Hypocrisy is not all bad

There is an increasing tendency to accept shocking statements by politicians by just saying that they are being authentic and not hiding behind hypocritical statements. Political leaders used to at least pretend that they are doing the right things some of the time. But Trump has been so successful in making people familiar with the idea of not pretending that they now just shrug their shoulders and say that Trump is being Trump. 

The global system shaped after World War II was built around open markets, human rights, international institutions like United Nations and cooperation and rule-based norms. A large part of the world did not accept it. There were many situations when the system was ignored more than being followed, particularly by the United States itself. But you still had this as the kind of default operating system of the international world.

Whenever the United States did not live up to those principles, it always tried to frame its actions as if it was trying to uphold them. So for example, for the war in Iraq, the Bush administration went to the United Nations, tried to get resolutions, had inspectors put in place, gathered a coalition of 40 plus nations, went to the United States Congress, and then went to war with Iraq. The war may have been misguided, but there was an effort to put it in the context of this larger international order that the United States believed in and was part of.

Now it has gone from being a country that believed in the international system that it had put into place to one that openly violates it. "Openly violates it" is the part that is important. For the current war in Iran, there was no effort to go to the United Nations or to go to Congress. The United States has exactly one ally, Israel. This was deliberate. The Trump administration doesn't believe in any of those features. It wants the unilateral exercise of American power for American national interests as it conceives it to be.

The practice of filling the government with incompetent loyalists has been going on for thousands of years and people know that it will always be there. But some excuse to show that you're doing it for other reasons will generally be given to cover up the actual reason for doing it. But now even this pretense is often not required. Is this a good thing? 

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that hypocrisy is the “practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform; pretense.”  It is generally viewed as a negative trait; a significant moral failing, especially in a leader. It is often seen as a mark of dishonesty and a lack of authenticity. But it easy to miss the good about hypocrisy - even giving lip service to an ideal that you fall short of maintains the idea that the ideal should remain and people should aspire for it. 

If people were required to perfectly live up to ideals of honesty and compassion at all times for those ideals to exist, there would be no ideals at all. According to Gandhi, there must always be an unbridgeable gulf between the ideal and its practice. The ideal will cease to be one if it becomes possible to realise it. He argues: "Where would there be room for that constant striving, that ceaseless quest after the ideal . . . if mortals could reach the perfect state while still in the body?"

The maxim that 'hypocrisy is the tribute that vice plays to virtue' makes the same point - you're only truly capable of hypocrisy if you're to some degree accepting the importance of certain norms. It's by reference to those norms that you can be called a hypocrite. Hypocrites who fail to keep their promises but refuse to abandon the ideals they betray help keep those standards in place for society to strive toward. The social condemnation of hypocrisy reinforces moral norms and promotes more authentic and accountable behavior in society.

Some situations may require hypocritical behavior in order to reduce tensions in social relations. When citizens appear to conform to the social and cultural conventions and norms of their communities, where their instincts and desires are repressed, they cannot merely be accused of being hypocritical.  Living in a group may require compromise at certain times. When politicians appear hypocritical, they may be performing much better than if they remained steadfast in their consistent adherence to principles. For example, when the leaders of various countries praise Trump to the skies, you know that they are lying but you also know that it is the best way to get a good deal for their countries. 

When a person is accused of hypocrisy, it makes both the charging party and those being charged critically reflect on the action. Trump-style dismissal of any appeal to ethics and virtues, or the belief that such an appeal is inherently in bad faith breeds cynicism and a decline in social standards.  A cynical agreement in society that hypocrisy is a common occurrence and that we are all hypocrites some of the time reduces the effective functioning of a society. 

Anne Applebaum writes that some countries are members of what she calls Autocracy, Inc. - Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Iran,  Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia etc. They have spent many years disputing the human rights language long used by international institutions. They dismiss treaties and conventions on war and genocide, and concepts such as “civil liberties” and “the rule of law” as embodying Western ideas that don’t apply to them. They feel no shame about the use of open brutality and send hundreds of their citizens to their deaths.

Once upon a time, the leaders of the Soviet Union, the most powerful autocracy in the second half of the twentieth century, cared deeply about how they were perceived around the world. They vigorously promoted the superiority of their political system, and they objected when it was criticized. They at least paid lip service to the aspirational system of norms and treaties set up after World War II, with its language about universal human rights, the laws of war, and the rule of law more generally. Even in the early part of this century, most dictatorships hid their true intentions “behind elaborate, carefully manipulated performances of democracy". But all that pretense is now not required. 

The Overton Window is a model for understanding how ideas in society change over time and influence politics. It was developed in the 1990s by Joseph Overton, a political scientist. The window illustrates the general public’s most acceptable policies in the center and the more untenable policies on the ends. According to the concept, politicians are limited in what policy ideas they can support — they generally only pursue policies that are widely accepted throughout society as legitimate policy options. These policies lie inside the Overton Window. 

Politicians and others in the political arena might shift or expand the span of the Overton window to make specific policies more or less acceptable in public opinion. Politicians of various countries, by their statements and actions over a number of years, have shifted the Overton window towards reduced importance of a number of moral ideas. Anne Applebaum writes in Autocracy Inc.:

This is the core of the problem: the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy will always appeal to some of their own citizens. To stay in power they must undermine those ideas, wherever they are found.

Russia and China would not have dreamt that they would have a person in the White House who would do their job for them. They will be content to follow a famous strategic maxim attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte - "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake".

Palantir Technologies - IV of IV

Palantir is much beyond a technology story and is a story of security and defense. Counterterrorism and defense form the main part of Palantir’s business. Much of this work necessarily takes place out of public view. A number of military veterans work at Palantir. It personifies the new revolution in military affairs. Alex Karp and cofounder Peter Thiel are now fully embedded in the Trump White House system and are looking for more and more business.

Palantir's work is related to analyzing data from thousands of satellites and other sensors and making sense of that for military commanders. They are also creating a platform that will facilitate the mass deportation of 'illegal immigrants'. Palantir's power, fame and presence is not confined to America or Israel.  All of NATO has embraced it. Palantir's use of AI has been has been criticized as crossing the ethical boundaries, particularly as it works with military intelligence, immigration, etc., probably with not enough disclosure.

Shyam Shankar, Palantir Chief Technology Officer, is a Lieutenant Colonel US army reserve, commissioned in June 2025 to a new unit called the Executive Innovation Corps. He plays a key role in upgrading technologies, particularly AI, for the US armed forces. (Reserve army officers in the US can keep on doing the work that they are doing, but they are part of the army as officers, which means they have got the privileges like security clearances, etc. Chief Technology Officers of three big tech companies have been appointed as officers.)

There are more indications about how deeply embedded Palantir has now become in the security and defense structure in America. Jacob Helberg, ex-Palantir, has been appointed under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and Environment. Gregory Barbaccia has been appointed federal CIO, Chief Information Officer, in the executive office of the president to lead US government's IT strategy.  He was in Palantir and was the head of intelligence and investigations. 

The brings us to the question of how the company got its name. Peter Thiel is a fan of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. In the novel, a Palantir is a magical sphere. The person who looks into one can see things far away and communicate with someone who holds another Palantír. (The company management is fond of referring to employees as “hobbits”.) He named Palantir after the all-seeing crystal balls. His software and AI also are supposed to be all-seeing. 

In Tolkien’s work, we see both good and bad effects of the use of Palantíri. Only very powerful and capable beings were able to use these seeing stones. But even the very wise could be deceived by what they saw, and using a Palantir led to their downfall. It can be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality. A kingdom used the Palantirí to facilitate communication and control across a vast territory. One of the story's villains, the wizard Saruman, used a Palantir to surveil his enemies. The Palantiri are a sinister symbol of hubris and a tool of manipulation. 

The Torment Nexus is an expression that refers to dystopian elements in science fiction that technologists pursue as practical goals. Dais Johnston of an online magazine Inverse has defined the Torment Nexus as "shorthand for something that backfired in fiction being unironically replicated in reality." Palantir Technologies is an example of the Torment Nexus. 

Peter Thiel is aware of the moral complexities involved in the use of Palantir in the novel but he seems to think his company is immune to them. Alex Karp indeed seems to take the issue of privacy protection seriously. But how can he ensure that his clients will do the same? How will he be able to ensure that the CEOs who come after him will have the same commitment to privacy protection that he seems to have? It seems inevitable that someone somewhere at some time will use the software for some unethical purposes. 

This has already happened. The company was implicated in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook data was surreptitiously used to try to manipulate millions of Americans into voting for Donald Trump in 2016. The investment bank JPMorganChase sought Palantir’s help for cybersecurity. Soon, though, the software was being used to surveil the bank’s own staff by a bank employee. When Trump launched his immigration crackdown, Palantir was accused of abetting racist and inhumane policies. That Thiel had been one of Trump’s most prominent supporters added to the furor.

Concerned about Palantir’s role in the second Trump administration, former employees of Palantir wrote a warning to their fellow tech workers in Silicon Valley. They recalled that in the epic novel, “the myth of the powerful seeing stones warned of great dangers when wielded by those without wisdom or a moral compass, as they could be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality.”

Similarly, the Palantir employees warned that the “Palantir Technologies" platform grants immense power to its users, "helping control the data, decisions, and outcomes that determine the future of governments, businesses, and institutions — and by extension, all of us.”

Some of Palantir's critics like to portray the company almost as an all-seeing, all-controlling company. Palantir's supporters say the company is saving Western civilization from collapse. The Trump years exposed an uncomfortable truth: the company’s technology would be a powerful weapon in the hands of an authoritarian regime. In The Philosopher in the Valley, Michael Steinberger writes: 

Palantir was arguably the most interesting company in the world — and possibly also one of the most dangerous. Its technology had the potential to help shape the balance of power in the twenty-first century and to alter the relationship between the individual and the state. Palantir was a window into the panoptic future that had now arrived ...

Palantir Technologies - III of IV

A major thing that's happened in recent years is the advent of AI. Palantir quickly realized that there's going to be huge demand among corporations in incorporating AI functions into their operations and that Palantir software could play this sort of bridging function. It just turbocharged their business. A few years ago the stock was trading at about $10 a share. A few months ago, it topped $200 a share. Palantir's Board of directors awarded Alex Karp $1.1 billion in total compensation in 2020, making him the highest-paid CEO of a publicly traded company that year. 

There is a story which illustrates Alex Karp's aggressive style.  In early 2023, he announced that the company was launching a new AI product that "was under development". None of the engineers in his company knew that there was any such product. He knew that AI is going to be the next big thing so he just decided there will be a product and assumed the engineers will find a way of doing it. And they did. 

Although Alex Karp is very supportive of his employees, he speaks abrasively to outsiders. Trump-style, he taunts his critics and attacks the media. There's a quote from him in a Wall Street Journal story where he says, "we are sorry that our haters are disappointed, but there are more quarters to be disappointed and we are working on that too."  And he goes on to say to his shareholders to stop talking to all the haters.

Much of what the company does is completely benign. It's helping make businesses operate more efficiently. Palantir has also done a lot of good. It played an instrumental role in the COVID response and in the vaccine rollout. It was being used by the World Food Program when the pandemic began. Then there's been stuff that's very concerning. Now Karp's view of what it means to defend the West seems to have changed. For much of Palantir's history, defending the West meant defending liberal democracy, the rule of law.

In the beginning, his political views provided an intriguing contrast with Peter Thiel, who was a libertarian (and who later would gravitate to the far right). But in recent years he has moved closer to Thiel's view. Thiel has spoken very disparagingly of democracy. You don't now hear Karp nor from Palantir talk of defending liberal democracy. They talk about the West now as a cultural entity, a superior culture. 

Peter Thiel has been a long-time Trump supporter and is supposed to be the man behind the rise of JD Vance. Prior to entering politics, Vance had worked for Thiel’s Mithril Capital. When JD Vance contested for his campaign to be senator in Ohio, Peter Thiel contributed $15 million.  He and a lot of his key people are seen very often in the White House.  And many of them are now working either in White House or in Department of Defense.  

Thiel has said that he no longer believes that freedom (he means economic freedom) and democracy are compatible. He wrote, “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” (He later clarified that he didn’t think anyone should be disenfranchised, while simultaneously suggesting that voting isn’t productive.) He thinks of the West as a collection of countries bound by a shared Judeo-Christian heritage and by attachment in varying degrees to free enterprise.

Thiel has a habit of ignoring or doubting scientific facts that run counter to his worldview. (He even funded an online magazine that promoted creationism.) Thiel’s idea of “freedom” seems to consist of free markets and not much else. He thinks that markets should be free of any regulation. He is skeptical about the value of competition and believes that the most compelling start-ups are those that aim to achieve monopolistic dominance in niche markets. According to him, "Competition is for losers because it destroys profits. You can survive, but you'll never thrive.” 

He gave the example of disc drive manufacturing in the 1980s, which saw repeated advancements every two years, but by different companies. “It had great benefit to consumers, but it didn’t actually help the people who started these companies,” he said. Companies needed not only to have “a huge breakthrough” at the beginning to establish their dominance but also to ensure they had the “last breakthrough” to maintain it, such as by “improving on it at a quick enough pace that no one can ever catch up - that’s great for society. It’s actually not that good for your business.”

Thiel said that an Antichrist would exploit fears of the apocalypse — for example due to nuclear armageddeon, climate change or the threat posed by AI — to control a "frightened population.". The Antichrist is a deceptive figure in Christian theology who opposes Christ and embodies ultimate evil. Thiel’s overall definition of the Antichrist “is that of an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times”. He identifies the Antichrist with anyone or any institution that he dislikes – from environmental activist Greta Thunberg to governmental attempts to regulate artificial intelligence. He labeled AI safety researchers who call for strict regulation as potential agents of the Antichrist.

In an interview to the NYT, he talked about his fears of an Antichrist taking over the world. The interviewer asked him if he doesn’t think that the Antichrist who he is so worried about would use the the tools that his company Palantir is creating to take over the world; that without such tools, such a takeover would not be possible. Thiel didn’t have a good answer. 

Thiel and Karp, are strong supporters of Israel. After 7th of October 2023, they took a plane load of Palantir top staff to Tel Aviv in solidarity. And then they faced a big pushback from many quarters that their platforms was being used by the Israeli military.  How did they respond? They decided to hold their next board meeting in Tel Aviv.

Palantir Technologies - II of IV

Karp is a very people-oriented person. He encouraged his employees to express themselves with absolute candor. “Alex’s attitude was that you should be able to tell even the CEO to fuck off,” says a software engineer. Even so, his colleagues felt as if Karp could almost burrow into people’s minds and implant his ideas. He seemed to have an astonishing ability to get people to see things his way and to do things that he wanted. 

Karp was good to those who worked for him. He was not one to scream or threaten, nor did he ever publicly upbraid or humiliate people. He disliked firing people even when there were problems with them. He would joke that his job was “managing unmanageable people.” Whenever he shared his thoughts about the work the engineers were doing, he made it clear that pushback was welcome. In this way, he had won the confidence and allegiance of Palantir’s engineers. Palantirians were intensely devoted to him. 

Karp has severe dyslexia (which makes his academic achievements even more impressive). He believed that his managerial acumen was tied to his dyslexia.  He says that it “fucked me but also gave me wings to fly.” He developed certain attributes that would prove useful in business. Dyslexia taught him the power of collaboration since those who have it need the help of others. In an environment that required team-building and delegating responsibility, Karp found that he had an intrinsic advantage. Dyslexics, he said, aren’t raised on an ethos of self-reliance and tend to excel in situations in which they have to work with other people. 

The company was a reflection of him: of his habits and quirks, of the experiences that had shaped him, and above all, of his bleak worldview and the anxieties that weighed on him. His sense of foreboding, he said, “propels a lot of decisions for this company". Karp’s commitment to Palantir was absolute. He rarely took a day off, and on most weeknights, he ate dinner at his desk.

From the start, Karp said that Palantir’s mission was to defend the West and liberal democracy. The company was a creation of 9/11 where it was felt that different agencies had the required data but had failed to post them together properly. Even before 9/11, Karp was skeptical that the end of the Cold War had ushered in an era of irreversible peace and prosperity. There was nothing utopian about Palantir; if anything, the company was founded on the conviction that we were facing a bleak future. Karp once said that bad times are incredibly good for Palantir.

He was fully supportive of Ukraine when it was invaded by Russia. In one sense, it wasn't Karp's choice. The United States was giving support indirectly to the Ukrainians from the start to try to help them repel the Russian attack and Palantir's software played a significant part in that. He felt strongly that every country should be able to have its own sovereignty over its territory. Three months after Russia invaded Ukraine, he went to Kyiv where he met President Zelensky and expressed his support for Ukraine and offered to open an office there. 

He identifies very strongly with his Jewish heritage and is a staunch supporter of Israel. Being biracial, Jewish and also severely dyslexic, he has always understood that this was a world that wouldn't necessarily be a very hospitable world for someone like him. Soon after the war in Ukraine started, the war in Gaza started after the October 7th attacks by Hamas in Israel. The October 7th attacks gets right to his sense of vulnerability.

He saw it as ushering in a period of enormous danger for Jews everywhere, not just in Israel, and this informed his reaction. Palantir was already working with Israel. The Mossad used its technology. But now after October 7th, Palatir's involvement increased. It took out a full page ad in the New York Times saying that Palantir stands with Israel. This was deeply personal for him. And Karp is furious over the protests on American college campuses against the war in Gaza which he sees as evidence of a broader rot on the left.

The slaughter in Israel also cemented his political metamorphosis. Although he had long ago stopped describing himself as a neo-socialist, he still claimed to be progressive. He was a Hillary Clinton supporter in 2016, and he had made clear to employees that he was personally repulsed by Trump. He had said, "I respect nothing about the dude. It would be hard to make up someone I find less appealing.” On certain issues, such as immigration, he expressed opinions that seemed consistent with a liberal worldview (at the same time, though, he opposed affirmative action and was a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment to the US constitution). 

But he thought progressives had been very irresponsible on the issue of immigration. He was increasingly unhappy over the role of identity politics and started drifting away from the left. In the meantime, Donald Trump (who he had criticized earlier, calling him "a phony billionaire") was running for president again, and Karp started warming to Republicans and to the idea of a second Trump presidency. He recognized that it was a huge opportunity for Palantir, being a major government contractor, if they played their cards right. 

Now he is a big Trump supporter, involved in ICE operations. He had quietly made a $1 million personal donation to the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee. He published a book called The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West whose main point is that a new, tech-driven nationalism was needed to keep America, and by extension the West, dominant. After an interview on CNBC, one of the cohosts commented that Karp was “an enigma wrapped in a riddle. He always emphasizes ‘I’m a progressive’ and then he "goes on to sound like just a huge right-winger.”

Palantir's platform was used with Anthropic’s Claude in the capture of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, according to the Wall Street Journal. Karp told CNBC that his company’s technology is being used in the war in the Middle East. He seemed frustrated that he couldn’t take more credit for the continued war being waged in Iran and made it clear that he supports President Donald Trump’s efforts. Palantir has experienced significant stock appreciation and high valuation multiples since the start of the conflict in the Middle East.

Palantir Technologies - I of IV

Palantir Technologies is a relatively small company, with only around four thousand employees but its reach is huge.  Climate change, famine, immigration, human trafficking, financial fraud, customs enforcement at ICE, the future of warfare - Palantir is at the center of many events that you see in the news. Under President Trump, Palantir has become an essential tool in American wars abroad and policy at home. Yet it has stayed largely under the radar.  

Its stock rose around 500% in the past 5 years. But it had a poor 2026 although it has risen again in the past few days. Palantir was one of the most expensive stocks on the market when its decline began, and even after its sell-off, it is still expensive at over 100 times forward earnings. Many think it will follow the same path as Nvidia, another company that benefited from the rise of artificial intelligence. And yet, unlike Nvidia, many people don’t know what Palantir does. There was a funny tweet that illustrated this point: 

“If someone held me hostage and asked me to explain what Palantir does, tell my family I love them…”

The company was founded by Peter Thiel (first major Facebook investor and founder of PayPal) and Alex Karp in 2003. Alex Karp is the chief executive officer. It was started after the 9/11 attacks in the US and was financed in part by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. A number of secret services now use Palantir, including the Mossad. All six branches of the U.S. military has deployed its technology. Palantir clients include the FBI, the IRS, and the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. It has become a major defense contractor. 

Alex Carp has a very unusual background for someone who is a big name in Silicon Valley. He grew up in Philadelphia in a very left-wing household, the son of a Jewish pediatrician and a black mother who's an artist. Much of his childhood was spent going to anti-war protest and he used to describe himself as a neo-socialist. He's biracial and he identified very strongly with his black heritage. He was someone who was sensitized to injustice both at home and abroad.

Karp majored in philosophy at Haverford. He went on to earn a law degree from Stanford University and a doctorate in social theory from Germany’s Goethe University, Frankfurt. He had no desire to pursue a career in academia, and when Peter Thiel, a law school classmate, asked Karp in 2003 if he would be interested in joining a start-up that was building software to fight terrorism, he jumped at the opportunity. Not long thereafter, Karp became Palantir’s CEO.  

Under Karp, Palantir became a dominant force in data analytics, a multibillion-dollar enterprise with swank offices around the world and an aura of intrigue that set it apart from other Silicon Valley companies. The company went public in 2020 and officially made Karp a billionaire. He became a center of attention at events like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Heads of state were eager to hear his thoughts, and he was in ever-greater demand as a speaker.

What exactly does Palantir do? It works with the raw data that has been collected by the various organizations it works with. Palantir doesn’t collect or store the data itself, and it doesn't sell data. This data collected by the various organizations is messy and riddled with mistakes, can be coded in different languages, such as Python or Java and can be stored in multiple databases that aren’t linked. There is also the problem of dealing with the huge volume of data that is generated now via phones, watches, satellites, automobiles, etc. 

Palantir produces software that enables organizations to pool the data they have which is tedious work if done manually. The software cleans up and standardizes the data and turns it into a composite dataset. Customers run queries to find patterns, correlations, trends, connections in that data that would take human analysts hours, days, even weeks to find. They typically work with large organizations that pull in massive amounts of data on a daily basis, like the US Army or Airbus.

It can be customized to reflect the particular needs and habits of mind that guide a corporation or a government agency and can be applied to a broad range of issues. For example, it has been used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to track food borne illnesses; by the German pharmaceutical company Merck KGaA to accelerate the development of new drugs and by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to combat insider trading.

The troubling legacy of Fritz Haber - V of V

Albert Einstein, already living abroad, observed Haber’s suffering but felt little sympathy. Einstein’s earlier disdain for all things German had hardened, under the influence of events, into fierce loathing. His letters to Haber display the satisfaction of a man who’d finally won a long-running argument. “I can imagine your inner conflicts,” he wrote to Haber in May 1933. “It is somewhat like having to abandon a theory on which you have worked for your whole life. It’s not the same for me because I never believed in it in the least.

Haber was plagued by depression, physical weakness, and a failing heart. He died in 1934, broken, unable to work in his native country which he had served so loyally, unable to work in another country since it was reluctant to accept him. The deepest tragedy in this was the fact that his destruction was, in part, self-destruction - he had led the pro-German chorus during the WWI. 

As the years passed, Haber’s work during World War I grew into a symbol of science’s uneasy conscience about its workings. Before Haber, soldiers had never relied so heavily on the latest products of science and industry. Never before had research institutes worked so closely with military leaders. Scientists and generals alike began to understand that their once-distant worlds were linked forever. Gas warfare became one symbol of this union. 

Haber represented the first of a breed. He was the forerunner of every modern scientist who works on banned weapons — at least those weapons, such as nuclear bombs, that international treaties allow in a few privileged nations but not in others. And the moral choices that he confronted during his life were not so different from those that we face today. He was not an evil man. His defining traits — loyalty, intelligence, generosity, industry, and creativity — have always been prized traits. 

Scientists abroad marveled at the German marriage of science and warfare, and rushed to imitate it. The United States set up a National Research Council and began a crash program to build nitrate factories of its own. It spent $100 million on them (about $1.6 billion today) by the end of the WWI which forged enduring links between universities and the military. Philosopher John Dewey called this interweaving of science and government policy a kind of borrowed “Prussianism” and predicted that it would remain even after the war had ended and so it has proved. Haber was the spiritual father of the military-industrial complex. 

Some time after the war, Haber's institute had made an insecticide called Zyklon A, a cyanide-based crystal that turned into vapor when exposed to air. Haber helped arrange funding for their laboratory. Later the concerned scientists moved to another laboratory where they upgraded it to Zyklon B. After Haber’s death, came the horrors of WWII. The Nazis built human-scale gas chambers and used Zyclon B as a tool of death on a scale beyond all normal imagination. Members of Fritz Haber’s extended family, children of his sisters and cousins, were hauled to those camps and killed by a gas their famous relative had helped develop.

If German politics had turned out differently, Fritz Haber might have been considered a hero, and statues of him might now stand in prominent places. Instead, Haber became a tragic figure. Haber's motivations may seem misguided, but before we rush to condemn, we have to remember that most of us behave in the same way. Most people, now as then, swim with the current of public sentiment; most embrace technical progress; most support their homelands. Haber too was guided by these motivations but his superior intelligence and drive meant that he went further and more dramatically than most. 

Haber embodied the capacity of science to nourish life and destroy it. The legacy of this forgotten scientist is present in every day’s news headlines and in every bite of food. Nitrogen is essential in war and in peace and the chemical reaction that Haber discovered delivered unlimited quantities of it. You could say that Haber snatched bread and bombs from the atmosphere. Ultimately the same person who saved billions of lives is also responsible for the deaths of millions of people. 

The institute in Berlin that once was Fritz Haber’s domain bears his name: The Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society. The name is mildly controversial at the institute; occasionally someone suggests that it be changed. Matthias Scheffler, one of the institute’s five directors,  prefers to keep the name. It reminds every scientist at the institute that knowledge can be a tool for good and for evil, for creation and destruction. A high school in Berlin that once bore Haber’s name did drop it a few years ago.  In Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare, Daniel Charles says about why most people tend to ignore his memory: 

The reason, I suspect, is that he fits no convenient category. Haber was both hero and villain; a Jew who was also a German patriot; a victim of the Nazis who was accused of war crimes himself. Unwilling to admire him, unable to condemn him, most people found it easier to look away.

Clara Immerwahr, Fritz Haber's first wife, has found fame in recent decades. The Clara Immerwahr Award launched by UniSysCat (Unifying Systems in Catalysis) in 2011, is an award for promoting equity and excellence in catalysis research fostering young female scientists at an early stage of their career. Haber's institute, The Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society had a memorial built for Clara in the garden of the institute in 2006.

The troubling legacy of Fritz Haber - IV of V

Haher considered the horror evoked by the use of poison gas irrational. He saw no reason why asphyxiation should be considered more ghastly than, for instance, having one’s leg blown off and gradually bleeding to death. He viewed war, and gas in particular, with the cool eye of the technocrat. He thought of gas warfare as an intellectual challenge, or an intricate game that had more psychological impact. 

Haber argued that the psychological power of traditional weapons was quickly spent as soldiers quickly got used to them. Chemicals, on the other hand, represented a many-faceted and ever-changing threat. Each new poison thus posed a new lethal threat, and a new psychic challenge to the foe, “unsettling the soul.” They produced, as he noted enthusiastically in 1925, “more fright and less destruction!”  Gas worked to the advantage of the most advanced industrial societies, Haber argued. He knew well enough that his weapons were widely hated, but he dismissed it. He saw only one explanation for it: prejudice against anything new and disruptive.

As Germany’s economy crumbled and its political system came apart at the seams after the war and the crippling demands of the Treaty of Versailles, Haber suffered as well. It was a time of honor and dishonor. One day he feared being placed on trial as a war criminal; the next he received science’s most prestigious prize. He also encountered moral condemnation from an old acquaintance who was appalled by the use of poison gas. Haber sent a brief, dismissive response, suggesting that his hostility to chemical weapons was outdated and that use of such weapons was legal. The acquaintance wrote back, asking Haber to consider not just whether gas weapons were legal, but also whether they were moral:

I hoped that you might agree with this view: That we, as chemists, have a special responsibility in the future to point out the dangers of modern technology, and in so doing to promote peaceful relations in Europe, since the devastation of another war would be almost unthinkable.

Haber was angry at the world. He considered himself and his country victims of political persecution. The Versailles Treaty prohibited German chemical weapons, but they did not prohibit the victors from researching into them. Haber was quite ready to violate the treaty’s terms if he could get away with it.  When the British chemist Harold Hartley, acting as an international arms inspector, arrived at Haber’s institute in 1921 to check for research on forbidden weapons, Haber probably did not tell him about a nearby laboratory that routinely worked with banned chemicals that Germany had once used as weapons.

Fritz Haber had written off the possibility of getting a Nobel prize. Members of the Nobel Committee in Stockholm, however, understood the enormous significance of the ammonia synthesis. When the news arrived in mid-November 1919 that he had won the prize after all, Haber seemed happier for his country than for himself. But it led to an immediate howl of indignation, particularly in Belgium and France, who had been at the receiving end of the as warfare. There were no protests at the ceremony itself though many Allied diplomats and Nobel laureates found reasons not to attend. 

Events of the 1920s and his own increasing age forced Haber, more frequently as the years passed, to reflect on the past. In a speech to Breslau’s Academic-Literary Association, he recalled the naive complacency of his youth when he had felt that his Jewish ancestry did not matter. He spoke of unthinking German patriotism and how the war destroyed both prosperity and illusions of national unity. He ended his speech with a plea for tolerance, intellectual freedom, and democracy. 

As Hitler’s movement swelled in power, Haber’s mood grew dark. On occasion, he even seemed to question technical progress which he had always believed in. Early in 1932, he confessed that the previous half-century’s technical innovations appeared to be merely “fire in the hands of small children.” One year later, Adolf Hitler was named Germany’s chancellor, and Haber wrote in a letter that he had "the feeling that I’ve made serious mistakes in life." He did not say what those mistakes had been.

He dimly foresaw Germany’s political catastrophe but he never imagined that it could strip him so completely of his dearest possessions and turn his proudest accomplishments into ashes. What counted now was ancestry alone and Haber’s forebodings became reality. The government unveiled a law ordering the removal within six months of all Jews from the German civil service.  The law covered every German university professor and nearly every scientist at the institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.

Haber, too, soon would find his situation intolerable. Apart from Einstein, who was traveling at the time and immediately declared that he wasn’t coming back to Germany, Haber was the most prominent Jewish scientist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Max Planck, president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, tried to save Haber by trying to convince the führer that forcing valuable Jews to emigrate amounted to Germany’s “self- mutilation" but Hitler flew into such a rage that Planck could only leave the room.

The remainder of Haber’s life is a chronicle of losses: his villa and institute, his fortune, and his remaining reserves of strength. Equally shattering, though, was a kind of spiritual dispossession, the loss of his faith and identity. He’d helped feed the ravenous beast that was turning on him. “I am bitter as never before, and the feeling that this is unbearable increases by the day.