“This is our aim: to see the expanding surface of connection around us clearly with our minds, not to be baffled by what it does to us our or world. Today we mostly see the parts of the cow: phones, biogenetic systems, drones. We don’t see the whole system of which they are a part.”

~ Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable

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“They share as background a view in which the spread of capitalism is good and inevitable, in which democracy and technology produce an increase in general stability. Such a view represents a shared consensus of elites, the best-mind conventional wisdom of our day, found everywhere from Geneva boardrooms to Whitehall corridors to Washington war rooms. These ideas fail both tests of good science: they neither predict nor explain our world. But too many of our leaders are incapable of confronting this disconnect. They lack the language, creativity, and revolutionary spirit our moment demands. In many cases, they have been badly corrupted by power, position, and prestige. We’ve left our future, in other words, largely in the hands of people whose single greatest characteristic is that they are bewildered by the present.”

~ Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable