Pontifical Catholic University of America

09/13/2026

El pueblo que se quedó sin guardianes: cuando la malevolencia colec...

09/13/2026

09/13/2026

# The Language That Does Not Return: How Destroying Another's Language Ultimately Impoverishes the Destroyer

*Organizational malevolence applied to linguistic and cultural diversity*

# 1. Rome and the Languages It Took with It into Its Own Silence

Before Latin became the language of half the Mediterranean, the Italian peninsula spoke Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, and dozens of other languages with their own systems of knowledge: agricultural, ritual, and medical.

Rome did not impose Latin overnight or through a single decree; it did so through administrative colonization, military recruitment, citizenship conditioned on the use of Latin, and, over time, the simple weight of the fact that every economic and political opportunity passed through speaking it (Woolf, 1998).

Etruscan, the language of a civilization with centuries of its own urban and religious development, died out as a spoken language during the first centuries of our era. Today, two millennia later, specialists still cannot translate with certainty a substantial portion of the surviving Etruscan texts, because the language that could have explained them disappeared along with its speakers.

What Rome gained from that uniformity was simpler administration and a shared imperial identity.

What it lost, without realizing it at the time, was irrecoverable: the agricultural systems, ritual calendars, and medical knowledge that the Italian and provincial cultures had accumulated over generations in their own languages, and that were never fully translated before their speakers ceased to exist as linguistic communities.

When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century, the linguistic uniformity that had been imposed over centuries did not prevent fragmentation into dozens of rival kingdoms; what it did prevent was Rome, or those who succeeded it, from being able to draw again upon the diverse knowledge that had existed before the conquest.

The wealth that had been homogenized never returned, not even to those who had absorbed it.

# 2. The Paradox: No One Destroys a Language in Order to Impoverish Themselves

No empire or state imposes one language over another with the ultimate goal of becoming poorer.

Every system of power acts toward what it believes to be its own benefit (Baumeister & Vohs, 2007): administrative control, political cohesion, internal security.

But current scientific evidence on biocultural diversity reveals something that no empire in history could have foreseen with the means available in its own era: every language that disappears takes with it, irreversibly, a body of knowledge that no other language can reconstruct in its entirety.

# # 2.1. What Is Lost Is Not Folklore: It Is Applied Knowledge

Cámara-Leret and Bascompte (2021), in a study published in *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, quantified something that until recently had been only an intuition: most traditional medical knowledge about plants — remedies, dosages, combinations developed through generations of empirical observation — exists documented in only one Indigenous language, without translation into any major language.

When that language becomes extinct, that specific medical knowledge becomes extinct with it, completely and without the possibility of recovery, even if the plant containing that knowledge still exists somewhere in a forest.

Maffi (2005), reviewing two decades of research on biocultural diversity, documented the same pattern on a larger scale: the regions of the planet with the greatest linguistic diversity systematically, and not coincidentally, overlap with those of greatest biodiversity, because Indigenous languages encode, in their vocabulary and grammar, generations of detailed ecological observation of the specific territory in which they are spoken.

Erasing the language is not merely erasing a way of speaking: it is erasing the archive in which that knowledge lived.

# # 2.2. Linguistic Imposition as a Form of Imperialism, and Its Long-Term Cost

Phillipson (1992), in his classic study of linguistic imperialism, documented how the imposition of a dominant language — historically English in the context he analyzed, although the mechanism applies to any language imposed through power — does not occur because of that language's intrinsic superiority, but because of the administrative, economic, and political convenience of those imposing it.

The problem is that this short-term convenience carries a cost that the empire or state imposing the language rarely calculates: the disconnection between central power and local knowledge that existed only in the suppressed language.

A colonial official who cannot read the crop-rotation systems encoded in an Indigenous language, or a modern state that cannot access accumulated knowledge about managing a specific ecosystem because the language that contained it was prohibited generations ago, is not governing with more information: it is governing with less, and it does not realize this until it needs that knowledge.

# # 2.3. The Empirical Bill: Historical Trauma and Its Measurable Social Cost

Brave Heart and DeBruyn (1998), documenting the impact of forced linguistic and cultural suppression in Indigenous communities of North America, described the concept of unresolved historical grief: trauma accumulated across generations when an entire community forcibly loses its language, territory, and ways of life, without that collective grief ever receiving recognized closure.

That trauma does not remain contained within the community that suffered it: as the same authors document, it translates into higher rates of su***de, addiction, and domestic violence that persist for generations after the original event.

And when these consequences occur within the borders of the same state that caused the harm, they become a social and economic cost that the state ultimately pays indefinitely, long after any administrative benefit of the original linguistic suppression has dissolved into history.

# 3. The Catalog of Forced Assimilation: Three Forms of the Same Error

**The European colonial empires (Spain, the United Kingdom, and France).**

The imposition of Spanish, English, or French upon hundreds of Indigenous languages in the Americas, Africa, and Asia sought total administrative control (Phillipson, 1992).

The cost of return, now documented by the science of biocultural conservation, is literal: Cámara-Leret and Bascompte (2021) show that much of the Indigenous medicinal knowledge concerning tropical plants — precisely in the regions that were most heavily colonized — was never translated into any European language before the original languages began to disappear.

Today, the global pharmaceutical industry invests fortunes in bioprospecting, attempting through trial and error to recover knowledge that once existed in precise, documented form in languages that colonization itself helped extinguish.

**The United States and Canada: the residential school system.**

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both countries prohibited the use of Native languages in compulsory residential schools, separating Indigenous children from their families for years with the stated objective of "civilizing" them.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015), in its final report, documented this policy as a form of cultural genocide and calculated thousands of child deaths within these institutions.

The cost of return, measured in the official figures of both governments, is twofold: on the one hand, billions of dollars now devoted to reparation, mental-health, and reconciliation programs; on the other, the historical trauma documented by Brave Heart and DeBruyn (1998), which continues to fuel public-health crises, addiction, and family disintegration in Indigenous communities generations after the residential schools closed.

No administrative savings generated by the original policy come remotely close to compensating for what both countries spend today attempting to repair its consequences.

**Imperial and modern China: unification under a single dominant language.**

Successive dynasties exerted pressure for centuries toward linguistic unification under varieties of Han Chinese, marginalizing the languages of border peoples — a process well documented in the history of imperial China, analogous in its logic to Romanization.

In the contemporary period, international human-rights organizations and United Nations committees have expressed concern about education and language-use policies affecting Tibetan, Uyghur, and Mongolian communities, while the Chinese government maintains that these measures respond to objectives of national cohesion, economic development, and security against separatism.

It is not the purpose of this article to arbitrate that dispute, which remains active and politicized.

What is consistent with the historical pattern examined here is that the social tension documented in these regions, together with the spending on internal security that a state devotes to maintaining a contested assimilation policy, are themselves measurable costs of return — regardless of how one politically evaluates the policy that generates them.

# 4. What a Living Civilization Does Differently: Listening Before Assimilating

Pointing out the problem without offering an alternative leaves the reader alone with the diagnosis.

The DASBIEN Theory of Life (Figueroa Cárdenas, 2010, 2025, 2026) offers a precise framework for understanding what is missing from a policy of forced assimilation, and what a state or civilization would need in order not to repeat the same mistake.

# # 4.1. The Triangle of Loving Applied to Language Policy

DASBIEN defines love as an interactional practice oriented toward the well-being of the other, through three moments: **subjetivar** (genuinely understanding what the community whose language one seeks to homogenize needs and knows, on its own terms), **intencionar** (acting in pursuit of its actual well-being, rather than merely the administrative convenience of those who govern), and **retroalimentar** (verifying whether the policy actually produced the good that was promised, and correcting it if it did not).

Every forced-assimilation policy discussed in this article completely omitted the first moment: no empire stopped to ask, before imposing its language, what agricultural, medical, or ecological knowledge would be lost with it.

That initial omission is precisely what guarantees that, centuries later, the lost knowledge cannot be recovered even when the very power that destroyed it would like to have it back.

# # 4.2. The Interaction Equilibrium Zone at the Civilizational Scale

The theory proposes the **Interaction Equilibrium Zone (ZIE)**: a relationship between cultures is healthy only if it strengthens both sides without destroying the diversity that connects them to their environment.

The ZIE question applied to any policy of linguistic unification has three dimensions:

* Does this decision genuinely strengthen the power imposing it, beyond the immediate administrative benefit?
* Does it strengthen the community whose language is being marginalized?
* Does the whole — the accumulated knowledge of both sides — emerge better or worse afterward?

None of the policies discussed in this article passes that test in its final balance.

And what they accumulate, in the terms of the theory itself, is **unrepaired entropy**: lost knowledge that no official apology, however sincere generations later, can restore.

# 5. Repair, When It Finally Arrives

Unlike other articles in this series, there is no need here to invent a hopeful ending: reparations, although late and incomplete, are already taking place in some of these cases.

Canada issued an official apology for the residential school system and now funds programs for the revitalization of Indigenous languages that it once prohibited by decree.

Various Latin American countries, heirs to Spanish colonization, have incorporated intercultural bilingual education as state policy, belatedly recognizing that the Indigenous languages marginalized by their own predecessors contain ecological knowledge that contemporary science needs in order to confront the biodiversity crisis (Maffi, 2005).

None of these reparations brings Etruscan back, nor does it resurrect languages that have already become completely extinct.

But each confirms the same lesson: the road back, although incomplete, always begins with what these policies omitted from the start — asking, before imposing, what is about to be lost.

# 6. Ten Questions for Any Language, Education, or Cultural Policy

1. **What knowledge — agricultural, medical, ecological — exists today only in a language that our policy is weakening?**

2. **Have we ever asked the community whose language we seek to homogenize what would be lost by doing so, or did we decide without consulting it?**

3. **Are we measuring the success of this policy by the administration it simplifies, or also by the knowledge it may be destroying?**

4. **What social cost — mental health, cohesion, conflict — are we already paying for an assimilation imposed generations ago, and are we still failing to fully acknowledge it?**

5. **Whom do we call "backward" or a "threat to unity" in order to justify a harm that we would not inflict upon a culture we respect as an equal?**

6. **What concrete repair do we owe — language revitalization, intercultural education, documentation of the knowledge that remains — and what costs us more: beginning it now or continuing to postpone it?**

7. **Is our language or cultural policy corrected through genuine feedback from affected communities, or is it merely announced and maintained regardless of what happens?**

8. **How much do we spend today on internal security or reparation programs for tensions that a past or present assimilation policy continues to generate?**

9. **Do we receive the knowledge that the diverse cultures within our borders could contribute, return it through policies that strengthen them, and protect their right to exist without conditions? Or have we closed all three channels?**

10. **If this language or culture were to disappear completely under our policy, what would we lose that we could never recover, and are we willing to accept that loss?**

# 7. Conclusion: What Does Not Return

The evidence converges on an uncomfortable warning for any power that has ever considered forced assimilation as a strategy: from Rome to the residential schools of North America, from European colonial imposition to any contemporary policy of linguistic unification, none of these decisions has left, in the final balance, those who imposed them richer than they were before.

Simplified administration and apparent cohesion may be gained; but agricultural, medical, and ecological knowledge that no other language can completely replace is lost irreversibly, and a social and economic cost is inherited generations later — one that far exceeds any original savings.

The responsibility here is also twofold.

The first is political: before homogenizing a language or culture, ask what specific knowledge would be lost, and calculate that cost with the same rigor used to calculate the administrative benefit.

The second is civilizational: understand that linguistic diversity is not an obstacle to the cohesion of a state but, according to all current scientific evidence concerning biodiversity and traditional knowledge, one of the most valuable reservoirs of knowledge available to that very state.

What is silenced by decree does not return by decree.

And history, with the same patience it applied to Rome, continues to collect that bill from whoever signs it.

# References

Baumeister, R. F., & Vohs, K. D. (2007). Self-regulation, ego depletion, and motivation. *Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 1*(1), 115–128. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00001.x

Brave Heart, M. Y. H., & DeBruyn, L. M. (1998). The American Indian holocaust: Healing historical unresolved grief. *American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research, 8*(2), 60–82. https://doi.org/10.5820/aian.0802.1998.60

Cámara-Leret, R., & Bascompte, J. (2021). Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118*(24), e2103683118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2103683118

Figueroa Cárdenas, A. K. (2010). *Das Bien*. Fondo Editorial de la UNMSM.

Figueroa Cárdenas, A. K. (2025). *DASBIEN Theory of Life*. Editorial Tecnologías Dasbien. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18103336

Figueroa Cárdenas, A. K. (2026). *DASBIEN Theory of Life, Part II*. Editorial Tecnologías Dasbien. https://zenodo.org/records/20278696

Maffi, L. (2005). Linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity. *Annual Review of Anthropology, 34*, 599–617. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.34.081804.120437

Phillipson, R. (1992). *Linguistic Imperialism*. Oxford University Press.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). *Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future: Summary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada*. Government of Canada.

Woolf, G. (1998). *Becoming Roman: The origins of provincial civilization in Gaul*. Cambridge University Press.
https://youtu.be/JGfTQo5gl-E

The language that does not return: how destroying another’s languag...

09/13/2026

# The Monster That Devours Its Creator: Why Technologies Invented to Destroy Others Always Turn Against Those Who Create Them

*Reflections on organizational malevolence: for companies, laboratories, engineers, armed forces, and every institution that puts something capable of causing harm into the world — harm always comes with two bills to pay*

# 1. The Sculptor Who Climbed Onto His Own Pyre

Around 570 BC, an Athenian artist named Perillus — Perilaos to the Greeks, Perillos to the Latins — traveled to Agrigentum, Sicily, carrying the work of his life: a solid, beautiful bronze bull of astonishing realism.

He offered it to Phalaris, the city's tyrant, as a gift. What Perillus did not reveal at first was what the bull actually was: a machine. It had a side door; a man could fit inside. Beneath it, there was room for a fire. The condemned man's vocal cords were channeled through tubes to the animal's mouth, so that the tortured man's screams sounded like the bellowing of a bull. The artist had solved the technical problem elegantly: how to kill someone with fire, solemnity, and music.

The tradition recorded by Diodorus Siculus tells us that Phalaris pretended to be delighted with the gift and told the sculptor what every tyrant says before using a new form of cruelty: show me. Climb inside first, imitate the victims' sounds, demonstrate your invention.

Confidently, Perillus climbed into the bronze belly. The door closed. The fire was lit. He did not die inside — Phalaris had him taken out while still half-alive and threw him from a cliff — but he died because of his invention, understanding something he had not understood in his workshop: the bull had no owner. Whoever builds an instrument of destruction builds, without intending to, his own end.

Two hundred years later, the city of Agrigentum rose against Phalaris, and tradition says that the tyrant ultimately burned inside his own bull. Two inventors of the same instrument, the same fate.

Pindar had already sung of it: Phalaris, "the one who burned men inside the bronze bull," was remembered everywhere "with hatred." The bull itself continued to exist: the Carthaginians carried it away, and Scipio returned it after the sack of Carthage. The machine outlived all its creators.

This reflection is written for companies, laboratories, engineers, boards of directors, procurement officers, ethics committees, and anyone working inside an organization that creates something capable of causing harm — which, let us be honest, is almost every organization, to a greater or lesser extent.

The question is the same as always, uncomfortable and simple: **Why do we believe that building technologies for destruction benefits us, when all the historical and psychological evidence says that harm always comes back, and that the longest bill is paid by the person or institution that originates it?**

# 2. The Paradox: No Organization Pursues Its Own Destruction

Observe any living being — and a human organization, factory, or army is nothing more than living beings organized together — and you arrive at the same conclusion: no one ultimately seeks their own harm.

Every institution acts toward its survival and prosperity (Baumeister & Vohs, 2007; Ryan & Deci, 2000). The laboratory that designs the gas, the factory that produces the explosive, the consortium that develops the weapon, does so in pursuit of something: security, prestige, contracts, victory, "defense." It believes that harm is the price and gain is the reward.

But the evidence accumulated by history and psychology shows that the equation is reversed: the benefit is brief, while the price is paid for decades, inside those who built the machine and inside the institutions that financed it.

# # 2.1. The Dissonance of the Gear: When No One Feels Responsible

Here we encounter the most dangerous mechanism of organizational malevolence, and Hannah Arendt gave it a name sixty years ago: the banality of evil.

Eichmann was not a monster with horns; he was an official who "followed orders," who took refuge in routine, who stopped seeing the people on the other side of his forms (Arendt, 1963).

Milgram (1974) demonstrated it in the laboratory: two-thirds of ordinary people continue administering painful "shocks" to a stranger when an authority figure orders them to do so and someone else assumes responsibility.

Kelman and Hamilton (1989) called them crimes of obedience: mass harm occurs when three conditions are present — authorization ("the state ordered it"), bureaucratization (the harm is divided into tasks so small that no one sees the body), and dehumanization of the victim.

And Bauman (1989), looking at the Holocaust, added the harshest lesson for any modern engineer: the distance between an action and its consequence is evil's greatest ally. The farther the victim is from the button, the easier it is to press it.

That is the heart of organizational dissonance (Festinger, 1957; Aronson, 1999). The physicist who calculates the trajectory does not drop the bomb; the chemist who stabilizes the formula does not open the valve; the manager who signs the contract never hears the scream.

Each link preserves an intact image of themselves as a "decent person" because their individual contribution appears small, abstract, and reversible.

But Aronson (1999) clarified something essential: dissonance does not hurt because of an inconsistency between ideas, but because it threatens the moral identity of the person acting.

And in organizations that manufacture destruction, that threat does not disappear through the division of labor: it accumulates.

Research shows that justifications — "I was only doing my job," "if I don't do it, someone else will," "it's for national defense" — calm the symptom while aggravating the disease, because the underlying conflict is never resolved: it becomes embedded (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 2019).

# # 2.2. The Moral Injury of the Person Who Builds

Litz and his colleagues (2009) coined a concept that fits the offices and laboratories of this essay almost too well: moral injury.

It is neither stress nor fear; it is the suffering that remains when a person commits, tolerates, or facilitates acts that violate their deepest values.

Shay (2014) adds the decisive point: moral injury degrades identity. The engineer no longer merely feels bad; they stop recognizing themselves.

Robert Jay Lifton (1967), after years of interviewing scientists from Los Alamos and survivors of Hiroshima, described what happened to many of the "fathers of the bomb": they became "soaked in death," trapped between the technical pride of having solved the most difficult problem in physics and the certainty that they had solved it wrongly.

The phrase Oppenheimer recalled thinking when he saw Trinity explode in July 1945 — "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," from the *Bhagavad Gita* — was not a literary pose; it was the sound of an identity splitting in two.

And here we encounter a particularly bitter mechanism: self-dehumanization.

Bastian, Jetten, and Haslam (2012) found that people who acknowledge the harm they have caused tend to see themselves as less human — less worthy, less warm, less valuable.

It is a psychological defense ("if I am less of a person, what I did weighs less"), but it carries a brutal cost: depression, anxiety, and deterioration of relationships (Bastian & Haslam, 2011).

The designer who can no longer explain to their child what they do for a living; the officer who stops answering family calls; the executive who dreams about the factory: all of them are paying the same internal bill, even if the quarterly report says otherwise.

Hypervigilance — watching who knows, what was leaked, what the press will say — is the chronic stress that McEwen (2007) documented as corrosive to sleep, immunity, and emotional balance.

Moral injury is paid in cortisol.

# # 2.3. The Empirical Bill: What Actually Happens to Those Who Build Destruction

The evidence is no longer anecdotal or merely psychological.

Those who participate in creating harmful technologies show, robustly, more depression, more anxiety, more perpetration-induced post-traumatic stress symptoms, and greater relational deterioration than those who do not (Gilbert et al., 2012; MacNair, 2002; Litz et al., 2009).

History adds its own records:

On the night of May 1, 1915, Fritz Haber — the chemist who had just directed the first chlorine gas cloud attack in history at Ypres, and who had just been promoted to captain for it — celebrated the "success" at his mansion in Berlin.

That same night, his wife, Clara Immerwahr, the first woman to earn a doctorate in chemistry in Germany, took her own life with her husband's army pistol in the garden of their home, while their thirteen-year-old son found her dying (Friedrich & Hoffmann, 2016).

Historiography warns that the reasons were complex and cannot be reduced to a single cause; but the coincidence is a symbol that no one can ignore: the gas bill arrived that same night, at the very table where victory was being celebrated.

Haber ended his days in exile from the N***s despite his patriotic service, knowing that Zyklon B, a pesticide developed at his own institute, was being used in gas chambers where people of his own blood were dying; his eldest son also died by su***de, in 1946.

The gas of Ypres did not only kill enemy soldiers: it killed the family of the man who helped create it.

The guillotine was proposed by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin as a "humane" and, above all, egalitarian method: death should hurt the noble and the poor equally.

His name became attached to the machine; his family, it is said, changed its surname.

During the Reign of Terror, approximately 16,600 people lost their heads on official scaffolds, and the machine designed to abolish medieval torture became the symbol of an age of mechanical death.

The N***s used it by the thousands, and France continued using it until 1977.

A machine designed to kill with compassion continued killing for 188 years, long after its original justification had evaporated.

Biological weapons obey the paradox even more strictly because they do not distinguish between uniforms.

Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army experimented on living prisoners at Pingfang and unleashed plagues on Chinese populations; the operations also infected Japanese troops themselves.

At the end of the war, its leaders obtained immunity from the United States in exchange for the data, so the architects of those deaths died in their beds, under changed names, carrying a wound that history continues to collect from them in the one court where there is no statute of limitations: memory (Harris, 2002).

In 1979, an accidental anthrax leak at Compound 19 in Sverdlovsk — a Soviet military laboratory — killed dozens of Soviet citizens living nearby: the first "victory" of the Soviet biological weapon was over its own people (Meselson et al., 1994).

Taken together, the evidence is clear: building technologies to cause harm is not a sustainable strategy of power or security; it is a usurious loan against oneself, whose bill never reveals its full amount on the day the contract is signed.

# 3. The Catalog of Shortcuts: Six Organizational Traps That Look Like Strategy

So that the argument does not remain abstract, it is worth examining the concrete ways in which technological harm disguises itself as engineering, patriotism, and business — and what it costs the person who carries it out.

# # 3.1. Torture Done Well

The Bull of Phalaris was not a technical mistake; it was a technical success in the service of an ethical mistake.

Perillus brilliantly solved the tyrant's problem: how to kill slowly, with spectacle, without getting one's hands dirty.

An organization that designs an "effective tool" for causing harm — the optimized interrogation, the surveillance algorithm, the design intended to generate addiction or dependence — makes the same mistake: it gives its client a power that the client will not be able to control.

Phalaris used the bull against Perillus; cities used the bull against Phalaris.

The instrument has no loyalty.

Every harmful technology built "to order" carries, in its invisible instruction manual, a warning: sooner or later, the order changes hands.

# # 3.2. The Gas That "Was Only Going to Be Used as a Deterrent"

The classic justification for every weapon: no one will use it because everyone will be afraid to use it.

Haber himself believed he was shortening the war.

But the chlorine gas at Ypres opened the door to a century of chemical weapons, mustard gas, and the weapons of mass destruction of the twentieth century, while the wind — an element no committee can plan — returned the gas to its own lines more than once.

The price was first paid by his family, then by his divided historical reputation: on one side, food for millions through the Haber-Bosch process; on the other, the "father of chemical warfare."

Every harmful technology has two résumés: the one presented in the procurement process and the one read on epitaphs.

# # 3.3. The Humanitarian Machine

The guillotine proves that even good intentions — ending torture — can feed the machinery of terror when the ethical question is disconnected.

Designing "death without pain" without asking who will decide who dies is like building a bridge without calculating what will cross it.

The engineers of the guillotine and their modern successors — designers of ex*****on systems, "non-lethal" weapons, and use-of-force protocols — share a technical blindness: they believe the tool is neutral because they themselves are neutral.

History demonstrates the opposite: the tool finds its users, and they are rarely the ones the designer imagined.

# # 3.4. The Bomb to End All Wars

Truman, in his private diary, wrote that the bomb was "the most terrible in history" and compared his decision with that of the admiral who did not want to use it.

Oppenheimer spent the rest of his life between prestige and expulsion.

Sixty-nine scientists from the Manhattan Project itself signed the Szilard petition asking that the bomb not be used without prior warning, and they were ignored.

Rotblat — as we will see in Section 5 — was the only one who left in time.

The result of "deterrence defense" was an arms race that produced tens of thousands of warheads, turning security into a permanent state of managed panic, while diverting resources that humanity never recovered.

Eisenhower, a victorious general and outgoing president, warned of this in his farewell address in 1961: the "military-industrial complex" was acquiring "an unwarranted influence" with "economic, political, even spiritual" consequences that threatened the democratic process.

The weapon created to defend freedom ended up establishing itself as a power no one had elected and no one could completely deactivate.

The monster, once again, took over the house.

# # 3.5. The Weapon That Distinguishes Neither Borders nor Uniforms

Biological weapons are organizational malevolence in its purest self-destructive form: their "effectiveness" depends on what cannot be controlled — air, water, mosquitoes, rats.

Sverdlovsk, 1979: the leak from the laboratory itself killed innocent Soviet neighbors (Meselson et al., 1994).

Landmines, more modest but far more numerous, continue to mutilate civilians — often children — decades after the armies that planted them have left, while their countries of origin bear the diplomatic, economic, and moral cost of something they can no longer collect.

Whoever releases an indiscriminate harmful agent into the world must understand that the world has no memory of who its architect was: it has only gravity.

# # 3.6. The Business of Fear

The sixth trap is the most modern: the organization that no longer manufactures weapons because of an enemy, but manufactures enemies in order to keep producing.

Eisenhower saw it in 1961: the "spiritual" weight of the military-industrial complex.

When institutional survival depends on the existence of a threat, the organization develops a sensor that learns to detect — and sometimes exaggerate — danger, and an alert system that rarely announces peace.

This requires no conspiracy: it is enough for thousands of honest people, each "doing their job," to add up incentives aligned in the same direction.

The most efficient form of organizational malevolence is the one no one ordered: it emerged from the distribution of dissonance among decent people.

In every case, the structure of the error is identical: a small immediate benefit, an enormous deferred cost, and the certainty that harm always returns to its source.

Harmful technology is not a strategy: it is a usurious loan against oneself, against one's own family, against one's own institution, and against the civilization that houses it.

# 4. What a Living Organization Does Differently: Love as an Institutional Operating System

Up to this point, the central argument has been that building in order to destroy is a bad psychological, ethical, and historical business for the person who does it.

But criticism without an exit produces cynicism, not change.

This is where the DASBIEN Theory of Life enters (Figueroa, 2010, 2025, 2026), not as decoration, but as an alternative operating system: a precise description of how genuine well-being works among people and institutions, and of why designed harm breaks that system down.

# # 4.1. The Triangle of Loving as Laboratory and Board Policy

DASBIEN Theory defines love as an interactional practice oriented toward the well-being of another, with three inseparable moments: **subjetivar** (genuinely knowing what is good for the other from their perspective), **intencionar** (deliberately acting to provide that good), and **retroalimentar** (checking with the other whether they actually received something good).

Omitting any of the three produces pseudo-love: the simulation of care that maintains the relationship while emptying it.

Seen this way, almost the entire industry of harm is institutional pseudo-love.

The organization that says "we protect" (declared intention) without **subjetivar** those who will be affected by its product — without imagining itself on the other side of the weapon, the gas chamber, or the mine — and without **retroalimentar** with those affected — without genuine mechanisms for listening to victims, communities, and its own employees — is running a simulation.

And like every simulation, it pays for it.

The operational translation is direct: a laboratory that institutionalizes the triangle — that truly understands the humans who will use and suffer from its technology, that directs its design toward actual well-being rather than the contract, and that verifies afterward through data and human faces whether its creation has left the world better — simply does not create the conditions in which the Bull of Phalaris and the gas of Ypres could have been born.

Perillus did not **subjetivar**: he did not imagine himself inside the bull.

Any ethics committee that does not include the question "Would we climb inside this ourselves?" is merely decorating the office.

# # 4.2. The Three Senses of Love: Why the Honest Institution Is Also the Strong Institution

The model also includes the Three Senses of Love: receiving love from others, giving love to our own being, and giving love to other beings.

Institutional life flows through these three channels, and the shortcut blocks all of them.

The harmful organization often begins with one wounded channel — "no one took care of us when we were competing for the contract," "that's just how the market works" — and ends up blocking the other two: it learns to despise its own profession (it stops giving love to its institutional self, which is its reputation and the pride of its sons and daughters) and to exploit users and communities (it stops giving them love).

The result is a company with all three taps turned off, wondering why its best engineers resign, why no one wants to inherit the business, and why its children study law so they will never have to set foot in the factory.

Those who work in an organization that **subjetiva, intenciona, and retroalimenta** — one that can explain to its family, at the lunch table, what it does and why — are simultaneously receiving, giving to themselves, and giving to others.

That complete circuit is the true institutional capital, and no military contract can reproduce it.

# # 4.3. The Interaction Equilibrium Zone and Unrepaired Entropy

The theory also proposes the **Interaction Equilibrium Zone (ZIE)**: a relationship is healthy only if it improves both parties and does not destroy the shared environment.

The ZIE question for any technology has three dimensions:

* Does my organization come out better?
* Do the humans who use it and those who suffer from it flourish?
* Does the ecosystem — society, peace, the planet — improve, or at least avoid deterioration?

Weapons, torture, and technological deception violate all three dimensions simultaneously, and what accumulates in those who practice them has a name in the theory: **unrepaired entropy** — harm that has not been transformed into better repair.

The final warning is serious: a system with sensors, alerts, and structures in place but without learning in any of them is not alive; it is a co**se that is still moving.

Organizations that manufactured destruction and never repaired it — those that did not compensate, clear mines, decontaminate, or confess — carry that entropy across generations: the lawsuits, the memory, the children who change their surnames, the engineers who cannot sleep.

Specific acts of repair — removing the mine, decontaminating the river, compensating victims, opening the archives — are not expenses: they are the mechanism through which an institution converts entropy into learning and remains alive.

# 5. Another Story, to Finish Convincing Us

Joseph Rotblat was thirty-five years old when he worked at Los Alamos, within the Manhattan Project.

He had left his family behind in Poland, where they would die in the camps; he had entered nuclear physics while fleeing the N***s, and he was working on the bomb precisely so that Hi**er would not have it first.

By any standard, he was a justified man.

But in March 1944, at a dinner, he heard General Groves, the project's military director, say that the weapon's true purpose was to subjugate the Soviet Union.

And by the end of that year, it had become clear that Germany had abandoned its nuclear program: the entire justification — "to prevent the N***s from having it" — had evaporated.

Rotblat asked to leave.

He was the only scientist to leave the project for moral reasons.

Intelligence services suspected him of being a spy; a trunk containing his papers disappeared during the journey home.

He paid a price.

The rest of his life was devoted to repair.

He changed fields, moving into nuclear medicine.

In 1955, he signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto — "remember your humanity" — and in 1957 he founded the Pugwash Conferences, where scientists from enemy blocs sat down to talk during the Cold War when their governments would not.

In 1995, half a century after Hiroshima, Rotblat and Pugwash received the Nobel Peace Prize.

In his speech in Oslo, he neither celebrated technology nor condemned it: he reminded us that science is a means, that ethics is the end, and that "above all, we must remember our humanity."

He died in 2005, at the age of ninety-six, having gained something that none of his Los Alamos colleagues fully gained: the ability to look into the mirror.

His story, and Perillus's, are the same story at two different points in time: **the machine you build to destroy defines, before it defines your enemy, what it turns you into by building it.**

Perillus understood it inside the bronze belly; Rotblat understood it in time to climb out.

Between these two extremes live most of us: organizations and people who did not decide to create the monster, but who decide, every morning, whether to keep feeding it.

# 6. Ten Questions for the Next Board, Laboratory, or Family Meeting

1. **What are we building that we could not explain in detail, with pride, to our children or to the community that grants us our social license to operate?**

2. **Who subjetiva in this organization?** Is there a real mechanism — not a symbolic one — through which the people affected by our product have a voice before it is designed, rather than after it is buried?

3. **If our technology fell tomorrow into the hands of our worst enemy** — as the bull fell into the hands of Perillus's enemy — would we be proud of the design? Would we be the first users?

4. **How much distance is there between the button and the victim in our production chain?** What would Bauman make of our organizational chart? Who, in this company, sees the body?

5. **What moral injury are we silently managing?** How many of our best engineers have resigned "for personal reasons" that no one recorded?

6. **What concrete repair do we owe:** demining, decontamination, compensation, open archives, public apology? What costs us more: doing it, or continuing to carry it as entropy?

7. **Does our "sensor" — ethics, compliance, review committee — have real veto power, or is it decoration?** Has it ever stopped a profitable project?

8. **Do we celebrate hardness as efficiency?** Whom are we promoting for "not getting sentimental" when the decision was precisely sentimental: these were human beings?

9. **Do the Three Senses of Love flow through this institution:** do we receive trust from our teams, do we love ourselves as an organization, and do we provide real well-being to the world? Or do we have all three taps closed and wonder why we are thirsty?

10. **If this organization disappeared fifty years from now, what would history say:** a place that built peace, or a factory of bronze bulls that no one remembers with gratitude?

Seven or more honest answers: the organization is alive, and the shortcut finds little ground.

Fewer than four: some monster is already living in the workshop, and its creator is already paying.

# 7. Conclusion: The Worst Business Deal in Technical History

Everything the evidence shows — from Diodorus Siculus to Arendt, from Festinger to Litz, from Haber to Rotblat, from the paradox of malevolence to DASBIEN Theory — converges on a single statement, and it should be engraved on the first page of the manual of any organization that manufactures anything:

**creating technologies for destruction is the worst business humanity has ever invented.**

Reputation is exchanged for contracts that do not compensate; sleep for permanent surveillance; pride in one's craft for a second name that one's family wants to forget.

The person who designs the bull, the gas, the guillotine, or the warhead does not gain what they believe they are gaining; they advance what they will later have to pay with interest, in victims who return, in stories that do not die, in the eyes of their own children.

And the technical world has a dual responsibility here.

The first is professional: to demonstrate through every design that the ethical question is not a brake but the only calculation that never gets the wrong customer — because the customer of every technology is, sooner or later, all of humanity, including its manufacturer.

The second is civilizational: to teach — from the classroom, from the laboratory, from the boardroom — that Frankenstein's monster is not a Gothic fantasy but the most accurate portrait ever made of innovation without love: something that rises from its creator's table and turns against him, against his family, against his city, against his century.

Rotblat, in his nineties, summarized half a century of repair in a sentence that now closes this reflection:

*"Above all, remember your humanity."*

The paradox of malevolence explains the mechanism: harm to others interrupts the processes that sustain one's own well-being, and at the organizational scale that interruption becomes inheritance, entropy, and ruin.

DASBIEN Theory completes the map: the alternative is not the renunciation of technical power but the craft of love — **subjetivar** those who will be affected by our work, **intencionar** their well-being, and **retroalimentar** with those affected — which is, literally, the only way to build technology that does not have to be paid for with one's own destruction.

An organization that understands both things will not merely have fewer monsters in its workshops.

It will be, in the most rigorous sense of the word, a living institution: one that turns every invention into a complete circuit of giving and receiving, and every error into repair that leaves it, machine by machine, more whole.

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“The Monster That Devours Its Creator” analyzes the paradox of orga...