Living In a Visible But Incomprehensible World
By Clark Winter
Chief Investment Officer
SK Capital Partners
There is a tendency to view the world right now as in a tremendous state of flux. Thomas Friedman, writing in a recent column in The New York Times, says that 2009 will be the beginning of The Great Disruption, a period when the global economy begins to shift from destructive patterns of consumption to a more responsible stewardship of the Earth and its resources. Freidman is right, but he is also wrong. The fact is, The Great Disruption is an annual event. It is ongoing, constant and ever changing. Trying to prepare for the next Great Disruption is like trying to prepare for the next tornado or earthquake. You might know it’s coming at some point, but you can’t know when or where.
So, what do you do? Think of the world’s problems as being divided into three buckets. The first is labeled Knowable and Understandable. That’s the world of facts and figures, the world of rules and orderly processes. The world you get up to most mornings, to which you dress and go to work. It is the world where things can be measured, and where the measurements are an accurate reflection of the reality they are meant to represent, the way profit & loss statements and balance sheets are supposed to represent the health of a company.
That’s the easy world, the world of No Disruptions. Unfortunately, it is a world that no longer exists. If you look at the accounting scandals that began with Enron and WorldCom and which carry through the Ponzi accounting of Bernie Madoff and Sir Allen Stanford, or the financial accounting black holes that companies such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers became, and which major banks around the world threaten to become, then you know that the world of No Disruptions is gone with the wind.
That brings us to the second bucket. It is called Unknowable & Unforeseeable. That is the world of tsunamis and earthquakes and other destructive forces of Nature, and the world of madmen and terrorists and bad actors on the world stage. It is a world where forces such as Hamas and Hezbollah clearly act against their own interests, carried along by an unreasoning hostility to any ideas or logic but their own. It is a world of ignorance – not stupidity, but rather, of a willingness to ignore proper facts, rationality and science in favor of unsubstantiated beliefs, and to attempt to impose those beliefs on others. In that world, when things go wrong, and they invariably do, people throw up their hands and say, “How could we have known?” or “Someone else is to blame.” Sometimes that might actually be true, but mostly, what is labeled as unknowable and unforeseeable is mostly knowledge that causes disruption that the No Disruption believers refuse to see.
Finally, there is a third bucket that we can call Visible But Incomprehensible. This is the bucket where honesty prevails, and where all opportunity exists Visible But Incomprehensible is the bucket where we might not have any idea of how to proceed, but if we simply admit that fact, incomprehensibility does not generate fear, but rather, a sense of possibility. Remember, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Incomprehensibility does not mean hindrance. Rather, it is simply a skills test. How quickly can you recognize an old pattern? How quickly can you discern an emerging pattern?
If you accept the necessity of living in the world of Visible But Incomprehensible, you understand why Thomas Friedman is wrong. Every day is a Great Disruption, but in turn, every day is a great opportunity. Instead of viewing the world and life as a movement toward terminal decline, the choice to live in the world of the Visible But Incomprehensible is a chance to repeal entropy. It is a chance to bring renewal to your own personal world and the world around you. If you accept that you don’t have to understand everything about everything, you have granted yourself freedom to act. And if you can see what is visible, even if you don’t fully understand it, chances are that you will act properly.
You don’t have to have a full understanding of economic calamity, for example, to know that it creates misery, and that acting to alleviate misery when you encounter it cannot be wrong. You don’t have to understand the mechanics of climate change to know that you can do something about it without putting on a hair shirt or living in a yurt. You don’t have to know anything about the intricacies of international trade to understand that the buying decisions you make, or the savings decisions you choose, will have an impact on workers around the world and can come back to bite you, or better, form the nucleus of a new business, or a new initiative to improve the lot of all humanity.
Indeed, choosing to live in the world of the Visible But Incomprehensible is choosing to live in the world as it really is, with all its wart and nightmares, but also with all its possibilities. When the world of No Disruptions, the world of the Knowable & Understandable, begins to fail us, there is a tendency to want to retreat, to pull in our horns, to run away. As the late, great country singer Eddy Arnold put it, “Make the world go away. Get it off my shoulders. Say the things you used to say, and make the world go away.” Well, those days are over. The world isn’t going away soon, and it doesn’t matter if it is comprehensible or not. It is what we have, and it is time to make more of it.
© 2009 Clark Winter
By Clark Winter
Chief Investment Officer
SK Capital Partners
There is a tendency to view the world right now as in a tremendous state of flux. Thomas Friedman, writing in a recent column in The New York Times, says that 2009 will be the beginning of The Great Disruption, a period when the global economy begins to shift from destructive patterns of consumption to a more responsible stewardship of the Earth and its resources. Freidman is right, but he is also wrong. The fact is, The Great Disruption is an annual event. It is ongoing, constant and ever changing. Trying to prepare for the next Great Disruption is like trying to prepare for the next tornado or earthquake. You might know it’s coming at some point, but you can’t know when or where.
So, what do you do? Think of the world’s problems as being divided into three buckets. The first is labeled Knowable and Understandable. That’s the world of facts and figures, the world of rules and orderly processes. The world you get up to most mornings, to which you dress and go to work. It is the world where things can be measured, and where the measurements are an accurate reflection of the reality they are meant to represent, the way profit & loss statements and balance sheets are supposed to represent the health of a company.
That’s the easy world, the world of No Disruptions. Unfortunately, it is a world that no longer exists. If you look at the accounting scandals that began with Enron and WorldCom and which carry through the Ponzi accounting of Bernie Madoff and Sir Allen Stanford, or the financial accounting black holes that companies such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers became, and which major banks around the world threaten to become, then you know that the world of No Disruptions is gone with the wind.
That brings us to the second bucket. It is called Unknowable & Unforeseeable. That is the world of tsunamis and earthquakes and other destructive forces of Nature, and the world of madmen and terrorists and bad actors on the world stage. It is a world where forces such as Hamas and Hezbollah clearly act against their own interests, carried along by an unreasoning hostility to any ideas or logic but their own. It is a world of ignorance – not stupidity, but rather, of a willingness to ignore proper facts, rationality and science in favor of unsubstantiated beliefs, and to attempt to impose those beliefs on others. In that world, when things go wrong, and they invariably do, people throw up their hands and say, “How could we have known?” or “Someone else is to blame.” Sometimes that might actually be true, but mostly, what is labeled as unknowable and unforeseeable is mostly knowledge that causes disruption that the No Disruption believers refuse to see.
Finally, there is a third bucket that we can call Visible But Incomprehensible. This is the bucket where honesty prevails, and where all opportunity exists Visible But Incomprehensible is the bucket where we might not have any idea of how to proceed, but if we simply admit that fact, incomprehensibility does not generate fear, but rather, a sense of possibility. Remember, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Incomprehensibility does not mean hindrance. Rather, it is simply a skills test. How quickly can you recognize an old pattern? How quickly can you discern an emerging pattern?
If you accept the necessity of living in the world of Visible But Incomprehensible, you understand why Thomas Friedman is wrong. Every day is a Great Disruption, but in turn, every day is a great opportunity. Instead of viewing the world and life as a movement toward terminal decline, the choice to live in the world of the Visible But Incomprehensible is a chance to repeal entropy. It is a chance to bring renewal to your own personal world and the world around you. If you accept that you don’t have to understand everything about everything, you have granted yourself freedom to act. And if you can see what is visible, even if you don’t fully understand it, chances are that you will act properly.
You don’t have to have a full understanding of economic calamity, for example, to know that it creates misery, and that acting to alleviate misery when you encounter it cannot be wrong. You don’t have to understand the mechanics of climate change to know that you can do something about it without putting on a hair shirt or living in a yurt. You don’t have to know anything about the intricacies of international trade to understand that the buying decisions you make, or the savings decisions you choose, will have an impact on workers around the world and can come back to bite you, or better, form the nucleus of a new business, or a new initiative to improve the lot of all humanity.
Indeed, choosing to live in the world of the Visible But Incomprehensible is choosing to live in the world as it really is, with all its wart and nightmares, but also with all its possibilities. When the world of No Disruptions, the world of the Knowable & Understandable, begins to fail us, there is a tendency to want to retreat, to pull in our horns, to run away. As the late, great country singer Eddy Arnold put it, “Make the world go away. Get it off my shoulders. Say the things you used to say, and make the world go away.” Well, those days are over. The world isn’t going away soon, and it doesn’t matter if it is comprehensible or not. It is what we have, and it is time to make more of it.
© 2009 Clark Winter
