Using Our Lives to Change History

I have just finished reading Joshua Cooper Ramo’s book “The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can do About It.” I think my Mandarin development and Go Global High School Study Abroad Program proposals are the type of innovative, even “revolutionary,” responses to today’s world that he is looking for. Both proposals are breaks with the past, but they also create a whole new generation with fresh eyes on what’s happening in the world.

The author, Joshua Cooper Ramo, is a managing director of Kissinger Associates, “one of the world’s leading geostrategic advisory firms.” He has a website here with a very short video intro to the book. The video ends with a statement about using our individual lives to change history.

Two quotes from his book and then a youtube video to give the flavor of his thinking.

On page 8:

 We are now at the start of what may become the most dramatic change in the international order in several centuries, the biggest shift since European nations were first shuffled into a sovereign order by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This change is irresistible. It is infectious. It will spread to every corner of our lives, to our businesses, our bank accounts, our hopes, and our health. What we face isn’t one single shift or revolution, like the end of World War II or the collapse of the Soviet Union or a financial crisis, so much as an avalanche of ceaseless change. It is change that will render institutions that look unshakable weak and unstable; it will elevate movements that look weak into position of great power. As much as we might wish it, our world is bit becoming more stable or easier to comprehend. We are entering, in short, a revolutionary age. And we are doing so with ideas, leaders, and institutions that are better suited for a world now several centuries behind us. On the one hand         , this revolution is creating unprecedented disruption and dislocation. But it is also creating new fortunes, new power, fresh hope, and a new global order. Revolutions, after all, don’t produce only losers. They also - and this is the heart of the story I want to tell here - produce a whole new cast of historical champions…..

Three pages later on page 11:

The main argument of the book is not particularly complicated: it is that in a revolutionary era of surprise and innovation, you need to think and act like a revolutionary. (People at revolutions who don’t act that way have a particular name: victims.)

Comments

[christian louboutin sale]

The main argument of the book is not particularly complicated: it is that in a revolutionary era of surprise and innovation, you need to think and act like a revolutionary

[louboutin]

institutions that look unshakable weak and unstable; it will elevate movements that look weak into position