Image by Michael Dziedzic.

On March 9, 1970, editors of The Intercontinental Press, Joseph Hansen, Pierre Frank, Livio Maitan, Ernest Mandel, and George Novack wrote an article called, “In a World Run by Idiots Can Man Survive?” The Intercontinental Press specialized in political analysis, labor rights, socialism, postcolonial independence, and black liberation. In the article, the authors referenced well to do biologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, a Hungarian-Jewish biochemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1937 for isolating and discovering vitamin C. After he won the award, he donated all the prize money to Finland to ward off Russia’s 1939 aggression. Szent-Gyorgyi joined the Hungarian resistance movement during the second world war and later became an unyielding opponent to the Vietnam War. War disgusted Szent-Gyorgyi so much in fact that in WWI he intentionally shot himself in the arm to end his tour of duty according to journalist Chris Gaylord of the Christian Science Monitor.

By 1970, Szent-Gyorgyi was filled with pessimism. He remarked after writing his 1970 book, The Crazy Ape, in a conversation with Robert Reinhold in the New York Times that humankind’s days were numbered. “Man is a very strange animal,” he stated. “In much of the world half the children go to bed hungry and we spend a trillion on rubbish ­— steel, iron, tanks. We are all criminals.” IP also included his explanation of the “terrible strain of idiots who govern the world,” leading to ultimate doom. Szent-Gyorgyi made clear that “the force of our arm was exchanged for forces of the atom…which course will man take, toward a bright future or toward exterminating himself?” He emphasized that not all hope was lost and that younger generations (“the human brain freezes up for new ideas by age 40”) would need to survive and engage in new beginnings for civilization to continue. On top of that, Szent-Gyorgyi remarked that “American society is death oriented.” This marked a moment in history when people interested in science, economics and politics regularly joined together in the resistance of state violence and the horrors of fascism and war.

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