“Waking Up Someone Who Is Sleepwalking” Daniel Ellsberg, Denial, Anti-Thought and the Nuclear Threat

Abstract

Daniel Ellsberg was an outspoken critic of the nuclear arms race, American nuclear war fighting strategy and the policy of deterrence based on so-called mutually assured destruction. With courage and a deep moral conviction, he raised an often-lone voice challenging our denial of the world annihilating potential of a nuclear exchange. His passing offers us a chance to reflect psychoanalytically on the minimization and denial of this and other world threatening existential threats and the omnipotent, hubristic belief in the assumed perfectibility of technology—the absolute conquest of nature by humankind. Together, the twin harbingers of mindlessness, silence and refusing to see, comprise a foundation on which rests the dangerous anti-thought linked to the possibilities of omnicide and world destruction.