Random thoughts

Lately I’ve been wondering whether being in science is “doing enough.” I’ve been reading Collapse, by Jared Diamond, which talks about all these past societies that have collapsed due to environmental destruction, and then I watch/read/listen to the news about poverty and disease and war and hunger and environmental destruction, and I see how corruption and greed and hate and selfishness and pettiness and short-sightedness serve as seemingly insurmountable obstacles to solving all of these problems, and I get depressed. I kinda feel like I need to be doing something more hands-on to make things better. Science and technology are so abstractly related to human wellbeing. To be sure, they can do a great deal of good, when used properly. But it’s so much easier for science and technology to be used by the “bad guys” (esp. since they have so much to gain from it, and are therefore very, very motivated). Last night, while trying to get to sleep, I had a thought: I wonder how many CEOs and national politicians are psychopaths. I bet if we could study every member of congress and the president and vice president and all the CEOs of the major corporations that are making billions of dollars in profits while destroying rain forests and contaminating local drinking water, etc., and then compared the percentage of those people who are psychopaths to the percentage in the general population it would be significantly higher. I mean, some of these people just have to be psychopaths, right? How else could they pursue agendas that are so willfully damaging to the other 6 billion people on this planet so that they can drive fancy cars and fly personal jets and snort cocaine off of hookers’ tits?

Side note: I think I’m suffering from PTSD from 9/11. And George Bush’s presidency.