Rapid change is destabilizing. When people experience rapid change, they tend to have anxiety. When the anxiety is powerful enough, it increases the sense of dislocation and impairs the person's ability to cope adequately with the changes in his environment. If the anxiety enters into a positive feedback with the change, the anxiety becomes traumatic; at that point the individual shuts down (dissociates) and loses their ability to effect the situation. Traumatic anxiety is paralyzing. This is as true on large scales as it is true on the level of the individual. We can see how this plays out in our own politics and policies.
[To differentiate adaptive "signal anxiety" from maladaptive anxiety and "traumatic anxiety" consider typical test anxiety. A person with signal anxiety uses their anxiety about doing well to study, perhaps more than is necessary to master the material; generally this leads to a good result on the test. The person with maladaptive anxiety does not use the anxiety to motivate their studying; instead their anxiety, because it reaches the threshold to trigger the "fight or flight" response, makes their studying less efficient; when the test arrives, the first difficult question may increase their anxiety, which makes it more difficult to retrieve the information necessary for the next question. This can increase their anxiety further, and in short order, the person performs much worse than would be expected. In the worst case scenario, the escalating anxiety becomes traumatic and th person freezes, unable to think or retrieve information; failure ensues. Mild "signal anxiety" is adaptive and beneficial; it is not clear that our society has been able to mobilize the necessary anxiety to deal with current problems which leaves us prone to maladaptive and traumatic anxiety when our defenses are breached.]
In the face of the rapidly changing international landscape, there are many, more on the left than the right, who want nothing more than to retreat from the world into neo-isolationism (flight). Others propose we fight more vigorously and expand the war, even when it is unclear that such a response would be helpful and possibly threaten our longer term goals. A third group, comprised of people who understand the need to remain engaged in the world, seem stuck in debilitating passivity. It is left to a small band of intrepid people, especially in the US military, to attempt to bring order out of chaotic change in Iraq and th greater Middle East. The outcome is very much in doubt and depends in no small measure on circumstances beyond our control, a prescription for yet further increases in anxiety.
Part of the problem, as described by John Robb, proprietor of Global Guerrillas, is that our Nation (perhaps Western Civilization itself) is fighting a 3rd generation war (3GW) against foes who are fighting a 4GW against us. In his thought provoking and dark book, Brave New War, John Robb describes 3GW in terms familiar to most:
(p. 22) Blitzkrieg (World War II). The objective: to take down an enemy army and state through maneuver; deep penetration, and disruption. Its roots: late World War I infiltration tactics.
In contrast, 4GW involves smaller, empowered groups and individuals, non-state actors, who practice system disruption against modern states, with the aim of weakening their will and emerging victorious:
(p. 26) Unlike conventional wars of the first three generations, guerrilla wars are primarily moral conflicts. Because the armies of each side typically never meet on the battlefield, there aren't any pivotal moments that decide the war. Under these circumstances, the side that best withstands the conflict's casualties and disruptions is the winner. The key is maintaining moral cohesion.
To get better at destroying the moral cohesion of the enemy, guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency have improved. The bulk of improvement has been on the side of the guerrillas, however.
He goes on, in a very readable and manageable book, to describe how the insurgents and terrorists have refined and improved their ability to disrupt complex systems and how poorly we have been able to defend against them and bring our offensive capabilities to bear against them.
Brave New War presents the case for the worst case scenario arising from the increased empowerment of the individual and increasing connectivity that are the hallmarks of the modern world. 4GW is a form of Jujitsu in which our strengths are used against us. 9/11 was the quintessential example of such an approach. An attack costing on the order of $500,000, using our own technology, delivered a return on the order of $500,000,000,000 in damage to our economy. The message conveyed was that there is no way to completely assure the security of the myriad vulnerable points in our complex society against catastrophic failure (ie successful attack). The message of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the subsequent spread of al Qaeda affiliates and philosophical allies, is that there is no way to complete eradicate such a menace using conventional means.
There is yet one more aspect of the type of disruption that John Robb writes so clearly about, that is implicit in the book and on his Blog. That is, the increased complexity of modern society has increased our mutual dependence on each other. We are all now quite literally "dependent on the kindness of strangers."
I have described elsewhere how dependency induces hostility and insecurity. In our modern society, none of us can survive for long independent of our neighbors. Most of us deal with such a reality by quite literally not thinking about it. Yet the Global Guerrillas John Robb describes are thinking long and hard about it.
In 1965, and again in 2003, the Northeast power grid failed and the entire Northeastern United States and large parts of Canada were plunged into darkness. In both cases, power was restored within 12-24 hours to most people. If a future black-out, perhaps engineered by our enemies, were to persist for 72 hours or more, most people would probably be able to muddle through, although the vast majority would be running low on necessary provisions by the end; a black out that lasted longer could seriously threaten to unravel the threads of civilization. The black-outs of 1965 and 2003 created some anxiety but it is unclear if they created enough signal anxiety to propel changes in the system necessary to ensure that the conditions conducive to a greater catastrophe no longer exist.
The 2003 black-out, with rumors of al Qaeda involvement, the Anthrax attacks of 2001, the beltway snipers, the sudden Jihad syndrome outbreaks at random intervals, etc, all illustrate ways in which our imagined safety, which has been the norm throughout the narcissistic age since Vietnam, is being chipped away by the anxiety of disruption.
A return to a subsistence existence, close to the 7th century world al Qaeda and some radical environmentalists hold out as their goal, would involve the death of some substantial percentage of the world's population. While this does not appear to be a genuine threat, some degree of devolution is not only possible but inevitable in John Robb's estimation.
Note the subtitle of Brave New World: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization.
His book is a fascinating look at the near term with some reason for optimism in the medium term. I am not going to refute his thesis since I think Tom Barnett has already done a much better job than I could in his non-review book review of Brave New World, In guerrillas we trust. Here's some flavor of the post:
In sum. I really enjoyed this book and plan to consult it often in the future for deeper understanding of John's many brilliant conceptualizations of network vulnerabilities. I only include my criticisms here because I know a lot of readers consider John and I to be doppelgangers of each other on the question of connectivity, whereas I'm more the optimistic builder/white hat and John's more the pessimistic breaker/black hat, so some parsing of universal views seemed warranted.
To that end, I think John's predictions of great stressing of globalization will happen and that we'll collectively surmount them in many of the ways he advocates. I just don't see that process in the same disrupting revolutionary terms that John does, but rather in more relaxed (in terms of tempo) evolutionary adaptation where politics remains--in its many forms found throughout the Core--a useful tool of compromise (thus the importance of grand strategic vision).
Reading both Tom Barnett and John Robb offers a particularly interesting dialectical approach to the near term. I would add to the mix that our collective emotional response to the possibilities both men describe will likely be determinative.
Whether or not the worst case scenario comes to pass will ultimately depend upon whether America's anxiety can be adaptive (a topic for a future post), remains maladaptive (fight or flight), or becomes traumatic and leaves us paralyzed.
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