You Can Do Anything

In Genesis, God creates by simply saying “Let there be x” and x appears out of nothing: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). In Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1995), our descendants have matter compilers (incredibly advanced 3-D printers) that can create everything from a bowl of rice and a gun to an entire island filled with mythical creatures. We have yet to acquire the godlike powers of creation found in Genesis and The Diamond Age. But some of our leaders have acquired godlike powers of destruction. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, grasped this immediately after the first bomb went off: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the end of scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multiarmed form and says, ‘Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that one way or another.”

As Dan Carlin rightly observes in The End is Always Near (2019): “If in the thirteenth century the Mongol titan Genghis Khan had decided to smash an empire or state, it was going to take some time. If that state was huge—as, for example, China was—it was probably going to take decades. However, if President Richard Nixon in 1969 decided to launch a nuclear strike on that same place, he could have annihilated one hundred million Chinese people in an afternoon. . . . Since the end of the Second World War, no greater disparity in weapons technology has ever existed than when the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons right after it. How many leaders in world history would have taken advantage of such circumstances? . . . President Truman’s secretary of war, Henry Stimson, described the advantage of the monopoly in poker terms: The bomb was the equivalent, he said, of a royal straight flush. How do you resist playing with a hand like that? What would Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great—or Hitler, for that matter—have done with a monopoly on nuclear weapons? Not use them? If you gave the great Carthaginian general Hannibal nuclear weapons in his life-or-death struggle with the Roman Republic, handed him the button, and said, ‘If you push this, all of Rome will be devastated,’ does he push it, or does he say, ‘Maybe I should think about this?’”

More than ever before, presidents need to possess virtues such as temperance, moderation, prudence, and self-control—what the Greeks referred to as sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη). Trump’s brother drank himself to an early death. And so he abstains. This is manifestly wise. Alas, many similarly warned do need heed the lesson. At minimum, this demonstrates that sophrosyne is not foreign to his soul. But aside from this undeniably virtuous instance, the man conducts himself like a self-indulgent, spoiled child: “I moved on her like a bitch. . . . I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” Nobody should have the power that the American president now possesses. But he has it regardless. And it looks like we’re going to make it to the end of this nightmare in one piece. Even so, electing men like Donald Trump is like playing Russian Roulette. Sooner or later, your luck runs out. Until we can create as well as we can destroy, we’d be wise to entrust the godlike power of nuclear weaponry to more sound-minded individuals in the future.