The Double Edged Sword

There is no rose without the thorn. There is no light without its shadow. There is no action without its equal and opposite reaction. The dichotomous nature of discovering conceivably “treacherous” knowledge, in the same way, poses either the greatest of scientific and societal victories or the potential for humanitarian demise. With the looming threat of the latter, must we not shy away from the acquisition of such dangerous knowledge? Or should knowledge, regardless of how it can be applied, be pursued and disseminated to the fullest extent? The age-old adage that knowledge should be pursued for knowledge sake is most certainly true. Its relentless pursuit is almost an important form of free expression. But what happens when such knowledge brings with it death and disease?

History’s most controversial example of seeking and using knowledge with lethal purpose is none other than “The Manhattan Project”. The funding and expenditure that went into manufacturing a nuclear weapon with the capacity for world domination, and with it the extinction of life as we know it, can be seen as both humanity’s greatest failure and yet a victory for detente and peacekeeping worldwide. During the 1930s, in a world wrought with serious concern that Nazi German scientists were working on weapons of mass destruction using nuclear technology, and fears that Adolf Hitler was prepared to use it against America, an arms race to construct the first atomic bomb was inevitable.

Perhaps the most important contention in favor of U.S efforts in seeking nuclear knowledge was the defense of the land and the people, as well as the belief that the knowledge of nuclear technology was in the hands of “depraved” people who would use said knowledge to bring about the fall of humanity worldwide. The US believed itself to be a virtuous nation, and as such, after seeking this knowledge, it would not wield this power negatively (the belief that this knowledge would be in the “right hands”). However, by pouring in the $2.2 billion in expenditure for The Manhattan Project, it was common understanding that the main knowledge that would be acquired from this investigation (while it held great scientific significance) was how to murder a mass population quickly, efficiently, and with the most destruction possible. Ethically, this was rather disconcerting. To be sure, many of the lead scientists, such as Robert Oppeheimer, expressed feelings of regret and anxiety while developing the bomb in its early stages. This was amplified after the bombs were physically deployed against the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, when it was clear that real-world actions would have real-world consequences. Since the dark and bleak days of the Second World War, we have harnessed the same nuclear technology developed back in the 1940s in more productive ways. Today, nuclear fission powers over 70% of electricity generation in France and well over 10% of the world's electricity supply. Yet, incidents like Fukushima in Japan make it abundantly clear that with esoteric scientific knowledge also comes death in a thousand disguises.

Despite the darker and perhaps more malign side of certain forms of knowledge, I firmly believe that know-how and knowledge should never be censored. First, human talent is adequately distributed all over the world, so to think that knowledge is owned by one group of people at the expense of others is an intellectual fallacy. Case in point: NASA may have been the first to send a lunar mission in the 1960s, but the most recent lunar mission sent by India, the ‘Chandrayaan', was done at a cost of $76 million, compared to NASA’s last lunar mission, which incurred over $4 billion in costs. Erudite scholars would argue that the ultimate knowledge for humans would be the path to understanding the true reality behind the universe. The ancient philosophers from India, who undertook such existential introspection, effortlessly realized that the fabric of consciousness is the true undecaying reality in the universe. This was not merely theoretically pontificated but practically experienced through deep meditation and intense self-inquiry. Imagine for a moment if these sages had kept that knowledge a secret and had not institutionalized their findings for successive generations to discover. The world would be in a perpetual state of darkness.

Knowledge is meant to be disseminated to progress and uplift humanity, and as such, it is the ultimate form of free expression. Censuring knowledge is in turn censoring free speech. Does giving knowledge away for free infringe on intellectual property? There is a cost to every discovery, and should not the discoverer of any form of knowledge reap the benefits of his or her discovery? The answer to this question depends on whether the knowledge itself is a private good or a public good. Where knowledge impacts society at large and is a matter of life and death, its dissemination needs to be broader and quicker. The most potent example of this was the COVID vaccine. Having the MRNA technology and discovering the vaccine led to its quick distribution all over the world that in turn saved millions of lives.

Humanity should be free to pursue knowledge of any kind. It’s an essential part of who we are as human beings. Creativity and imagination are what differentiate us from other species. Whilst I may not trust the human instinct enough to know how far to push the limits and when they need to reign in their creativity in order to prevent chaos, I stand by the thesis that knowledge and power itself is never the problem : it is how we choose to wield it.