Not sure as yet if I should write more. If you’d like me to, please write me.
“Uneasy is the head that wears a crown.” — Henry IV. Part II
The Germans have a word for it: “Weltschmerz,” or “world pain.” It’s the sadness you feel when you compare the way the world is to the way you wish it to be.
It’s a sadness that’s particularly acute for those of us who serve our country in the development of its critical advanced technology, at great personal cost.
This work is not easy though it needn’t be as hard as it is. We’re up against foreign powers and a domestic press that relies on selective leaks and misinformation to deliberate harm us. These leaks will be used to alienate you from friends, investors, and even your own family. The threat is real—and oh so vicious.
Some of these efforts, such as smearing or canceling American citizens working on controversial projects, are designed to send a message: If you work to make America safer we will character assassinate you and your media will help us. Sometimes the so-called free press relies on hacked material, obtained by those very same foreign governments who want to keep their positional advantage over America. They rely for sourcing on undeclared foreign agents who smear those keeping America safe and who are honor bound to keep quiet.
To say this is annoying would be an understatement.
And while it’s hard to talk about specifics without jeopardizing what’s being worked on – loose lips, sink ships! – let me posit a thought experiment which you might find interesting and illuminating. If isn’t exactly a roman a clef; it’s certainly close enough.
Imagine that the atomic bomb was developed in the time of the Internet.
The Germans would notice that all the physicists working on the Manhattan Project began dropping off LinkedIn one by one. And they would begin going into overdrive to smear each and every one of them, forcing them into involuntary retirement or worse.
These imagined Germans make sure that some sympathetic outlet – BuzzFeed or Huffington Post would do – would cover the following so as to make life unbearable for Oppenheimer and those who would willingly work with him. In a World War II with the Internet the Germans could not build an atomic bomb but they could smear those who could.
J. Robert Oppenheimer – a Jew, they’d whisper! – was also a |Communist, they’d say, dropping the oppo that had the added benefit of likely being true. He was a member of numerous Communist front organizations. His wife and brother were members of the Communist Party USA. (“I’m not calling you a racist but the racists seem to like you” is the attack today, as expressed by Andrew Gillum against Ron DeSantis. Racism being the new taboo, not Communism. See generally, “What You Can’t Say,” by Paul Graham, for how to respond “ism”.)
Oppenheimer probably was a Communist. What Jewish academic wasn’t in those days? Didn’t Oppenheimer help the FBI to catch other communists? Can one be an American patriot anda Communist? Can you love America and be a racist? Do Communists or racists have rights too? Do we even believe in rights anymore in a postmodern world? Or is it just power all the way up and all the way down?
Never mind that Oppenheimer would later be found innocent; he’d still be stripped of his security clearance after the war, unable to participate in the world that he made possible. It had been his idea to build a weapons laboratory at Los Alamos Laboratory but he’d be canceled all the same. Like all great artists he’d become famous after his death when his reputation could at least be restored.
In this imagined world Oppenheimer’s boss, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves Jr., wouldn’t be able to defend the rogue yet essential academic. He couldn’t let the probable communist continue with his necessary work. No, he couldn’t take that risk. Somebody would report him to HR. He’d be canceled too and that would be that for the promising director of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps for America’s development of nuclear weapons altogether. They’d all be Googleable. The Germans would begin editing the Wikipedia pages, especially the controversy section, to make sure whatever was written would follow them throughout their careers and limit their range of freedom.
So instead, America’s enemies would develop the weapon and remake world. America would be pure, so pure, but it would be poor and weak.
This is, of course, a hypothetical. Of course!
But pick your taboo. I could instead imagine a world in which computer scientist Alan Turing is outed as a homosexual before he works on cracking Enigma. Or one in which rocket scientist Werner von Braun was tried and canceled at Nuremberg before he could build NASA and (oddly) Disneyland.
The point remains: cancel culture makes us less safe by stuffing our out of the box thinkers into ideological straight jackets.
We must free the nerds to stay free.
Any regime worth preserving will judge its nerds on what they produce in the service of the state and on no other metric. Judge them by their works, not their words. “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
If our civilization is to endure let’s hope the harvest isn’t too bitter or the fruits too poisonous.
After all, it is more important to be dead or a slave than to be called a racist or a communist, isn’t it?