“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” – Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

The root cause of the sprawling incompetence in our country today is the value placed on loyalty over competence. The complementary driver of this is the primacy of money. Money has become the sole measure of success. The rich and powerful are strip-mining our society to line their pockets. For them, profits outweigh damage to society. They have accomplices who benefit from assisting them with incompetent leadership. The promise of making lots of money is the root of it. In the public sector, government funding is used to bludgeon everyone into submission. We see this in Universities. I’ve seen it at the Labs too. It is bad, and it is getting far worse.

Loyalty to power is the price, and integrity is the cost.

One of the key elements of all this is that you pay a personal price. It is clear that the way to make the most money these days is by playing the game, not speaking out, and serving the incompetent leadership. Incompetent leadership wants to do what they do without any feedback from anybody who knows what they’re doing. If you speak out, you’re put out into the wilderness. There won’t be any money, there won’t be any work, and ultimately your career suffers. If you play ball with them, you can make money, and you can be successful.

I saw this at Sandia, and you see this in the political dynamic. The price of demonstrating competence is a loss of money. If you’re loyal and play the game, you are paid handsomely, and it’s the road to success in this dynamic. Competence, honesty, ethics, and morality all come at a price, a personal one. In this way, the powerful lock into their power and save themselves from any criticism coming from those who actually know what to do. Meanwhile, society as a whole suffers while the powerful thrive.

“For the love of money is the root of all evil.” – 1 Timothy 6:10

I’ve learned from friends that the laboratories (Sandia at least, and I assume Livermore and Los Alamos as well) have all bought into Trump’s demand that artificial intelligence be relabeled as “super intelligence.” I am sure the rank and file at the laboratories roll their eyes at this. They see it as another example of how craven and incompetent their leadership is. True, no matter how smart or scientifically accomplished those leaders are. Their integrity is simply sacrificed. All of them have turned into craven whores simply because their funding and money are at risk.

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” – Richard Feynman, Rogers Commission Report, Appendix F (1986)

We can see how Trump wields this money and power like a chainsaw against our greatest institutions, producing ever greater damage. Our biggest corporations are even more susceptible. One casualty is the promise that artificial intelligence will deliver good things for society. Right now, all it’s going to deliver is more inequality and more money in the hands of the few. The price to society will be massive. The opportunity for the technology to deliver good will be destroyed in the process. It is going to be the damage of social media on steroids.

The cost is going to be vast societal damage that exceeds even the vast damage done by social media. Artificial intelligence is a much more powerful and, by no coincidence, more dangerous technology. In the hands of these money-grubbing whores, it is all of us who are going to get fucked.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time… when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority…” – Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

Let’s take the interview Ezra Klein did with Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia. Jensen managed to say some very intelligent, learned things until the conversation got to regulation and control. Then he turned on his heel and delivered a craven, self-serving view of AI. He only cares about his wealth. All his credibility should have been shredded in that moment.

He has submitted completely to the president because of all the money he stands to make. He wants to sell cutting-edge chips to China despite export controls. He wants the AI companies to go full speed ahead with data centers, because those data centers will mostly buy the chips his company sells. He’s just looking at the stock price, and his answer lacks a scintilla of credibility.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” – James Madison, Federalist No. 51 (1788)

This pathological response to money has been brewing for decades. I saw it at the labs, where the competence of leadership was sacrificed over and over again for the promise of funding. Money became everything, and it became the only thing that managed ideas. Research and science were sacrificed on the altar of money.

The end result has been incredibly toxic for our most important research institutions and for the country as a whole. We see managers repeatedly trading their integrity for financial gain, or to avoid financial loss. When offered the choice between money and doing what is right, what is ethical, or what is competent, they choose money every single time.

“Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.” – Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier (1945)

This played out in my own career. Unethical decisions were made, and the only explanation for the lack of ethics was concern about funding. Ultimately, ethics and integrity were traded for money.

The result is a lack of competence. Incompetent leaders are everywhere; one need only look at the top of our federal departments and institutions. Increasingly, the thing that binds them all together is a lack of competence and an insatiable desire for money. Corruption and graft are rampant.

“…he looked for three things in hiring people: integrity, intelligence and energy. And he said if the person did not have the first, the latter two would kill him.” – Warren Buffett, quoting Peter Kiewit, University of Florida lecture (1998).

Nowhere is this truer than in our largest corporations, where profit and maximizing shareholder value are the only things they care about. No attention at all goes to the price paid by society or the citizens of our country. If there is money to be made, our citizens are simply sacrificed.

The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” – Milton Friedman, title of his New York Times Magazine essay (1970).

The real problem is that there is perhaps no worse time for this than the present. We need competent leadership and direction now more than ever, and yet that competence has been swallowed by a bottomless greed for money and power. The fixation on money creeps in and destroys competence wherever it takes hold. We have monumental challenges to contend with. AI is one of them, and massive changes in what warfare and national defense look like are another. In the face of these challenges, we see greed, the raw exercise of power, and a focus on money swallowing all the good answers.

One of the most insidious ways this dynamic manifests itself is by actively undermining competence. Someone who is incompetent ultimately becomes more useful to those in power, because they lack the characteristics that drive a person toward competence. Competence is the characteristic that interferes with doing exactly what the leadership wants. Moreover, acquiring competence becomes detrimental, and rather than developing competent people, we actually foster the development and promotion of incompetent ones. This makes the situation even worse.

There are plenty of examples to choose from. Perhaps foremost among them is our Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, who seems to have traded his competence for loyalty and now has to defend all sorts of incompetent decisions. He could have been a decent or even good public servant. Now he simply serves greed and incompetent decision-making.

Increasingly, incompetent leaders will avoid competence at all costs. Competence, ethics, and morals have a habit of getting in their way. One might think this is limited to the political realm, but I saw the same thing at the laboratories. Over time, more and more incompetent leaders were put in place. Decisions favored money above all else, and competent, correct decisions were often disfavored because they meant somewhat less money.

“If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere once we have started it… then we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire and not merely a colorful imitation of it.” – Norbert Wiener, “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation,” Science (1960)

The second example is warfare. Drones and autonomous warfare are clearly the future. Our national defense is built around Cold War systems. They increasingly resemble the Maginot Line, which the Nazi blitzkrieg simply went around in 1940. We are flirting with the same outcome for ourselves. Inaction will ensure a future catastrophe. We are already behind the necessary transformation.

“Generals always prepare to fight the last war.” – Proverb.

Perhaps the more consequential danger we should face head-on is the change in how warfare is conducted. The future is being shaped every day in the war between Ukraine and Russia. We have seen similar things happen in Iran. In both cases, a middle power uses drones and automated warfare to hold its own, or perhaps even to defeat a traditional power. We ignore this. We are imperiled.

Rather than take notice of this, our Department of Defense is promoting old ideas about warfare. It’s pretty clear that Pete Hegseth would much rather have a bunch of oiled-up, muscle-bound men reminiscent of the movie 300 and Sparta than a fleet of drones tailor-made to actually fight a war today. The focus should be on modernizing our military. Instead, we focus on performative physical fitness, hormone levels, and beards. Any minority that is promoted to a higher rank is suspect. Intellect is optional when it should be prized.

“Every age had its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions, and its own peculiar preconceptions.” – Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book 8

He is, without a doubt, the single most incompetent person in the entire cabinet. He is completely unfit for the job. I will note that being the most incompetent member of Trump’s cabinet is a difficult thing to achieve. Just look at the host of supplicants and morons he has assembled. Somehow, Hegseth is even less competent than RFK Jr. This should terrify all of us. Worse yet, his incompetence comes just as we enter a period of immense danger. Today demands a complete transformation of our warfighting capabilities. Hegseth stands in the way of the transformation we need.

Using money, or the threat that they would not make as much as they wanted, Trump brought the entire high-tech world to heel. Just think: a group of incredibly rich, incredibly intelligent, accomplished men, all reduced to subservience to a blithering, anti-intellectual idiot, merely because he threatened how much money they could make. Rather than speak wisdom or act independently, they gleefully submitted to his idiotic ideas. Super Intelligence was the most obvious and pathetic example of their capitulation. It was done solely to allow their acquisition of more money.

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” – Theodore Roosevelt, Kansas City Star (1918)

The only silver lining is that this has generated immense political backlash. The plans our tech overlords have for us are meeting a great deal of resistance, and it is growing. In a time when we need intelligence, wisdom, and integrity, we have the opposite. In a time when we need to shape AI to produce genuine good for society, we have greed and a lust for power in its place. None of us should have any faith that this is going to end up in a good place.

Today, managers and leaders want loyalty masquerading as competence. We see over and over again that those who have that competence are willing to trade it for loyalty as long as the illusion of competence is upheld. The formerly competent experts will be rewarded handsomely for their service to the leaders. The synonym for this is: The competent ones who serve the incompetent leaders trade their integrity for a bigger paycheck. In today’s world, success is measured in dollars, not by being correct or doing the right thing.

The big lesson today is that the trade of loyalty for competence we see with the Trump administration is going on everywhere. I increasingly observed this in my professional life. The trade is happening at our top research laboratories and at our universities. I know it was happening in Sandia. I suspect it is happening almost everywhere else. The only difference is that Trump is more brazen and nakedly obvious in this regard. In a sense, what Trump is doing is simply vividly reflecting the choice that society has already made.

We live in a time of transformational change, and we also live in a time of numerous existential dangers. Given the challenges we face, confidence should be required to navigate them. Today, that competence comes with the demand of obedience and the ability to reject that competence if it chafes against the desires of leadership. The greatest danger is that, in this moment, competence has been rejected and incompetence is sought. This incompetence only serves to amplify the power of those already winning. The threat is that the incompetence will turn these potential dangers into real existential catastrophes that endanger us.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” – Bertrand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (1933)