18.08.2025
‘You know, game theory is the truth. It’s how humans behave.’ As usual, it was me and Alfonso. It would always be just me and Alfonso. Because there was no one else in my life. We had our own little world, our little kingdom together. Yes, we were both kings together. And I, a solitary king.
‘Of course, you must go on,’ said Alfonso. He was wearing exquisite jewellery today, bedecked like a Hellenic dream of Persian magnificence and luxury. For him, fashion was everything. Style and substance. It suited him well, gold. He was a golden man.
‘Game theory says that no one will change the brute stupidity that they run their lives by, because they have set it down as the rule.’
‘Is this the usual rant about stupidity and conformity and the stupid conformists?’
‘You know me well. Could a genius say anything different?’
‘And what would a genius say about game theory?’
‘Game theory also applies to genius. Look at myself. My research was revolutionary and interdisciplinary. I am the last generalist in a world of pedantic specialists with their disciplines and their tunnel vision. They could not take it. The brute stupidity of their rules in a putative academia could not take real intelligence. They insist upon their stupidity as their rule. The way I can put things together into new combinations and innovative formulations. It is the same wherever I go. No one can keep up with me and therefore they try to marginalise me and throw a shade upon my magnificence.’
‘You are all ego.’
‘I deserve the recognition. You know it yourself.’
‘I do know it!’ Alfonso slapped his thigh and laughed. ‘Only you know things. But remember, the stupid hate the clever. It is in the Greek tragedies with Medea. The foreign woman…’
‘I am the foreign woman.’
‘Yes. And therefore your cleverness is abhorrent. It will get you nowhere. It does not matter if you achieve, educate, learn, do.’
‘And that is something that I know. I am the genius that suffers from game theory. I am cleverness against stupidity and limited perception.’
‘Dont worry’. Alfonso sighed. He often did so when we spoke. Alfonso believed in me. No one else could but he could. And he believed in me because he knew my talent. He had recognised something in me. Others recognised and still they shunned and still they sinned with their unfairness. But yet, truth exists. Philosophers thought the whole world was a lie. That all learning was a lie. It was not so. I had discovered the truth. I knew truths about justice, injustice and human nature as it had been corrupted. However anyone tried to keep me down, I knew. I was wise.
‘The inventor of game theory,’ continued Alfonso, ‘descended into madness. Be careful what you know and how it affects your mind. Remain a genius. Do not forget yourself in insanity. Pride yourself on sobriety and avoid intoxication. Cling to the truth while others drown around you. And voice what is rather than what is not. In the Gita, work is done for the sake of work, not for the reward. For neither love nor money. And money…’ Alfonso smiled, ‘is something that you have.’
But not love.
diary of a lone man 