https://www.nonzero.org/p/why-we-keep-stumbling-into-stupid
"Why is the current war happening? If you want to answer that question in a
broad sense—in a way that applies not just to the Iran war but to other
needless bursts of carnage of the past and future—I would direct your attention
to an exchange that took place this week on a
New York Times podcast called
The Opinions.
The exchange was between
Times columnist David French and retired four-star
General Stanley McChrystal, and it was an archetypal interaction between two
kinds of mindsets—the kind that keeps getting us into wars and the kind that,
if it were more common, could keep us out of them.
The roles played by the two men aren’t what you might expect based on their job
descriptions. It wasn’t the career Army officer who exemplified the narrowly
tribalistic perspective and the writer for the liberal media who offered the
more balanced and pacific view. Rather, it was the professional soldier who
brought the enlightenment and the journalist who lacked it—and who showed no
signs of absorbing any of it.
In a way this isn’t surprising. What McChrystal crucially evinced is the
ability to see things from the point of view of other people, including
adversaries and enemies—an ability any good military strategist needs. In fact,
though I typically call this skill “cognitive empathy,” it is, when employed in
certain contexts, also called “strategic empathy.”
As regular
NonZero readers know, I consider cognitive empathy a kind of
untapped superpower—a human potential that, if more widely realized, could work
wonders. For example: It could transform American foreign policy from the blunt
and brutal instrument it’s become into something that’s actually good for the
world."
Via
Global Terrorism Has Been Shrinking for a Decade:
<
https://theprogressnetwork.substack.com/p/global-terrorism-has-been-shrinking>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
