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Deleted ScenesDeleted Scene #17Chapter Five: The New Ordering PrincipleSection: The Rise of System PerturbationsCommentary: This seventeenth "deleted scene" was my attempt to state that I felt 9/11 served as an "existence proof" for the System Perturbation concept, which is how Art Cebrowski likes to describe it. I also inserted in this sequence the bit about how various sectors of the society recover at varying speeds from a System Perturbation, which I think is an essential truth regarding disaster recovery in general. Mark Warren apparently cut these paragraphs for pacing, believing they took up too much time without scoring a bit enough point. Deleted Scene: 9/11 As An Existence Proof of System Perturbations[TEXT BEGINS] Now, when I first went around the Pentagon giving my take on 9/11 as an "existence proof" of the concept of System Perturbations, most audiences were polite but perplexed. "Interesting, but what do I do with it?" was the common response. They would say, "I agree with everything you're saying, but what really changes because of this new understanding?" At first, I did not have a good answer, other than, "I think it will change the way we think about wars in the future; I think we'll have to understand better how the ways in which we fight wars occurs within the context of everything else going on." What I was really reaching for in my fumbling, vague responses was a way of saying: System Perturbations put crucial rule sets in flux. Eventually, all these rule sets settle down and become clear to people largely because new rules are put in place to deal with the gaps in coverage revealed by the perturbation's trigger, or the event that set the whole shebang in motion. Social rule sets will recover most quickly, because people have tremendous skills in rationalizing and putting bad events out of their minds, moving toward happier futures. So individuals will update their wills, buy a back-up power generator or new cell phone, and society in general recovers in a matter of weeks. Economics takes longer, probably months, but eventually things shake out as the markets get a grip on what the new rules seem to be, and risk calculators, like the insurance industry, come up with new models and algorithms to account for the new dangers and behaviors. Politics will recover next most quickly, probably within a year or so, because big bills will be passed to correct the "mistakes" of the past, and then it on to the basic experience of implementing new laws, learning from mistakes, and having the court system fine tune them over time. {the text would have continued on page 260 with a new paragraph beginning "But it is in the security realm where the adjustment will be the hardest and take the longest . . ."} [TEXT ENDS] |
Putnam, 2004 |
