The Übermensch
Jun. 27th, 2011 02:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueI have just about had it with engineers and the engineer-identified. I'm not talking about engineers over 65; the cultural shift happened after them. I'm talking about engineers who came of age with computers in the workplace. I am thinking of men like Scott Adams and the "rocket scientist" Scarlett just (briefly) dated.
I spent my first two years of college as an engineering major, like my grandfather and great grandfather. I left the field not because I didn't understand the coursework but because I hated the idea of spending 40 hours a week for the rest of my life with people like my classmates. Scientists are naturally curious; engineers aren't. Another applied science, medicine, similarly inclines toward unjustified certainty in its first conclusion, but is defined by its concern for the well-being of other people, and a healthy respect for what is messy and unpredictable.
Engineers don't care about people and pretend they can eliminate failure rates. They think things would work perfectly all the time if you could just take the people out of them. They think of themselves as non-people, as superior, ordered machine-people, and with that comes chauvinism, because it is understood that the default correctly-made person is a straight male, and women and gay people are unfortunate (messy) malfunctions that gum up the system.
Unsurprisingly, they also like guns and martial arts, and they like them specifically for the idea that they could kill dispassionately. They are ten thousand unredeemed Raskolnikovs, convinced they are superior to empathy; ten thousand Leopold and Loebs. Our homegrown terrorists, the FBI has found, are overwhelmingly engineers.
There is a cancer in that profession, or an area of low pressure which has encouraged men (they push out women) with these character traits to cluster, and it must be rooted out. It's not the computers, because it's not a malady of sysadmins and webmasters. It's not the engineering, because it passed over older engineers. It's something else, some self-reinforcing culture. They're a new breed of jocks, and unlike sports jocks they never have to lose, or break a bone. They can go on believing they are the height of perfect function, spreading smug poison as they go.
I spent my first two years of college as an engineering major, like my grandfather and great grandfather. I left the field not because I didn't understand the coursework but because I hated the idea of spending 40 hours a week for the rest of my life with people like my classmates. Scientists are naturally curious; engineers aren't. Another applied science, medicine, similarly inclines toward unjustified certainty in its first conclusion, but is defined by its concern for the well-being of other people, and a healthy respect for what is messy and unpredictable.
Engineers don't care about people and pretend they can eliminate failure rates. They think things would work perfectly all the time if you could just take the people out of them. They think of themselves as non-people, as superior, ordered machine-people, and with that comes chauvinism, because it is understood that the default correctly-made person is a straight male, and women and gay people are unfortunate (messy) malfunctions that gum up the system.
Unsurprisingly, they also like guns and martial arts, and they like them specifically for the idea that they could kill dispassionately. They are ten thousand unredeemed Raskolnikovs, convinced they are superior to empathy; ten thousand Leopold and Loebs. Our homegrown terrorists, the FBI has found, are overwhelmingly engineers.
There is a cancer in that profession, or an area of low pressure which has encouraged men (they push out women) with these character traits to cluster, and it must be rooted out. It's not the computers, because it's not a malady of sysadmins and webmasters. It's not the engineering, because it passed over older engineers. It's something else, some self-reinforcing culture. They're a new breed of jocks, and unlike sports jocks they never have to lose, or break a bone. They can go on believing they are the height of perfect function, spreading smug poison as they go.
