One of the delusions of modern times is that we need a nerd clerisy to help us run things. We’re presently at the end of the post-WW-2 order (or the post-broadcasting order), sort of nervously contemplating what happens next. There has been an active clerisy of nerdoids in place since the 1930s, before the war: FDR implemented this idea of a nerdoid clerisy in its current form. Herbert Hoover offered a different nerdoid clerisy—he was an excellent engineer and administrator and was more effective than what replaced him. FDR’s nerds were arguably a failure from the start: FDR’s clerisy put the “Great” in “Great Depression.”

You know who didn’t have a Great Depression? Knuckle dragging anti-intellectual fascisti, that’s who: people who were sans clerisy. Literal beer-hall philosophers. The US clerisy did take credit for winning WW2. Whether or not they did anything useful is questionable: the Russians did most of the actual fighting. The US had the foresight to build nukes and ramp up military production to help the Russians kill our enemies (and themselves—an important unspoken goal of WW2) for us. Some of this plan was executed by various kinds of bureaucrat-nerd, but few to none  of the important decisions were made by such people, who probably supported the communists on principle. Nukes would have been built without Oppenheimer, but probably wouldn’t have without the mostly unsung Leslie Groves who did all of the important leadership work, including hiring Oppenheimer.

I bet Groves gave Oppie noogies when out of range of the cameras: The weak should fear the strong.

Groves was 0% nerd race; he was an Army engineer, a type of cultured thug who has  existed since the late Stone Age. He had zero tolerance for nerdoid bullshit, and you can see how hard he mogs Oppie in a photo of the two men together. Groves is the type of man leaders have relied on for all of human history, and quite a few centuries before. Groves, to put it in American terms, was more of a Captain of the Football team than he was a nerd. The same can be said of other technical work done in Radar. Nerds had little to do with American victory in a “calling the shots” sense. They helped: but only because they were told what to do and kept under strict control by the Captain of the Football team.  Subsequently, nerds and their bureaucracies flourished in the US, essentially cargo-culting what happened in WW2, leaving out the all-important urgency and accountability to the Captain of the Football team who mercilessly bullycided them into producing results on a timeline, as is correct and proper.

After American victory, nerds proliferated like cockroaches, and to this proliferation was attributed a lot of the postwar American financial and industrial dominance.  American financial and industrial dominance was more readily attributed to the fact that it held the world’s gold and the only functioning factories that hadn’t been bombed to cinders. The  proliferation of nerds and nerd institutions was a result of prosperity; not a driver of it. You can make new nerds more easily than we do now should we happen to need more; the sciences did better when a Ph.D. was unnecessary or a brief apprenticeship. This compared to the present system, where science nerds aren’t even paper-productive almost until their 30s, and are often still kissing ass and publishing bullshit papers to get tenure in their 40s.

A historical example of astounding governmental success: the East India company (the US was modeled after it; the flag anyway). None of the men in it were nerds. All of them were Leslie Grove-types. British gentlemen, while often superbly educated in the classics and in technical fields, were not nerds. The British elite were known by continentals to be anti-intellectual. Then you go look at the situation where nerds run everything: Weimar Germany, current year, any random 1000 years of shitty Chinese history,  peak Gosplan Soviet times. Nerd leadership isn’t good. Nerds belong in the laboratory. If they’re not in the laboratory they should be bullycided. Even when in the lab they need to be held accountable for producing good results; nerds will always tell you some bullshit story about their fuckups. That includes bureaucrat nerds pushing bits and paper. Do something useful with matter or GTFO. Nerds like Robert McNamera come up with  failson do-everything products like the F-111, the golden dodo-bird of its time. Not-nerds who put their ass on the line like John Boyd come up with the F-16; after almost 40 years, still the backbone of Western air forces.

 

The same is true in tech leadership. Most of the leaders of nerds who matter are not really nerds, even if they  fake it for the troops. Zuck does Brazool Jiu Jitsu and kills goats: he ain’t doing leetcode pull requests. Elon was a street fighter before he developed his interest in payment systems and rockets, and his personal life is more like Andrew Tates than that of a nerd. The nerds who founded google and kept it an engineering company in its early days hired a womanizing chad to make it a useful company, and speaking of Larry types, Larry Ellison is both a womanizing saleschad and lunatic jet pilot rather than a nerd. Look at the most prominent actual nerd entrepreneur in recent history: Sam Bankman Fiend. Archetypical nerd; he even worked at uber-nerdy Jane Street and had filthy sex orgies with other ugly nerdoids. Nerds need to be bullycided. It’s good for them, good for the organizations they work for.

Being intelligent isn’t the same as being a nerd. Though nerdism is touted as being a sort of definition of intelligence: it isn’t. Being a nerd is being a disembodied brain; a king of abstraction. Being a nerd is a lifestyle open to obvious stupidians. Even when they’re bright, nerds lack thumos; they have a hard time operating outside the nerd herd. If something is declared “stupid” the nerd won’t give it a second thought. If other nerds like a thing, or are declared “expert,” even the 200 IQ nerd will go along with it, because being a nerd is his identity. This is why the football star is superior to the nerd: his life isn’t made of abstractions -it’s made of winning, which is something that happens when you’re right, not when you do the proper nerd-correct thing to sit at the nerd table in high school.  Right now there are probably a hundreds thousand nerds trying to predict the stock market with ChatGPT (aka autocomplete). That’s what a nerd does: acts on propaganda as if it is real information. Chad either exploits a bunch of ChatGPT specialists and flips it as a business to a greater fool, or invents a new branch of mathematics to beat the market the way Ed Thorp did.

 

Objectivity is another thing the nerd lacks. Nerds are masters of dogma. They’re good at putting dogma into their brains: that’s in one sense what “book learning” is -you have a sort of resonator in your noggin that easily latches into patterns. People who are good at tests are good at absorbing propaganda. They’re bad at noticing the thing they absorbed is propaganda; that takes another personality type. One that nerds associate with “stupid people” who bullied them in high school. You know, the ones who should be their bosses.

 

Nerds become in love with their ideas, even when they’re wrong. Architecture astronauts, mRNA enthusiasts, marxists and other schools of economics, diet loons, snake-oil pharmaceutical salesmen, “experts” in most fields -these are ideologies that people can’t course correct without losing face. Since being “smart” is all a nerd has, they stick with shitty ideas even unto their actual deaths. Actually intelligent people play with ideas, consider where they might be useful and where they might break down. Ideas are like wrenches; they’re not useful in every situation, and you have to pick the right one for the job. You have to put down the wrong wrench and pick a screwdriver sometimes. That’s why you need a General Groves to manage the nerds: your legions of shrieking nerd wrench-enthusiasts can be helpful in putting together a car, they need to be bullycided into not using a wrench to install rivets or screws. The other useful management technique is to pair them with machinists who will make fun of them for trying to use a wrench for everything: the China Lake approach.

It’s OK to be a nerd; nerds can serve a purpose. We can even admire the nerd if he’s actually capable of rational thought. It’s not OK to give nerds leadership positions. You need people who played sports or who killed people for a living, or otherwise interacted with matter and the real world. The cleric doesn’t order the warrior in a functioning society; it’s the other way around.