Neal Stephenson: belief

Transcript context

…How many spies do you think psychologically are just totally screwed up? Are all of them screwed up? Or can you be a normal spy the way you might be a normal grocer? I suspect that it begins to screw you up over time. You might go in normal, but it takes a big psychological toll to be trying to maintain multiple identities and always worrying about divulging information. It’s just not a natural way for people to live. From what I can tell, looking at espionage in the era of, say, the Second World War, the best spies were completely unexceptional people. That’s probably still true today. You don’t want James Bond. You don’t want the femme fatale kind of character who’s going to stand out. You want somebody who just disappears into the background. That’s the kind of people that they like to recruit. You want psychological compartmentalization? People who suppress emotions?…

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