For this week's post, the topic is going to be madness. So, what does madness have to do with tech?
Fortunately or unfortunately, a lot. On the one hand, thanks to the madness of geniuses like Albert Einstein and Hedy Lamarr, humanity has been able to make significant progress. On the other, the madness of our leaders has sometimes led to turning these discoveries into destruction rather than treasures.
Einstein famously said that politics is more difficult than physics, referring to the fact that it took less time to discover nuclear power than to learn how to manage it.
If we look at the news, it seems as we are still incapable of managing nuclear power. Lately, the news seems to bring us back to the dark times when our leaders were really MAD. The acronym stands for Mutual Assured Destruction: it is a principle of deterrence which at its core had the idea that a nuclear strike by a superpower would have been followed by a counter-attack and, therefore, led to an escalation.
This principle was particularly important during the Cold War when two superpowers were in constant competition with each other. This principle allowed the two superpowers not to ever fight directly, but it also led the world to live in fear for decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In 1947, Salvador Dalí painted "The three sphinxes of Bikini" inspired by the use of the atomic bomb: he wanted to portray the horror and the fear that followed that action.
Today, in a multipolar world and one year after the start of the war, the question we need to ask ourselves is: is this really the kind of world we want to live in? Do we really want to go back to a time when the geopolitical equilibrium was based on fear?
Salvador Dalí, picture by Pixabay
The answer is that probably policymakers should start to aim for a better kind of madness: the one that creates progress rather than fear, the one that moves scientists when making their discoveries.
Of course, it is going to be much harder in the case of politics, but peace is worth a try.
Love,
Elena
Resources:
Comments