[...] Going at least as far back as Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl ad, which conjured the Macintosh computer as a revolutionary device, insurrectionary rhetoric has always been bruited alongside Silicon Valley’s reigning neoliberal credo of maximum return on investment. The relevant difference here is that, instead of staging a real revolution, the insurgent rebels of the Valley scene reject authority by innovating the old guard out of existence and becoming authorities themselves. There’s no risk in assuming the mantle of rebellion when it’s just another word for “disruption”—when you are, in other words, a rich white man in the tech industry.

For Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA rented safe houses—referred to by White as “pads”—in New York and San Francisco. The more infamous of the two, the San Francisco safe house, was decorated with, as Marks wrote, “items that gave the place the air of the brothel it was to become: Toulouse-Lautrec posters, a picture of a French cancan dancer, and photos of manacled women in black stockings.” Microphones were planted in the bedroom and an observation mirror was built into the wall. With Gottlieb’s blessing, White concocted the following plan: he would recruit sex workers to bring clients to the safe house, where they would give their clients LSD-laced drinks, and White would observe the effects of those drinks on clients. In return, he gave the women “chits,” each good for one favor. The next time a woman was arrested, she could give the officer White’s number to call and she’d be bailed out.

[...] Now LSD has joined the ranks of green tea, Adderall, and various over-the-counter supplements as a mind- and life-enhancer. It has been integrated into a performance-obsessed culture that demands everything be done better and faster than it was before. The suburban kid cramming for his SATs, the startup employee faced with a weekend of coding, the wealthy stay-at-home mom managing three kids—these striving souls all want to be better, and all have the resources to achieve betterness. The tripping hippie and the venture capitalist are both trying to be better, too: one’s just sifting through time and the other’s sifting through investment proposals. The impact on America? Another rung of inaccessibility separating the commoners from the blissed-out bourgeoisie.

Over at the United Nations, whose member organization UNAIDS recently lost its deputy executive director Luiz Loures amid allegations that he sexually assaulted a female colleague, there is a similar official minuet of remorse and remonstration. Indeed, Newsweek reported in August that eight male complainants alleged that UN official Ravi Karkara sexually harassed them on the job. The quasi-Orwellian twist here is that Karkara heads up the agency’s iniitiative for the global empowerment of women—against, say, things like sexual harassment. Weary observers of the Western aid scandals can by now fill in the blanks themselves: promises to investigate, earnest assurances of better vetting to come, a pledge to bolster protocols of internal reporting, and similar refrains of collective reassurance ring through tense hallways frequented by grim-faced aid bureaucrats.

Like the organizations themselves, the recommendations for reform are thick with jargon, and billowing with vague talk of improved bureaucratic vigilance and executive transparency. All this will be carried out at great expense, and after a great passage of time—the sum of it all designed to drag out the underlying allegations until they’ve mostly been forgotten.

In this respect, aid work parallels the culture of abuse that has taken root within the private-sector world of military contracting, which also operates in a netherzone of blurry-at-best jurisdictional authority and agency oversight. And it’s long been true that the personality profile of swashbuckling Western male aid workers uncomfortably echoes that of their counterparts in the demimonde of global private soldiering—both kinds of aspiring Western savior figures share an unswerving faith in their own personal heroism and the superior virtue of their mission, while regarding the legal protocols of accountability in their host countries with a certain studied contempt.

the increasingly macho culture of global aid as it continues to blur indistinguishably into the arrant nation-building worldview that undergirds global humanitarianism and military intervention

Humanitarian aid workers are indeed deployed as the charitable equivalent of diplomatic “honest brokers.” Their broader social function is to connect those who look at catastrophe from the comfortable distance of the West and those everywhere else who must actually live amid its aftermath. The trucks full of food, tents, and medical supplies are evidence that the blessed of the world are “doing something.” In sending aid, Western governments and their citizens can feel a bit less embarrassed about their wealth and good fortune and assure themselves that they are indeed, still and forever, the “good guys.”

such behavior carries none of the opprobrium or disciplinary risk in an aid setting that would be the case in other workplaces back home

the stolid enablers who shelter rapists and provide cover to sexual abusers