(March 2, 2026)

“Don’t delegate conscience,” Daniel Ellsberg wrote.

“Most people conform and accept,” he noted. “A minority protest, withdraw. A tiny minority resist, take risks.”

“The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly,” Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.

He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who’d been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the US war machine. He’d been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.

“After I released the papers,” he vividly remembered, “some people were afraid to write to me . . . to shake hands with me . . . to receive a phone call from me.” Three years later, his takeaway was: “Accept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity.”