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The geeks I know aren't in the -ism game: you'd be hard pressed to find an -ist among them. And this is as it should be, in my opinion. -Ism is the tail of the dragon whose head is fundamentalism, and that goes for science and any other so-called "godless" belief systems.

Geeks know that putting your feet into the concrete of a bipolar dichotomy just leaves you stuck there, without perspective. They know that the system needs zero as well as it needs one; that your heart does its best work with both ventricles; that two lungs make for better breathing.

So geeks tend to retreat from position-taking, as in, "I am against God and His adherents," or "I know that there is no such thing as God."

In fact, geeks tend to sense the invisible consciousness in the most dead-looking things. Their hardware, for instance: a geek I know very well, a CMU graduate with an IQ of about 150, once told me about the time he bought an IBM Thinkpad and brought it home, set it up beside his old Dell desktop, and fired it up. Within hours, the desktop box started malfunctioning for no apparent reason. My friend concluded that it was offended and made jealous by the appearance of the Thinkpad, and so he left the IBM machine in another room and didn't let them mix anymore.

As he summed it up, "I swear these things have souls."

Learn more about this author, Brian Donohue.
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