The Age of the Unthinkable

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I just finished reading a book entitled, The Age of the Unthinkable – Why The New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It by Joshua Cooper Ramo. (Copyright © 2009 by Joshua Cooper Ramo – Little, Brown and Company New York, NY). As I read this book, I keep recalling how pertinent some of the authors remarks are regarding the discussions we are having in my community, and in this country.

I distinctly enjoyed this book and look for more insightful, stimulating works from Ramo. I would recommend this work to you.

Ramo is Managing Director at Kissinger & Associates, former Foreign Editor and Assistant Managing Editor of Time magazine etc. etc. – degreed from University of Chicago and NYU. Consider the following:

“We are entering, in short, a revolutionary age. And we are doing so with ideas, leaders and institutions that are better suited for a world now several centuries behind us. On the one hand, this revolution is creating unprecedented disruption and dislocation. But it is also creating new fortunes, new power, fresh hope and a new global order. Revolutions after all don’t produce only losers — they produce a whole new cast of historical champions.” P. 8.

“We’ve left our future, in other words, largely in the hands of people whose single greatest characteristic is that they are bewildered by the present.” P. 9.

“The main argument of this 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 (People at revolutions who don’t act that way have a particular name: victims). P. 11

…(paraphrasing here….) Elites who are descendants of the former era engaged in public policy making make poor revolutionaries. In the present era, the most dynamic forces in society come from outside elite circles, from geeks, who might have been thought of in the past as outsiders or losers — to exclude these folks is an error of catastrophic proportions.” P. 37

“In a revolutionary age, our architects tools are deadly. It’s time for us to put them down and follow the injunction to live and think as gardeners.” P. 40.

“When we find that we have reached the end of the bookshelf, then it’s time to write new books.” P. 46

“Systems might look good for a while, but when they are hit with the unexpected, they react in ways that doom them. They simply can’t shed their wrong ideas fast enough. Sound familiar?” p. 61.

…(paraphrasing here….) “The explanation for this shared “wrong view” — a delusion,  really — was social rather than factual. People agreed because they wanted to be part of the community more than they wanted to be right: a set of shared, wrong ideas clung to loyally by people who couldn’t quite see past their illusions or the imagination-killing need to agree and fit in.” p. 62

“Once barriers — which consist in a sense only in man’s ignorance of the possible — are torn down, they are not easily set up again.” P. 96

Read this book

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