Would I fish if fish had face?

Yesterday evening I was contacted by a friend. During the phone discussion he told me that during the flight some finnish physicist had started to talk with him. During the discussion my friend had mentioned my name and to his surprise had received a very strong negative reaction.

My friend who knows me personally of course wondered why this. It had become clear that mentioning my name touches very sensitive emotional nerves. Is there some reason? Does the mentioning of my name induce the same kind of weird aggression in all my finnish colleagues? I told as my impression that this negative attitude characterizes most of the collective. I also proposed that it might reflect the characteristic socio-pathology of the finnish society which one might refer to as "misunderstood equality". It is very difficult for us in Finland to tolerate the feeling that one of us, just one of these ordinary Finnish people, might possibly have done something that might possibly distinguish him or her among other Finns some day. It is easy to find historical reasons why for this syndrome.

I however felt that this explanation was not all of it. During the night I saw a strange dream which gave a hint about the deeper psychology. I was fishing (not my hobbies during day-time!). Strangely, half of the fish was out of the water. It had taken the bait to its mouth and was just about to swallow it. There was however something that disturbed me. The "face" of fish was very clever, I might say even human. It was clear to me that the fish would feel horror and pain if it were to swallow the bait. I woke up and decided that I would not continue my dream hobby if it depends on me.

When I began to ponder about this, I realized the connection with the phone discussion. What made the situation so unpleasant was that I saw the "face" of the fish and its ability to suffer. I also felt that in the dream I was both the fisher and fish whereas in this something that we are used to call reality my colleagues were the fisher and I was the fish. The dream clearly wanted me to imagine what it is to be in the position of my colleagues and think what they have felt during these 28 years. I have of course done this many times in my attempts to understand but not in this context.

During years I have repeatedly encountered two obvious but strange things which dream expressed symbolically. First of all, most colleagues have avoided personal contact with me to the extent that the situation has often reached comic proportions. On the other hand, colleagues have wanted to label me to be something so weird that it simply cannot belong to the same species. During first years I was labelled as a kind of idiot savant lacking all forms of intelligence and even the ability to feel insults (sic!).

Later the idea about some kind of psychopath was added to the repertoire of my psychopathologies. I got a very concrete demonstration about this as I visited Kazan for more than decade ago. One of young professors who had just labelled my work as a pure rubbish in an official statement had allowed the locals to understand that I am more or less a complete psychopath who has cold-heartedly rejected his family (I had divorced at that time).

In light of the dream I find it easy to understand these strange and cruel behaviors of the community towards individual. Dehumanization is the only possible justification for the cruel behavior of the collective against individual and saves individuals from feeling directly how unethical it is. But dehumanization is possible only if you do not see the victim. If you see that the victim is intelligent living creature able to suffer, you cannot continue. You wake up, as I did from my dream. Without the refusal from personal contacts these people could not continue their dreaming.

Net age has made this painful conflict even more difficult since it provided me with communication channels making even more obvious that I am an intelligent human being and even theoretical physicist. 15 books on home page and name in Wikipedia in category "Physicists" makes it very difficult to seriously continue believing that I am a miserable crackpot. It is clear than I can write. Probably also my ability talk would become manifest if some academic instance in Finland would invite me to tell about my work. I can express myself also in my blog, and anyone can become convinced that the label of a mentally retarded psychopath is not from this world.

My belief is that the reason why this situation has reached the verge of collective madness is that for a collective it is extremely difficult to admit that the path once light-heartedly chosen is wrong. Even if it becomes obvious that something horribly wrong and cruel is being done. As perfectly normal and benevolent individuals these people certainly feel that they are doing something very bad and have probably sometimes experienced that I have become a fish with human face crying like a mad for pain and even more horrible, refuses to die. This kind of unresolved psychological conflict must be very painful as it continues. For myself, I have been done my best to not evoke these feelings in my colleagues as anyone in this kind of position is biologically programmed to do (Stockholm syndrome, not that one;-)!)

My story is of course a rather tame version about what happens everywhere around the world all the time. There is however something very special in the community of theoretical physics. There is a horrible competition and the situation is not improved by the fact that community resembles in many respects primitive communities dominated by archaic myth figures (Newton, Einstein,...). There is something very primitive in that these persons are given a status of God and that individual who just dares to think aloud, can be professionally destroyed by dooming him to be a sufferer of Einstein syndrome.

If each of us had the social maturity of sixty years old at age of twenty, I would not be writing this. At the first pole of the problem is the self-centeredness of young person and his poor ability to put himself in the shoes of another human being. At the other pole is the desire for the social acceptance and our very poor ability to resist social pressures. No institutional reform can serve as a fast miracle cure since each individual must start from scratch his personal social evolution. Cultural evolution is needed. Although this evolution have been very fast and perhaps exponential in biological time scale it is desperately slow when you taken human lifetime as a time unit.

There are however flashes of light from darkness now and then. Just few days ago I experienced something historic. The number of those finnish colleagues, who have contacted me during these years on their own initiative, can be counted using the fingers of single hand, actually single finger is enough! Now I must add to my counting system second finger;-). A colleague, who has already resigned, sent me an email and asked my opinion about something as a theoretical physicist. My opinion! As a theoretical physicist!! I was totally embarrassed about my own happiness and had to work hard to calm down myself!

P.S. I have two especially active net-enemies in Finland: Lauri Gröhn and "Optimistx". Both of these fellows have an attitude to truth which brings in my mind the notion of "creative book-keeping". It is frightening to see how deep hatred my thoughts generate in these fellows. Finnish readers can find my comments about these skeptic militants in finish here.