The Khmer Rouge governed Cambodia for three years, eight months, and twenty days. That was enough time for nearly two million people to die, at least a quarter of the country's population according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, while the regime attempted to transform Cambodia into a self-sufficient agrarian utopia. Phnom Penh fell on April 17, 1975, and within hours soldiers were ordering roughly two million residents out of the city and into the countryside. Hospitals were emptied. Families were separated. People were pushed into forced labor. The transformation did not arrive after years of disappointing reform or a gradual radicalization of government. The transformation was the government. The old society itself had become the obstacle.
That is where I want to begin because I prefer opportunists to true believers every time. It sounds morally backward because sincerity is supposed to be a virtue and opportunism an insult. We admire the person who means what he says and distrust the politician who changes position after discovering that yesterday's conviction is polling at 34 percent. That is sensible when choosing friends. I am much less convinced that it is sensible when choosing the person who commands armies, directs laboratories, reorganizes economies, controls intelligence services, writes constitutions, or has access to nuclear weapons. In those circumstances I become intensely interested in whether the person wants something ordinary enough to lose.
Give me Bill Clinton. I mean Clinton almost archetypally. Give me the politician who wants to be loved, reelected, invited back, remembered fondly and photographed shaking the right hands. Give me Nixon looking at Communist China after a career built partly on anti-Communism and deciding that yesterday's ideological enemy might be strategically useful tomorrow. Give me the revolutionary who takes the palace and discovers that palaces have surprisingly comfortable bedrooms. Greed tells me what you want. Vanity tells me what you want. Ambition tells me what you want. Cowardice tells me what you fear. Nepotism tells me whom you love. Narcissism tells me which image of yourself must survive. None of those are virtues, but they are handles. The opportunist needs tomorrow because tomorrow contains the things he wants.
The true believer may have discovered something more important than tomorrow. It may be God, equality, revolution, race, nation, science, democracy, liberation, history, the planet, the proletariat, the market, the Constitution, technological transcendence or a purified humanity. I am agnostic about the content. I am not frightened merely because somebody believes something absolutely. I believe some things absolutely myself. I believe in Jesus. I believe the Second Amendment is an essential canary in the coal mine of American liberty. I believe rivers should not catch fire, children should not drink lead, getting lead out of gasoline was a triumph, and animals and wild places possess value independent of their usefulness to us. Conviction is not my problem. My problem begins when conviction produces a particular moral permission structure, one that can be expressed in four words that frighten me more than almost any others in politics: by any means necessary.
Put almost anything admirable before those words and listen to what happens. Save the world by any means necessary. Protect democracy by any means necessary. Defend liberty by any means necessary. End poverty by any means necessary. Achieve equality by any means necessary. Advance science by any means necessary. Preserve the nation by any means necessary. End human suffering by any means necessary. The object can be magnificent. The four words poison the grammar because any abolishes the limiting principle. Once the end is sacred enough, the means cease to possess independent moral weight. If a million people must suffer so that ten million can eventually inherit justice, the arithmetic begins to perform itself. If one generation must be sacrificed so that every generation afterward can live correctly, objecting to the sacrifice can start to look like moral cowardice.
Social scientists have actually studied a related phenomenon under the name sacred values. Work by Scott Atran, Jeremy Ginges and colleagues found that people do not always behave according to ordinary bargaining logic once an issue has moved into a morally non-negotiable category. In politically charged disputes, adding material incentives to a compromise could make some participants less willing to compromise rather than more willing, because the offer itself treated a sacred commitment as though it had a market price. Sacred values are not inherently pathological. Some things ought not to be purchasable. The danger appears when the priceless thing begins making everything else expendable.
Pol Pot is one of the purest examples because he removes the temptation to make this essay about religion. There is no need for a supernatural apocalypse when human beings are perfectly capable of manufacturing secular eschatologies. The Khmer Rouge did not merely seek a different tax system or a more equitable distribution of land. It sought a reconstructed human order. Cities, markets, religion, professions, institutions, inherited loyalties and enormous portions of existing Cambodian life became evidence of contamination by the world that had to disappear. The familiar story that people were killed merely for wearing glasses is too neat to describe what actually happened. Educated people, professionals, former officials, religious figures, people with foreign connections and others associated with the previous society were vulnerable because the revolution had made the previous society itself incriminating. The Khmer Rouge warning preserved by the Holocaust Museum was chillingly concise: “To keep you is no gain; to lose you is no loss.”
What particularly terrifies me about Cambodia is the speed. Revolutions usually discover that they need the people they have spent years denouncing. Somebody eventually has to maintain a turbine, deliver a baby, repair a pump, account for grain, run a railway, understand an electrical grid, manage a hospital and know which pipe leads where. Vanguard movements generally assume that there will still be a vanguard around to run things after victory. The Khmer Rouge came frighteningly close to treating the inherited human infrastructure itself as disposable. Phnom Penh fell in the morning and by afternoon soldiers were driving residents into the countryside. It was not a hundred-year transition. It was an attempt to turn history around immediately.
That is eschatology in the lowercase sense that interests me. A corrupt present is identified. The corruption is declared structural rather than incidental. Reform therefore becomes inadequate. Rupture becomes necessary. Suffering during the rupture becomes regrettable but historically meaningful. Purification follows. A redeemed society waits on the other side. Religion did not invent this architecture and modern secularism certainly did not abolish it. It simply supplied new names for the eschaton.
China's Cultural Revolution provides another enormous example. Stanford sociologist Andrew Walder reconstructed the first five years using published histories from 2,213 county and city jurisdictions, covering 99 percent of the relevant local jurisdictions. His estimates run from 1.1 million to 1.6 million deaths and 22 million to 30 million people subjected to political persecution. The detail that interests me most is that the vast majority of casualties in his reconstruction came from organized repression by authorities rather than the insurgent violence normally associated with images of youthful Red Guards. The restoration of order became extraordinarily violent too.
That is another feature of true-believer politics worth remembering. The revolution does not necessarily stop consuming people when the revolutionary side wins. Purity has no obvious natural stopping point. Yesterday's revolutionary can become tomorrow's reactionary because once one layer of impurity has been removed, the remaining impurity becomes easier to see. The person who helped expose the traitors may himself be insufficiently vigilant. The person who helped destroy the old hierarchy may have acquired suspicious authority in the new one. The eschaton retreats another hundred yards.
Max Weber identified the moral problem more than a century ago when he distinguished an ethic of conviction from an ethic of responsibility in Politics as a Vocation. The distinction was not between people with principles and people without them. The serious politician needs convictions. The problem is whether fidelity to the principle becomes sufficient moral accounting, or whether the actor also accepts responsibility for the foreseeable consequences produced by acting upon it. Good intentions do not sterilize bad means. Pure motives do not cause unintended consequences to vanish. Politics is the place where the person saying “but I meant well” can have a body count.
I am therefore obsessed with second-order consequences, third-order consequences and consequences so far downstream that nobody putting the policy into effect ever has to meet them. I am interested in blowback. The architect of a grand intervention naturally concentrates on the intended consequence because the intended consequence is the reason he built the machine. The unintended consequences live outside the beam of the projector. You want people to appreciate pristine environments, so you create ecotourism, and people who once sat obediently beside resort swimming pools put on Tevas and march into every pristine environment they can locate. You destroy an institution because it is oppressive and later discover that it was also containing something worse. You reorganize agriculture because the existing system is backward and discover that relationships you dismissed as inefficient were transmitting information nobody knew how to reproduce centrally. The more ambitious the intervention, the more interested I become in the least glamorous question in political philosophy: and then what?
This is where climate eschatology enters my thinking. I don't believe in climate change. I do believe in environmentalism, and I do not experience those positions as contradictory. I don't want mercury in fish, lead in children, toxic sludge in groundwater, spontaneously combustible rivers or species casually extinguished. I don't need the end of the world to want a clean river. What interests me politically is what happens to the permission structure when somebody else sincerely believes that the world itself is approaching catastrophe. If the alternative is planetary ruin, what intervention becomes too audacious to contemplate?
Stratospheric aerosol injection is almost comically perfect as an image because it is sunglasses for Earth: deliberately placing reflective material high in the atmosphere to reduce incoming solar energy. The important thing for my argument is not whether somebody has already deployed it globally. They have not. The important thing is that serious institutions study solar geoengineering precisely because people sufficiently worried about warming can imagine planetary intervention as a rational response. The National Academies has treated solar geoengineering as a subject requiring substantial research and governance precisely because its environmental, social and geopolitical consequences could be profound. Existential urgency changes the risk calculation. Ordinarily the fact that something acts on a planetary scale is an argument for restraint. Under an eschatological frame, the planetary scale of the alleged emergency becomes an argument for planetary-scale action.
That is the true-believer problem at maximum magnification. There is no spare Earth in the laboratory next door. Nobody can obtain meaningful consent from every human being who would live under the intervention. The people making the decision can be brilliant, educated, compassionate and convinced that they are acting for humanity. None of those qualities alters the topology of the risk. The size of the good intention does not shrink the possible size of the unintended consequence.
Then there is Oppenheimer. After Trinity, the first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon, J. Robert Oppenheimer later recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The scientific accomplishment had reached a scale for which the language that came back to him was not merely technical. It was cosmic and divine.
I don't need to claim that Oppenheimer literally believed himself to be God to find the moment extraordinary. Human beings had acquired a power previous civilizations would have described through the vocabulary of gods, nature and apocalypse. That is what technological history keeps doing. It takes something once belonging to myth and converts it into engineering. Flight. Instantaneous communication across continents. Seeing inside bodies. Editing genes. Splitting atoms. Redirecting rivers. Potentially altering the atmosphere. The danger is not that scientists are uniquely evil. The danger is that intelligence does not solve the moral problem created by intelligence.
This is also why I do not accept the flattering image of science and scholarship as floating outside human systems of orthodoxy. Universities have hierarchies, initiations, credentials, specialist vocabularies, canonical literatures, accepted methods, senior authorities, mechanisms for determining who may teach, ceremonial robes and institutions devoted to reproducing themselves into the next generation. Graduate school can function socially like formation, the doctorate confers standing, tenure confers authority and the people who have spent decades ascending such systems are no more magically immune to hubris than people ascending churches, armies, parties or corporations. The dangerous move occurs when epistemic authority becomes moral authority. “I know more than you about atmospheric chemistry” may simply be true. “Therefore I know which risks civilization ought to accept” does not follow. Physics can determine whether a bomb detonates. Physics cannot determine whether a city ought to be underneath it. There is no laboratory instrument that measures ought.
The most powerful orthodoxy may therefore be the one whose priests are convinced that only other people have religions. The religious believer says revelation gives him the truth. The revolutionary says history gives him the truth. The nationalist says the nation gives him the truth. The activist says justice gives him the truth. The scientistic believer says the method gives him the truth. The language changes. My question remains the same: what does your certainty give you permission to do to everybody else?
The same question explains why disruptive climate activism interests me more than climate argument. If someone sincerely believes billions of lives and the continued viability of civilization are at stake, gluing oneself to a roadway, blocking traffic, attacking the protective barrier around a famous painting with food, interrupting public events or accepting arrest may make perfect moral sense inside the believer's denominator. Ten thousand irritated commuters are microscopic if your comparison class is planetary catastrophe. The behavior is useful to this essay because it shows how changing the perceived stakes changes the apparent cost of the means. What looks grotesquely disproportionate outside the eschatology can feel embarrassingly moderate inside it.
I do not care whether this psychology presents itself from the left or the right. I do not care whether the eschaton is religious or secular. I care about the believer's relationship with the future. Can he accept an 80 percent improvement, or does 80 percent constitute collaboration with the remaining evil? Can he lose an election and try again? Can evidence make him retreat? Can consequences embarrass him? Can he discover that an opponent was right about one thing? Can reality veto the theory? Those are much more interesting questions to me than which bumper sticker is on his car.
There is another person who frightens me even more than the person who says he wants to save the world. It is the person who says, “I want to change the world.” Change it into what?
The phrase is treated as automatically noble. Universities put it in recruitment material. Startups put it on walls. Politicians put it in speeches. Philanthropies turn it into mission statements. But change has no moral direction. Penicillin changed the world. So did the atomic bomb. Gutenberg changed the world. So did Mao. Norman Borlaug changed the world. So did Pol Pot. “I want to cure cancer” at least contains a stopping condition. Cancer is cured. “I want clean water” can be measured. “I want to bring art to people” tells me what the project is. “I want to change the world” tells me only that the speaker wants history to notice his fingerprints.
That is where Milan Kundera's Immortality enters the article for me. Human beings do not merely fear biological death. Some of us want to survive as images in the minds of people who never knew us. The politician starts imagining the biography. The billionaire imagines the foundation. The revolutionary imagines the statue. The scientist imagines the unit of measurement carrying his name. The artist imagines the canon. The eschaton becomes personal. I may die, but the world will have been altered so deeply that it cannot stop remembering me. That form of immortality can become more dangerous than ordinary opportunism because ordinary opportunism often anchors a person to the existing world, while the immortality seeker may need to wound the world deeply enough to leave a permanent scar.
Competent administrators rarely become immortal. Nobody writes an opera about the deputy minister who kept sewage treatment functioning for thirty-five peaceful years. History disproportionately remembers founders, conquerors, revolutionaries, destroyers, inventors, prophets and people associated with enormous ruptures. That creates a perverse prestige economy around scale. If your ambition is merely to leave the neighborhood slightly better than you found it, history may ignore you. If your ambition is to change civilization permanently, history might remember your name even when the change is monstrous.
This brings me to the event that supplies the other half of the essay, because history also gives us moments when almost everything depends upon somebody declining to become history.
On October 27, 1962, at the most dangerous point of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet submarine B-59 was submerged while American anti-submarine forces above it used signaling depth charges in an attempt to make it surface. Conditions aboard the Soviet submarine were miserable. Communications with Moscow had been lost. Captain Valentin Savitsky believed the submarine might be under attack and readied its nuclear torpedo. The Americans pursuing B-59 did not know that the submarine was carrying a nuclear weapon. Vasily Arkhipov, chief of staff of the Soviet submarine brigade and fortunately aboard B-59, recognized that the American forces were signaling rather than opening a war and helped calm Savitsky down. The submarine surfaced. The nuclear torpedo stayed aboard.
That one decision is impossible to price because the counterfactual is impossible to observe. Nobody can tell us exactly what President Kennedy, the Pentagon or NATO would have done if a Soviet nuclear torpedo had detonated against the American naval force during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The nearest plausible target included the carrier Randolph, with thousands of sailors and Marines aboard, and the United States had nuclear antisubmarine weapons available in the theater. What we can say is that a Soviet nuclear attack on American forces on October 27, 1962 would have occurred in the middle of a crisis already balancing at the edge of nuclear escalation.
Civilization may therefore owe an unknowable debt to a man who did not insist upon being right quickly enough.
Think about the psychological materials available to produce the opposite decision. Fear. Exhaustion. Military honor. Humiliation. Anger. An American force overhead. A captain who believed the war might already have started. A nuclear weapon ready to use. Every ingredient for an existential outburst was present. Arkhipov's contribution was not a brilliant theory of history. It was restraint under uncertainty. He acted as though the premise might be wrong.
That may be the most important characteristic I want in anybody who possesses enormous power: not lack of conviction, but the capacity to interrupt conviction with doubt before the consequences become irreversible.
The contrast with Pol Pot could hardly be cleaner. Pol Pot had a vision of the society that should exist and power sufficient to begin forcing the existing society toward it. Arkhipov faced a situation in which acting decisively could have made him a participant in one of the most consequential moments in human history, and instead helped create the possibility that nothing happened. One man pursued transformation so completely that approximately a quarter of his country died. Another man may have preserved an enormous portion of the existing world by refusing to assume that his side's worst interpretation of events was correct.
The first becomes history because of what he did.
The second matters because of what he declined to do.
That is why I keep coming back to opportunists. Opportunism is not the highest virtue. It is not even a virtue. It is merely one crude way of attaching powerful people to consequences. The politician wants another term. The billionaire wants another decade. The dictator wants his children to inherit the palace. The narcissist wants the statue. Those appetites can be disgusting, but they create stopping conditions. They give reality something to threaten.
The better brake is what Arkhipov appears to have possessed: epistemic humility under pressure. The willingness to admit, at the exact moment when pride, honor, ideology and fear are screaming for action, that the information may be incomplete and the interpretation may be wrong.
That is not weakness. On October 27, 1962, it may have been a survival system.
This is ultimately what I want from true believers, including the ones whose beliefs I share. I do not want Christians without faith, environmentalists without love of nature, scientists without curiosity, patriots without loyalty, activists without conviction, soldiers who believe nothing is worth defending or politicians whose only philosophy is tomorrow's poll. I want people whose beliefs contain stopping conditions. I want the environmentalist who can conclude that the intervention creates more damage than it prevents. I want the revolutionary who can admit that the revolution is hurting the people it was supposed to liberate. I want the scientist who can discover that something is technically possible and still say it should not be done. I want the general who can win but still decide the price of victory has become unacceptable. I want the religious believer who trusts God enough not to appoint himself God's project manager. I want the constitutional absolutist who understands that constitutional liberty includes other people exercising liberty in ways he despises.
Most of all, I want the person who can say I might be wrong while he still has time to do something useful with the possibility.
Not because truth does not exist. Not because conviction is embarrassing. Not because morality is relative. Not because all perspectives deserve equal respect. I want that opening because complex systems contain relationships nobody completely understands, because interventions produce consequences their architects did not intend, because human beings surprise us, because beautiful theories eventually encounter plumbing, because intelligence does not eliminate hubris, because institutions reward conformity as well as truth, because history does not provide control groups, and because eight billion people are not raw material for somebody else's perfected experiment.
My own Christianity contains a wonderfully simple version of the same restraint. I am a Jesus freak, but I do not believe I have been appointed assistant regional manager of the Apocalypse. Jesus tells his followers that they do not know the day or hour. The Messiah may be part of my faith, but managing the Messiah's travel arrangements is not my job. I believe in the Messiah. I distrust anybody who thinks the Messiah requires his help getting here.
I think of the Godhead as white light hitting a prism, with human religions and traditions appearing as different colors after that light passes through culture, history, language and temperament. I happen to live most comfortably in the Christian ray. Jesus is where the light makes the most sense to me. That does not give me ownership of the light source, and it certainly does not give me permission to break the prism because everybody else is standing in the wrong color.
That is the same standard I want applied everywhere. The activist, the professor, the scientist, the priest, the revolutionary, the patriot, the billionaire, the general, the environmentalist, the president and me all remain human beings standing in front of systems larger than ourselves. None of us gets an exemption because our intentions are pure.
Believe whatever you believe. Believe it fiercely. Argue for it. Evangelize it. Vote for it. Organize around it. Spend your life building it. Tell me I'm an idiot for rejecting it. I can live with all of that.
Just tell me there is something you will not do to me in order to get there.
Because the moment your answer becomes by any means necessary, I no longer care how beautiful your destination is. I am looking for the exits.
And if the person beside the launch control can still say, at the worst possible moment, we may be wrong, I would very much like him to remain in the room.
