I think people see it the same way a movie is made by the director, even though a ton of people work on it, and, according to Kaiser, that is a misunderstanding of how it happened based on the information made available by the government.

Well, I should’ve said “build or design,” maybe.

But yes, this should be obvious when you think about it, because it’s just how things work. Still, in our culture, we regularly refer to physicists as the people who made the atomic bomb happen. Kaiser writes about this too, and the influence it had on McCarthyists, who regularly panicked that physicists were secretly communists because they associated physicists with building the atomic bomb.

It had other weird influences on culture too. For a couple decades after the Manhattan project, being a physicist was considered mainstream cool. Social magazines ran articles with pieces about how no hip dinner party is complete without a physicist.

The whole thing is a super interesting cultural phenomenon and I highly recommend anything he’s ever written.

I know this is just a meme, but I’m going to take the opportunity to talk about something I think is super interesting. Physicists didn’t build the bomb (edit: nor were they particularly responsible for its design).

David Kaiser, an MIT professor who is both a physicist and a historian (aka the coolest guy possible) has done extensive research on this, and his work is particularly interesting because he has the expertise in all the relevant fields do dig through the archives.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read him, but he concludes that the physics was widely known outside of secret government operations, and the fundamental challenges to building an atomic bomb are engineering challenges – things like refining uranium or whatever. In other words, knowing that atoms have energy inside them which will be released if it is split was widely known, and it’s a very, very, very long path engineering project from there to a bomb.

This cultural understanding that physicists working for the Manhattan project built the bomb is actually precisely because the engineering effort was so big and so difficult, but the physics was already so widely known internationally, that the government didn’t redact the physics part of the story. In other words, because people only read about physicists’ contributions to the bomb, and the government kept secret everything about the much larger engineering and manufacturing effort, we are left with this impression that a handful of basic scientists were the main, driving force in its creation.

Haha yes, I totally agree. TK definitely takes the concept of surrogates to a ridiculous place, but then again, that’s kind of his thing. He starts with a nugget of insight and turns it into something unhinged and scary.

I still think there’s a little something to the concept, though. Marcuse’s parallel ideas of subordinating autonomy to the industrial society seem a lot less “every society not built on killing and eating is bad," as you delightfully put it lol. I’m not really that knowledgeable on his writing, but I’ve added it to my list because Luke’s paper made me curious about it.

I like it. You’ve stumbled upon a concept that I think closely parallels that of a particularly notorious critic of modern society, Ted Kaczynski, though his is more generalized and expansive. I am going to quote from Tim Luke’s paper “Re-reading the Unabomber Manifesto.”

To compensate for lost power, the system not only provides for but also endorses “surrogate activities” that industrial peoples “set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward . . . for the sake of the ‘fulfill- ment’ that they get from pursuing the goal” (1J39). Because “only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one’s physical needs,” (1(39) most of what preoccupies anyone is a surrogate: art, science, athletics, literature as well as acquiring money, partici- pation in corporatism, engaging in social activism, and pursuing celebrity. These surrogates are are “less satisfying than the pursuit of real goals . . . one indication of this is the fact that, in many or most cases, people who are deeply involved in surrogate activities are never satisfied, never at rest” fl|41). The Unabomber states that “the effort needed to satisfy biological needs does not occur AUTONO- MOUSLY, but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine” fl|41). When meeting real needs takes only trivial effort, and satisfying surrogate desires is given such latitude, the stage is set for individual marginalization on many interrelated levels. Thus a very fine line divides “Sensible Sam the Smart Con- sumer” from “Crazy Kaczynski the Alleged Founder of the Freedom Club.”

There’s a lot TK wrote that’s pretty… welll… crazy, but I find the concept of surrogates to be persuasive. Luke in this paper points out that TK’s writing on this often parallels that of Marcuse, whose writing I quite like but I’ve never done a real deep dive, and who is less terroristy and a bit more palatable.

On a way less controversial note, you might enjoy the book “Mad in America,” and its sequel “Anatomy of an Epidemic.” They’re both a parade of horrors, so be warned, but Whitaker gives a comprehensive and unapologetically critical history of what it means to be mad in the US, how we’ve treated them, and, in the second book, how we’ve come to view mental health as a biological deviation from normal that can and should be cured with with a pill. Whitaker also runs the blog madinamerica.org. From their mission statement:

Mad in America’s mission is to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care in the United States (and abroad). We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society, and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change.

Oh, and finally, you should be a luddite. Luddites were great ;)