The Age of the Unthinkable

I recently listened to the May 11, 2009 Charlie Rose interview with Joshua Cooper Ramo on his book The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It.

His main themes were:
• We have to look at the world differently
• Focus on Resilience, instead of deterrence
• Not always be direct in our negotiations, look at indirect negotiations
• Learn to give away power




The book include a number of excellent thought provoking ideas that one can use in their personal life, at work, in our respective countries and larger world.

I grouped them as ideas for upcoming Aikido classes as:

What is it
"The main argument of the book is not particularly complicated: it is that in a revolutionary era of surprise and innovation, you need to learn to think and act like a revolutionary." (pg. 11)

"...we need policy makers and thinkers who have that intuitive revolutionary feel for the inescapable demands of innovation. We need early adopters, men and women who touch newness and change as an almost totemic reminder of what is possible in the human spirit and who are honest about the fights and struggles that lie ahead." (pg. 37)

Responsibility
[George Kennan] said "Today you cannot even do good unless you are prepared to exert your share of power, take your share of responsibility, make your share of mistakes, and assume your share of risks." (pg. 19)

"There was something profound and amazing in the dynamics of the piles (of sand), he thought: their ability not only to translate order into chaos, but also to translate chaos into order." (pg. 54)

Current state
"The main lesson is that just because something is too terrible to contemplate doesn't mean it's not going to happen." (pg. 56)

[Lawrence Summers], head of the National Economic Council said, "adopt a probabilistic view of the world and discard the black-and-white models that make for success in academia." (pg. 34)

Next steps
"It is senseless to aspire to periods of 'peace on earth' during the lifetime of anyone reading this book unless we begin to change how, where, and why we do fight. Threats to our physical security are complex, new, and growing. They demand nothing less than a complete reinvention of our ideas of security" (pg. 99)

[Aharon Farkash], former head of Israeli military intelligence said "look deep, focus on things that move and change, never ask the usual questions." (pg. 144)

“Deep security doesn’t answer all of our questions about the future. Indeed, it’s predicated on the idea that we don’t have all the answers and, in fact, can’t even anticipate many of the questions. What it is instead is a way of seeing, of thinking, and of acting that accepts growing complexity and ceaseless newness as givens–and, used properly, our best allies." (pg. 108)

“Perhaps the best way to think of deep security is as a kind of immune system, a reactive instinct for identifying dangers, adapting to deal with them, and then moving to control and contain the risk they present." (pg. 109)

“Learning to think in deep-security terms means largely abandoning our idea that we can deter the threats we face and, instead, pressing to make our societies more resilient so we can absorb whatever strikes us. Resilience will be the defining concept of twenty-first century security, as crucial for your fast-changing job as it is for the nation. We can think of resilience as a measure of how much disturbance a system can absorb before it breaks down so fundamentally that it can’t easily return to the way it once was." (pg. 172)

“Resilience allows us, even at our most extreme moments of terror (in fact, precisely because we are at such a moment), to keep learning, to change. It is a kind of battlefield courage, the ability to innovate under fire because we’ve prepared in the right way and because we’ve developed the strength to keep moving even when we’re slapped by the unexpected.” (pg. 178)

“Construction of a resilient society need not be complex. The aim is simple enough: to withstand the surprises that await us; to absorb the worst nightmares and walk away with the core attributes of our freedom intact.” (pg. 190)

“Resilience isn’t a just a passive virtue, it’s also something we have to be able to incorporate into the way we act in the world, whether it is regulating financial markets that change faster than we can think or, as we’ve often done in the Middle East, stepping into unstable landscapes of ethnic and religious fury.” (pg. 192)

“Among the elements common to successfully resilient systems was an ability to constantly reconceptualize problems, to generate a diversity of ideas, to communicate with everyone from fisherman to truckers, and to encourage novelty and even small-scale revolts or crises and recoveries instead of waiting for a big, unanticipated collapse.” (pg. 197)

Peace
“What Jean Monnet, one of the most masterful strategists of the last century, wrote in 1951 is true today: ‘World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it.’” (pg. 240)

“We owe everything to human creativity. Everything that lasts, that changes our lives, that emerges from what was once unimaginable has its roots in that initial spark of innovation.” (pg. 240)

“I want to propose [is] that we focus our attention also on the very smallest parts of the system, on people, and bet that the one thing we know for sure is that we can’t predict what they’ll do. In other words, the last step to deep security in a world of unthinkable granular surprise is to push-as hard as possible-for even more unthinkable granular surprise.” (pgs. 242-243)

“As Niels Bohr remarked in later life, ‘Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.’ Conformity to old ideas is lethal; it is a rebellion that is going to change the planet.” (pg. 262)