AOC = BSA = NQC

Yesterday, a journalist and FB friend I greatly respect asked for input on the question of whether Ocasio-Cortez is in fact mentally ill. Her query was occasioned by accounts of AOC publishing a video of her own modest freakout over a bottle of wine in her new apartment. The FB post solicited the opinions of a couple of gentlemen in the psychiatry business by name. One of them weighed in with an extremely lengthy discussion of the current state of his profession regarding gradations of bipolar disorders and other pathologies. Ultimately, he concluded (in effect) that it was hard to say what her state of mental disorder might be.

I understand both the concern and the thoughtful attempt to elaborate on the complexities of diagnosis. There is, however, a simple answer to the originating question. No. AOL is not mentally ill. The entire discussion is in error. The photo up top can help us see why. The very lovely motorcycle shown is a 1950 BSA 500 cc, one-cylinder model that produced 15 horsepower. It was a successful model in its time, which lasted from 1937-1961, an enjoyably attractive and economical vehicle, though prone to reliability problems. (BSA stands for British Small Arms; the initials acquired over time a different meaning, “Bitch Stalled Again.”) For our purposes here, AOC is this BSA, model year 2019.

The 2019 edition presents with some troubling symptoms. It just doesn’t run very well. Hard to start, once started frighteningly unresponsive to throttle inputs, hard to shift, hard to stop, and inclined to stall out in plumes of oil smoke for no obvious reason. It’s a baffling situation. The bike is pretty to look at, it’s not old, and yet it’s obviously got something seriously wrong with it. Motorcycle technologists are called in to offer their expert opinions. Their diagnoses are hampered, though, by some daunting restrictions. There are no written specifications for the bike. (BSA doesn’t publish those anymore.) It may be a replica, not a factory model. There are some registration documents, but they may be forged. Worse, the experts are required to make their diagnoses based only on photographic evidence, pictures like the one above and fragmentary videos of the bike in (non)operation. What do they do?

You must remember that they are used to state of the art motorcycles. They don’t remember BSA. It was before their time. They have to go on what they know. In the bikes of their intimate acquaintance, the biggest problems — trouble starting, not running smoothly, tendency to stall, sudden engine cutouts under acceleration, oil smoke, etc — are most often the symptoms of faulty interactions in the fuel injection system and/or the turbocharger. Braking and shifting problems are most likely the result of sloppy settings by the owner or manufacturer, easily corrected. The fuel/turbo issue is potentially very complex, like as not a tricky computer programming challenge to correct inappropriate fuel and air mixtures throughout the entire range of engine operation in both normal and boosted modes. Debugging problems of this sort simply can’t be accomplished without hands-on, up-close and personal inspection of the bike itself. All that can be said for sure is that it’s one sick machine.

Our experts deliver a 43-page single-spaced report explaining all this in impressive jargon-laden detail. The only problem with their report is that it’s completely, 100 percent wrong.

There’s not much mystery about what’s wrong with our BSA. It’s not sick, certainly not in any exotic way. It’s a very simple, very badly manufactured machine. It’s also terribly antiquated. There can’t be anything wrong with its fuel injection system or turbocharger because it doesn’t have those. Here, the experts simply fooled themselves, assuming from the contemporary date of manufacture that such components had to be there even if the bike had a retro appearance. They no doubt convinced themselves that the telltale missing hardware was on the side of the bike they couldn’t see, the injector, the blower, etc. it’s just that it wasn’t, isn’t, there.

Back to AOC. What is the human counterpart of a one-cylinder engine with no fuel injector or turbocharger? Injection is intelligent application of fuel to engine demands for power. A turbocharger is actually an additional dimension of fuel delivery, the use of forced air to dramatically increase power output either instantaneously or in concert with more primitive engine operation. The turbo technology is a heightening of internal combustion engine potential, providing more agility, responsiveness to changed conditions, improved interaction with the driving environment. We can think of it as a kind of mechanical, even computer-assisted analog of consciousness. Why it seems to engender “crazy” seeming symptoms when it’s not functioning properly.

But on the BSA this stuff just isn’t there. The purpose of consciousness is to help human beings make appropriate decisions in the context of social and moral human environments. Consciousness enables us to evaluate consequences of potential behaviors on one’s self and others before they are undertaken. In this sense, it’s most vital component is an interior “observer,” capable of viewing us and our interactions with others from a conceptually external perspective. More simply, it’s a little guy we all take with us wherever we go to whisper in our ear “Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?”

I said “we all take with us” in error. Consciousness is not an automatic feature of the human brain any more than a turbocharger is an automatic feature of a motorcycle. It must be built, manufactured if you will, by our education and upbringing. To have that little guy, our parents must put him there and equip him with knowledge, values, language sophistication, logic, sensitivity to the emotions of both ourselves and others, and a constant emphasis on the importance of being aware of being aware.

This last element — the awareness of being aware — is what most people believe consciousness is. I think therefore I am. But like so many seemingly reliable simplicities, this one is a half truth, if that. Everything depends on the underlying mountains of which the peaks are the words “I” and “think.” What does this one’s or that one’s “I“ consist of? It CAN consist of little more than a name, an image in the mirror, a collection of felt appetites, and a kind of moving picture recall function we can easily mistake for memory. In the same way “think” can be as puny a verb as to want, to react, to imitate, to repeat, to say words in some simple order that others can respond to.

The little guy in this instance, carrier and guardian of the precious “I,” can be a tiny fellow indeed. If he’s not there at all, a person is not conscious in any human sense. Like the un-computer-assisted BSA, all of whose decisions must be made by a wholly external agent, the vehicle operator. if the little guy is there in tiny form, with no thought capability beyond articulating a few mostly physical needs, the person so equipped is what we might term not quite conscious.

Not Quite Conscious. It’s not a personality disorder. It’s not really a pathology of any kind; it’s not sociopathy for example, which has been convincingly linked to anomalous features in brain chemistry. There’s nothing wrong with the brain chemistry of a NQC person. There’s just the absence of a lot of vital stuff that was never put there. Parents and teachers may have tried, or thought they were trying, to put it in there, but they were just throwing parts around with no clear sense of how it was all supposed to work together. Which, most likely, they’ve never had a clue about either. Why our 2019 BSA isn’t half the machine the 1950 Model was. It’s an incompetently manufactured lemon, a bungled off-brand replica, from top to bottom.

What’s the saddest part of all this? Several things are equally sad in fact. The NQCs are everywhere these days. You know and work with a lot of them yourself, (if you’re not one yourself), and the only time we tend to recognize an individual NQC is when they are plucked (or ripped) out of their ordinary context into something utterly alien from their customary routines and rituals and habitual algorithms of speech and action. Why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems so alarming to so many. Fish out of water and all that. Another sad thing. Nobody wants to know this, nobody wants to see this, and for many the most creativity they apply to any part of their lives is refusing to perceive the NQCs in their own lives and families. Why they will dismiss everything said here out of hand. Most will laugh. But most will also have to shush the little guy in their heads who is frowning and gesturing at them without daring to say a word.

AOC = BSA = NQC? QED.


END NOTE: To prevent a misunderstanding that could lead to a waste of time, I want to say that this essay is not about IQ. I’m not saying, for example, that AOC has a low IQ. DON’t be misled by the BSA’s 15hp; 500cc is still a perfectly respectable displacement for a motorcycle engine. The appropriate computer analogy would be a brain of whatever size and synaptic potential that is not properly booted, a mind that is not formatted in any usable way. Doesn’t matter what it could have been and done in terms of intelligent applications. It just won’t ever function beyond an extremely primitive level. Because there is no cure for the NQC condition. The brain can’t be rebooted, the mind can’t be reformatted if it has never been organized and fed time-sensitive data in the first place. Why this epidemic is so catastrophic.