prolong your life. If it does so as particles do, it only adds a few seconds to your life, all else being constant. But large organisms like us resort to size as our moat to prolong our lives.

Size and motion are somewhat equivalent. A particle does not have a chance to grow and develop, so it resorts to being in consistent motion. We have that ability, and so utilize the benefits of size, or as Geoggrey West calls it, scale.

Since particles lack this ability, paranoia kicks in. Then they have to be on the move, to prolong their existence.

See how interesting Organismal Selection can be?

As I close…

Organismal Selection is unlike any theory you might know about evolution.

It embodies some of the tenets of Natural Selection, like competition and cooperation, but it stresses an essential property — mergers. It also incorporates the two fundamental theories of physics — quantum mechanics and relativity, to explain why particles behave as they do.

Most of these theories explain and predict how particles will behave, but they don’t explain why they behave in that manner.

Organismal selection does.

It explains why the paranoid survive.

PS: If you’re paranoid and want to cut your professional journey in half, you can visit The One Alternative Academy or subscribe to my awesome newsletter, all aimed at reducing the paranoia the universe can instill.