People living in horizontal systems typically enjoy significantly larger amounts of freedom, and so it is easier to slap a vertical scenario like a terrorist attack on an open society than a closed one. Naturally, people living in more horizontal systems understand that vulnerability and fear vertical scenarios, or the bolt-from-the-blue, far more than horizontal scenarios, or some slow-developing problem against which you can mobilize your network of resources. 9/11 really shocked America, even though the death total was fairly small when you compare it, say, to deaths from car accidents each year (40 to 50 thousand), but those death unfold in small increments, spread out across the land, whereas 9/11’s victims died all at once. Plus, Americans understand the risks of driving; we know those rule sets. But 9/11 triggered the response of “People just shouldn’t have to die that way,” meaning it offended our sense of rules regarding warfare. Bolts-from-the-blue like 9/11 tend to haunt U.S. strategic planners, because we know there is little we can do to prevent an enemy from getting that first sucker-punch in on America, whereas in a long, knockdown drag-out fight, we are very confident that we will prevail. Vertical systems tend to fear horizontal scenarios more, say, like the slow build-up of resistance to rule. Soviet Russia went nuts over individual dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, because they feared he would slowly “poison” the minds of an entire generation, making both rule and reform impossible. They were right to be afraid. Similarly, the political leadership in China runs scared when a Falun Gong movement develops secretly on its own, using the network connectivity of the Internet to spread its gospel. When several thousand Falun Gong disciples showed up one morning on Tianammen Square, what was frightening to the Chinese leadership was less their non-violent protest than the their obvious self-organizing capabilities. So if horizontal systems fear political assassinations, vertical systems live more in fear of grass roots movements.

Horizontal scenarios based upon economic trends or memetic ideological appeal are also extremely difficult, though not impossible, to reverse or check. For the WOT we need to bear in mind that al Qaida is a vertical system but Islamism is a horizontal one that goes back actually to the late 19th and early 20th century – Jamal ad-Din al Afghani’s Ittihad-i Islam, Muhammed Abduh, Rashid Rida and Hassan al Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood among others. It has taken at least four generations of increasing militancy and ideological reification to produce intelligent, highly capable, moral monsters like Osama bin Laden and an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. They did not spring out of the earth solely because the United States supports Israel and invaded Iraq or because the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The political programming – the Islamist “rule-set”- as it were, was ready to go when the Muslim world faced the twin System Perturbations of the Shah’s fall and the invasion of Afghanistan.

These kinds of horizontal scenarios can be stopped – the American Populist movement with it’s alternate model of anticapitalist communitarian economics and fiat money was destroyed at the ballot box by the major parties and by the logic of the industrial revolution and free market efficiency. National Socialism and Fascism were utterly discredited by their bloody defeat in WWII. Socialim and Communism suffered a devastating blow – but were not destroyed completely as a force in world politics – by the collapse of the USSR.

While each of these horizontal scenarios took decades to reach a crisis stage and decline the second and third examples involved ruinous economic and human costs – it was a lot of expensive hard power over many years to gain those results. Fortunately, the first example gives us a clue to the virtue of PNM theory’s ” Connectivity ” and the ability to provide, in Dr. Barnett’s words, a ” Happy ending ” of a ” Future worth creating “. The Populists failed here and did not take up arms or become terrorists because the same economy that was tormenting farmers with gold standard deflation and monopoly transport costs also provided cheaper consumer goods, competing ideas and an alternate means of rising in life through urban industrialization. That is precisely what we need to start doing in the Gap and it’s why Dr. Barnett’s PNM is striking a chord across a deeply divided America – it’s a comprehensive explanation, it isn’t the dark prospect of nothing but perpetual war and people who are already connected in the Core intuitively know it will work.

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