entering my fed arc

Recently I have become very enamored by the idea of becoming a federal agent. This is due to numerous reasons, the most prominent among them the fact that I’ve been reading a couple of books: See No Evil by Robert Baer, a CIA case operative’s memoir on being onsite during the War on Terror from the ‘70s to the ‘90s, and Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner, which is a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the CIA from a guy who really, really does not like the CIA. Taken together, these books paint a pretty elegant picture: the CIA is simultaneously an agency which is more-or-less fumbling through the world and is quite bad at accomplishing its goals, while simultaneously supporting the lifestyle of several operatives who thrive essentially on the sole basis of kicking ass. Compared to academia, these guys sound like they are having the time of their life: not only am I bad at accomplishing my not-close-to-world-changing goals, I am also having very little fun in the process of accomplishing them.

“Leave!” you say. “If you don’t like it, find something you do like!”

Yeah and what do I like, pray? This is about as good as it gets, I think. Not only does human life not work like that, it’s basically impossible to be a professional ‘guy who kicks the can around in the playground.’ Really the closest I’m getting is house husband slash New Yorker-short story writer, but even for that I need to be in some kind of stable relationship. So I’ve decided that despite not holding American citizenship I will become a federal agent.

in more seriousness

One of the things I often get as response to statements like the previous one is that the CIA actively wants me to reach exactly the conclusion that the above books have led me to: that they are both quite bad at doing things that are evil while still ensuring some amount of national security, and in fact it is quite fun being a CIA operative—time of your life James Bond stuff. This is well and good, but this is only a concern if the CIA is not actually like it’s portrayed in those books. It’s fine if I’m thinking what they want me to think as long as it also happens to be the actual truth. So the problem with this stuff about CIA psyops is that it is by and large difficult to tell whether a claimed CIA psyop is actually a psyop or whether it’s just something that is both true and also happens to be what the CIA wants me to believe. This is kind of the key thing about institutional propaganda: if it’s good then it’s really hard even for someone supposedly educated and looking out for propaganda to correctly detect it. I, for instance, am someone who is very susceptible to propaganda in the sense that I’ll very easily believe what they want me to believe (in that I actually do believe that being a CIA operative is the most fun anyone can ever have) but I’m also de facto useless since I believe pretty much every narrative that anyone tries to sell me and therefore also believe in competing ones. In fact, I think I am pretty much the ideal recipient of sophistry; I will latch on to whoever sells me the most compelling narrative, and the CIA’s narrative is really, really good.

This is also combined with my instinct of being a natural contrarian, which means that it’s actually only in 2026 now that it’s cool to hate on three-letter agencies that I’ve come around to liking the CIA. In fact until recently since it was cool to say the type of things that Michael Moore goes around saying so I was actively in the ‘Bush is the antichrist’ camp. Really I say whatever the cool kids are saying, and in 2026 the CIA is in—which, as I said, makes me a very fickle friend, since I will, sure, believe in your narrative, but that doesn’t translate to any sort of action—if I believe in everything I also largely believe in nothing.

That aside, here’s my point: yes, the CIA is trying to get me to believe some or the other narrative, but they are at the very least trying to get me to believe in something.

My other motivation for this whole post is a long conversation I had with a friend about this thing he found online, which is a post by some guy who calls himself ‘Prof. Serious’ (but is actually Sir Anthony Finkelstein, Chief Scientific Advisor of National Security to the British Government!) in which he makes the astonishing claim that as a scientist the most important thing you can do is contribute to national defense initiatives, because Russia is evil and going to take over and we need to stop them.

I am an intelligent guy. I can see through his take in an instant. But that has little to do with whether the take is true: as I said, compelling narratives are significantly better than true ones, and it’s fun to see the sophistication with which he actually argues his point—for one, the article is quite boring and proceeds somewhat logically without much in the way of hyperbole, which is absolutely perfect for the intended audience of scientists, who think they are far too cool to buy into regular Sun-level tabloid fearmongering. Instead they will be quite seamlessly convinced by what seems to be a series of well-placed logical arguments rooted in simple and elegant theory. I mean, just look at how delicious this is:

Democracy, the rule of law, the ability to freely exercise political rights, sovereignty, a rules-based international order, and the opportunity to live in peace and with security are precious and hard-won assets. They are not to be taken for granted. There are those, both state and non-state actors, who disdain them and who seek to deprive us of them, either for reasons that are ideological or rooted in greed, grievance, and hatred. They must not be permitted to do so.

Defence is our means of protection. At some point we may be required to fight, and at all times we seek to deter. Our friends and allies also require support and protection. For this purpose, we require the sharpest tools and the capacity to use force. This necessarily includes defence technologies and advanced weaponry.

Are you seeing this? This guy is a genius (and partly because I’m sure some amount of AI went into this whole thing—another thing scientists are very good at is being convinced by AI-esque takes, because they spend all their time moping around on ChatGPT). That first sentence is monumental; all the big words, I mean, democracy, the rule of law, etc, all hard-won assets—can anyone ever argue with that¹? Followed by a bunch of non-sequiturs that seem to proceed logically but can easily be debunked as complete tosh, and yet remain completely undetectable as fallacious to anyone who considers themselves a detector of fallacies. It’s not a coincidence that everyone in his comments section seems to be agreeing with him as well, while pretending to mildly disagree:

We indeed need to respect our colleagues who do not want to work on 'Defense' and we also need to respect that DoD/MoD may not want to work with of our colleagues (for instance, due to their nationality).

Yeah, uh-huh, we need to be respectful and kind while destroying their countries!

You may think I’m disagreeing with him, but I’m really only pointing out how nice and well-constructed the whole thing is. In fact I find his narrative quite compelling precisely because it’s presented to me in the above manner, while the alternative is a slog through tedious and boring facts. Like, I know what Prof. Serious is trying to accomplish, because he outright just comes and says it. He’s not fooling around, he wants you to do research for the military. He’s not trying to pass it off as anything less than what it actually is, similar the CIA’s wink-wink strategy: yeah we are evil but we’re also having a fun time and actually love to show off how important we are to the country. These are very nice narratives, very beautiful dreams. So of course I would buy them.

the scientists

On the other hand, what’s the best our side has got? My friend wrote a long response tediously complaining about the fallacies that our colleague in National Security was committing, which is only ever a good response to rationalists, who are decidedly not the target audience for Prof. Serious’s screed; rationalists are happy to work for defense because they are pretty much amoral about anything except making money and/or gaining power. The target audience of Prof. Serious’s stuff are scientists, like regular scientists who think that they are doing great things and changing the world and are very susceptible to believing that whatever technology the people giving them grants want to fund is somehow good for the world. Many of them will openly come out and say that they don’t agree with the people giving them grants and know that they are evil, or whatever, but they still persist in the task. Then what is the psychology going on here?

I think that it’s pretty much the same psychology going on when I claim that I can be a Fed: yes, I understand on a logical level that this is bad, but my existential conception—the thing that I feel ‘in my bones’—is largely pessimism, and so I can think that it’s morally bad without getting the gut feeling that this is wrong, which means that I will have few qualms about joining a Federal Agency (whether I will be able to survive is another matter).

The thing about guilt is that it generally causes you pain. Whatever the cause is—Christian indoctrination, genuine biological response, etc—is largely irrelevant. The question of whether you can ‘live with it’ comes down to how strong your physiological response is. I often feel gross about certain things, like smoking, hence why I don’t do it. Somehow it feels kind of wrong (and so you do get a little bit of a kick out of it if you indulge). Either these scientists don’t feel it, or they’re actively shoving it down because it, for example, feeds their children. The latter is something that is very difficult to argue with: I would definitely judge someone who chooses an arbitrary notion of ethics over their own children. But the former is something I think is not talked about very much. It doesn’t seem to me that nurses and doctors are going around doing evil things—no one ever accuses them of working unethically. What drives a certain kind of person to become a doctor over becoming a scientist? The answer, I suspect, is bleak: scientists are far more drawn to the allure of ‘scientific advancement’—ie, shaping the world in their image—than doctors, who are people that dedicate their lives to saving and helping other people.

In that regard, perhaps the big lie is that science is somehow an act that is good for the world, or that scientists are heroes. There are all these principles like ‘following the scientific method’ which somehow leads to something like 70% of studies being pretty much useless, wrong, unfalsifiable and unreproducible all at once, or ‘be aware of the ethical implications of your research’ as if Albert Hoffman somehow knew that LSD was going to be the great psychoactive substance of the century—this guy was trying to make medicines. Neither can you expect individual people to somehow anticipate the world-changing implications of of their actions, nor can you expect them to care. In fact, I think I’m willing to posit that scientists are temperamentally more psychopathic than the rest of the population, in that they are able to list out the variety of ethical frameworks they support to justify their research without internalizing any of them. I don’t think scientists believe in anything except for the fact that they are scientists, and therefore x is what they should do.

In other words, it is in fact very easy to see why scientists would buy into Prof. Serious’s argument completely: they already want to believe in it because they want some hierarchical big-shot (if there’s anything scientists love more than pretending they are smart it’s lapping up whatever a person with a Wikipedia page says) to tell them what to do.

I guess my big problem with all this is the underlying assumption that intelligence is somehow a virtue. I seem to be smart, but indulging in my intelligence is one of my biggest vices; the time I feel best is almost certainly when I’m kissing a girl or watching the new Avatar movie or literally just lying around pedantically discussing my friends’ workplace drama over some chips and guac. Scientists love to pretend that they are intelligent, but what good is this intelligence if it translates to a world which is generally proving to be objectively poorer?² Which is why I don’t like all this business about ‘how to be more productive!’ or ‘this is what the great scientists do!’ or ‘this is why you should work for Northrop Grumman!’ and so on and so forth. It starts with this assumption that you should be more productive or that you should be a great scientist. What’s wrong with being a bad scientist? We seem to have enough good ones, perhaps we require a few bad ones? Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t it be fun to have a bunch of unproductive scientists who mostly do nothing?

Meanwhile the CIA isn’t offering these little tidbits, it’s literally shipping you off to Iran and giving you a mission to do that involves kicking ass, and all of a sudden this scientific work seems so quaint.

See what I mean about narratives? All that’s going on is that Prof. Serious is trying to feed you a little bit of that CIA lifestyle, making your work mean something, because right now it means nothing. He’s outsourcing ethical responsibility. You don’t have to pretend anymore—just join the dark side, we need you anyway, and you actually get to feel better about yourself than you ever did before because he is, on a fundamental level, right—working for defense is absolutely going to give your work more meaning than anything else will, because it is accomplishing a shared goal of people who want to accomplish tangible goals. Edward Teller absolutely believed in defense, and guess what? He got to build the hydrogen bomb. How many people can say that?

These institutions—the Feds, Defense Agencies, etc—these aren’t evil corporations, they’re meaning-making institutions. The people in them believe in things. Yes the CIA is evil, but what’s the alternative? That everyone know that the CIA is evil, including CIA agents, and they do their task anyway? It doesn’t work like that. People do tasks because they believe in those tasks. So when Prof. Serious says that you should work for defense, he’s just allowing people to openly believe what they already secretly do: that it’s okay to work for a defense agency because you think it’s cool and you believe in what they’re selling. It’s why he can write whatever he wants and responses to the article will never work—not because he’s convincing anyone of anything they don’t already believe, but that he’s allowing those who believe to join them. He’s going to get a slew of rebuttals from people who aren’t buying his argument for a second, like my friend, but that’s not what he cares about. The moment that even one person who reads his article starts openly agreeing with him, he’s won, no matter how hard a New York Times op-ed comes down on him.

See the power of a narrative?

So what’s our narrative? I told my friend to slander the guy and expose him for a psyop, but he said that he doesn’t want to attack the author, he wants to address the underlying argument. This is why ‘our side’ is losing, because we have nothing to offer. He’s offering the people democracy and the ability to fight for it—what argument are we giving, that you have democracy anyway and that you don’t need to fight for it? What’s the action item here? What are we collectively believing in? What are our meaning-making institutions, if we are to fight for the Feds? The cypherpunks, the guys who call themselves Anonymous—these people organize well, because they believe in the First Amendment. They believe in the founding fathers. But in this postmodern world where all the conspiracies are true, what’s the point of being anti-establishment? There used to be an Other—what else is there now?

There are a lot of people out there who need someone smarter and more capable to tell them what to believe in. What do you think happens when the only people willing to do that are the Feds?

It’s a bleak world, and we live in bleak times. There’s got to be some narrative out there to latch on, and until we find it, we’re going to be locked in this ceaseless limbo where the bad guys get trillions of dollars of funding for building data centers that eat trees for breakfast while the rest of us write articles in Ethics journals while aging German women clap us on the back. Academia is toast.