Knurd—Terry Pratchett coined this term to describe the horror of living in reality with all dreams and little niceties of life ripped away. The opposite of being drunk, even in spelling, it describes the world as it would be without comforting illusions to keep us going or the thought of events working out for the best.
Sam Vimes, of the City Watch stories, is naturally knurd—meaning he doesn’t see the best or good options, he knows inevitably: bad options are what end up happening. He is a drunk for this reason, as his body is alleged to not produce enough ‘natural alcohol’ to keep him going and he overdoses when he tries to dose himself to not be a cynical bastard all the time.
I say this because there are certain things I tell myself not to think or concern myself about because, “That’s crazy.”
Take this, for example.
A few years ago, I read Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk. It discusses the importance of the Department of Energy and its many responsibilities the public at large does not recognize. One of them?
Overseeing the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons.
More recently, I read Character Limit. One of the things noted by the book that stood out was Elon’s mishandling of mass firings. How he’d convinced himself Twitter was infested with bots—and then “ghost” employees—and just kept chasing delusions. That led to mass firings. Or shit like disassembling servers that then almost brought down the entire site.
The people who could have fixed it or been there to stop the crash? They’d been fired, so the people left had to scramble to bring those people back on, when the company was on the brink of disaster—if they were even willing to return. It barely sort of managed to get by. Twitter definitely hasn’t taken a hit in the last few years, right?
And then Elon started moving closer to political power.
Now look where we are, with mass firings within the government by people who have no understanding of their importance.
More recently, I let slip some of my concerns about nuclear weapons, especially in regards to Edward Teller.
This whole time, I’ve had this little fear at the back of my mind. Told myself I was crazy for it, if I tried to explain it to anyone, they’d think I was a nutcase… well, anyway, maybe you can piece together what it was.
