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Deleted ScenesDeleted Scene #18Chapter Five: The New Ordering PrincipleSection: The Rise of System PerturbationsCommentary: This eighteenth "deleted scene" was my first swing at defining a System Perturbation. It would have gone at the bottom of page 261, right after the paragraph ending with "…one man with a vision-Osama bin Laden" and before the paragraph beginning "For a System Perturbation to be triggered …." This was really my attempt to utilize the imagery from the slide I use to make my graphical explanation of a System Perturbation in the brief (see below). In the end, it made sense to cut this bit because it simply complicates the better explanation and definitions that follow.
Deleted Scene: 9/11 as a Combo of Vertical Shock and Horizontal Waves[TEXT BEGINS] By the summer of 2003, less than two years after 9/11, the United States had 150,000 troops in Iraq, trying to jump-start a "transformation" of the Middle East. None of that happens without a strategy of preemption, and that strategy was generated by the System Perturbation known as 9/11. You want to know how this strategic concept affects your lives? It defines the context within which war and peace will be waged across the 21st century. That is how it matters to average Americans. How do I go about describing that model? I employ the two scenarios types I described earlier, and here is where you see why distinguishing between vertical and horizontal scenarios is not just interesting, but incredibly useful. A System Perturbation begins with a vertical shock followed by any number of horizontal scenarios, or tails. The metaphor most people like to use here is that of a person dropping a large stone into a still pond. The agent here is not as important as the trigger, but the two are often linked by motivation, though not necessarily. Al Qaeda clearly sought to trigger a vertical shock on 9/11 whose horizontal waves would extend far beyond downtown Manhattan or the Pentagon's vast parking lots, but in the case of the SARS epidemic, one infected doctor walked into a Hong Kong hotel and unwittingly triggered a host of horizontal scenarios involving the Chinese political leadership, the city of Toronto, the airline industry, and the World Health Organization -- to name just a few.1 The big thing about the vertical shock is that it needs to destroy conventional wisdom and complacency, not necessarily result in a lot of death and destruction. In other words, the world cannot respond to the shock in an incremental fashion. Bold steps are required. Global warming is not a System Perturbation -- yet. It is not because, so far, humanity can respond to its changes in an incremental fashion. If a massive global heat wave kills 30 million people next year, then global warming becomes a System Perturbation. It needs some aspect of overwhelming shock to it. It needs some modicum of perversity. People simply have to be driven to the point of saying, "Damn it, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" The world has to reach that Howard Beale-moment in Network, which happened to the city of Toronto when the World Health Organization issued a travel warning against going there during the SARS peak.2 [1] Donald G. McNeil, Jr. and Lawrence K. Altman, "How One Person Can Fuel an Epidemic," The New York Times¸ 15 April 2003. [2] Clifford Krauss, "Canada Increases Pressure on World Health Organization to Life Travel Advisory," The New York Times, 26 April 2003. [TEXT ENDS] |
Putnam, 2004 |
