PART IV – THE BOUNDARIES OF SYSTEM PERTURBATION
Reviewing rules # 7 – 9 from Dr. Barnett’s Deleted Scene on System Perturbation. As before my remarks are in regular text, Dr. Barnett’s in bold:
“Where are the boundaries in System Perturbations?
Rule #7: Vertical scenarios are always preceded by horizontal scenarios that generated the preconditions for system shock.
This one I definitely stole from the complexity guys. Their basic point is that no vertical shock occurs in a vacuum. With 9/11, there were a host of horizontal scenarios on our side that led to all that lax security and our government’s downplaying the threat from Al Qaeda. So looking for that one “smoking gun” is always an illusion, despite the fact that we always pretend to ourselves that we have really found one, like the FBI “Phoenix Memo.” To believe that one little memo should have turned the tides on all those long-term horizontal scenarios is just fantasy. You cannot turn conventional wisdom on its head without a serious shock. On Al Qaeda’s side, 9/11 was the culmination of a slow build-up of capabilities and demonstrated strikes over the years. This group did not appear out of nowhere, nor did their grievances.
Amen. Dr. Barnett has provided grist here for historians like myself where one of the great difficulties when asked by someone outside of the field for an explanation of a historical event is to give one that has brevity yet respects the complexity of multiple-causation. Almost every significant event in the history of the earth – at least as far as I can authoritatively speak- is a result of multiple causation of unfolding horizontal and vertical scenarios. Political partisans and ideologues in particular prefer simple, single-causation, explanations that are usually correct only to a limited and compartmentalized extent and often become dangerously wrong when subsequently extrapolated into a demagogic slogan.
I suppose an exception might be examples of divine revelation that became slow-moving System Perturbations – Muhammed’s vision, Constantine and St. Paul’s conversions, Buddha’s enlightenment but even here the spread of new religions occur within a social and historical context. The collapse of Roman power, the destruction of Temple Judaism, the political disorganization of Vedic-Hindu India and vertical organization of dynastic China all provided a space for these belief systems to triumph as rival rule-sets over earlier moral systems.
Rule #8: Vertical scenarios are invariable followed by horizontal scenarios that generate preconditions for future shocks.
This one sort of says, “Be careful what you wish for.” Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and hopes it will shock the U.S. into rapid defeatism. Instead, we respond with the Pacific Campaign, or a methodical dismantling of Japan’s empire. Hitler thought Germany might conquer Russia with the same blitzkrieg that overwhelmed Poland and France, and he got the Battle of Stalingrad and the Siege of Leningrad instead. Al Qaeda thought America would be shocked into isolation after 9/11, and got a Bush Adminstration hell-bent on transforming the Middle East. Of course, as part of that transformation, we invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. That was the “big bang” America put on the Middle East as a whole. But that vertical shock invariably creates its own horizontal scenarios like leaving tens of thousands of U.S. troops trapped in Iraq for the long haul, pulling in jihadists from all over the world to try and kill the “infidels,” and forcing the U.S. into an accommodation with the UN it had long sought to avoid regarding postwar Iraq. What new vertical shock comes out of that maelstrom of horizontal scenarios? Good question.
Sir Isaac Newton wrote: “Forces always occur in pairs. If object A exerts a force F on object B, then object B exerts an equal and opposite force -F on object A” or as every school child calls it ” Every action has an equal and opposite reaction “. If you remove the critical term ” equal” and substitute the phrase ” probable set of ” you have a good, analagous, ” Law of Blowback ” to Newton’s Third Law, for unfolding vertical and horizontal scenarios.
” For statesmen, every action has a probable set of opposite reactions “
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