This concept stems from an observation made by an historian of millenarian movements, or groups with apocalyptic agendas. Richard Landes of Boston University says, look back through any nation’s history and you will find defining moments, or what he calls “chosen trauma.” These events shape the ethos of the society because people there have chosen to mark them as key turning points in their collective history. In the United States, our chosen trauma include the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Gettysburg, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and now 9/11. Not every bad thing that happens triggers this response. America could have chosen to respond to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center to launch a global war on terrorism, but we did not. In general, a chosen trauma can be summarized by the phrase, “Remember the ______!” So Americans “Remember the Alamo!” and “Remember the Maine!” But we do not really chose to remember Columbine or Oklahoma City in the same way. The point of this rule is simply to remind us that we have the ability to say no to responding to a vertical scenario, and that when we do decide to respond, like with a global war on terrorism, that is not a choice forced upon us, but one we make freely — thus signifying control. It is one of those things we all learned in kindergarten: anyone can hurl an insult or a rock, but you only have to fight when you want to.”

With all due respect to Dr. Landes, he’s wrong. Or at least he’s not counting the costs of *not acting* when he argues for a completely free choice in responding to vertical scenario attacks.

The difference between 9/11 and the car-bombing of the WTC in 1993 and Pearl Harbor and, say, the Panay incident or Gettysburg and Bull Run is that all the former cases involve a mass psychological crossing of the Rubicon. Our collective attention is grabbed not merely by death tolls but by the gravity of the situation with the implied costs. Pearl Harbor buried peace negotiations with Japan. Gettysburg buried reconciliation with a Slave power South and 9/11 to most Americans buried the law enforcement view of Islamist terrorism. Yes, we could have chosen *not* to go to war ( or up the ante to total war against the Confederacy) but not acting after Pearl Harbor or 9/11 carried serious costs that were universally evident to everyone – a serious defeat for America and a possible slippery slope decline when friends and enemies change their risk calculations on a host of unrelated problems to adjust for our non-action.

A System Perturbation by definition, provokes a response.

Rule #3: Once the vertical scenario plays itself out, control reverts back to nation-states, so long as they stay on the offensive.

You could say this one also comes from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, because that has been the basic philosophy they have advocated in America’s global war on terrorism. In other words, once the dust cleared after 9/11, it was America’s task to keep hounding Bin Laden and Al Qaeda until they are completely destroyed as a threat. Our enemy’s goal is clear: they need to keep hitting us with vertical shocks that cumulatively depress our stock of rules, our collective sense of individual security, and our belief in the stability of our system. A vertical shock like 9/11 immediately creates a sense of rule-set void: people are thinking, “We are clearly short of the right rules because if we had had them, this disaster never would have happened in this way.” If an Al Qaeda can maintain a certain frequency of shocks, America never really fills that void back in with new rules, because we would be constantly scrambling to understand — yet again — “how something like this could happen?” But if we maintain a constant pressure on the enemy, those vertical shocks are few and far between, allowing us to fill in any voids created by our original sense of shock and horror. This is the essential difference between America and Israel since 9/11: we have never been hit again, but Israel keeps suffering the vertical shocks of suicide bombings, thus Israeli society suffers systematic brutalization and thus responds more brutally with time. My point: you take the offensive, you limit the need for brutality in your response. You get the bad stuff over as quickly as possible

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