Resources:

• “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” ― Yogi Berra

• ON CREATING THE FUTURE (We can divine what is important, but we can’t predict it)
• The Folly of Prediction (No one is held responsible for bad predictions)
• The groundhog is like most other prophets; it delivers its prediction and then disappears. Bill Vaughan

It is dawning on most of us that the world seems less predictable than it used to be. Every day brings events that are surprising. In trying to gain a foothold on this ever-changing reality, we bundle the surprises and give them some abstract name, like terrorism or climate change or natural disaster. But there are a lot of problems with trying to bunch very different things under a single term.

The biggest is that we tend to use the same response to all of the problems under a single umbrella.

To use terrorism as an example, some of the terror groups became friends of ours when they stood against the Russians or Assad or ISIS. The most illuminating example concerned the jihadists who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, backed by the US. They defeated the Soviets, and we abandoned them eventually moving them back toward the enemy category, only by then well-armed by us through our earlier friendly relationship. And then there was 9-11.

In the old days, these decisions about who was a friend and who was an enemy would have remained relevant for several years. Today, the label of friend or enemy can change in weeks, and decisions that made sense when a community or organization was a friend, suddenly make no sense. It becomes too late to change the earlier decision or its long-term effects. So, we treat the effects of changing a friend to an enemy as though it were a new problem unconnected to our previous decisions and actions, and we continue to ignore our role in the creation of those inevitable unintended consequences.

It has always been clear that we can’t predict large-scale physical events (say when an earthquake will occur or how powerful it will be) or social/political events over long periods of time. But now a long period of time in our society is measured in weeks or even days. We regularly make decisions that will turn around and bite us on the ass far into the future, long after our original assumptions are proven to be inaccurate.

So it isn’t just that we can’t predict. We also can’t assume that our “good-faith” decisions based on those poor predictions won’t make our lives more dangerous, violent, and costly than it seemed at the time we made them. There is no on/off switch that goes along with, “Oops, my bad” to stop the continuing damage to ourselves from our short-sighted decisions.

We can’t predict the complex future well-EVER!!