Barrel Strength

George Friedman is head of Stratfor, a strategic forecasting firm whose analysis may have passed by your desk from time to time.

Friedman has written a most entertaining romp through the next hundred years. Whether right or wrong he helps open one’s mind to the larger picture. Friedman’s intellectual base is in demography, geography and technology: geopolitics. Religion figures little in his view of the next century, whereas I think it is already the prime driving force of the next confrontation, in the form of Islam.

Major predictions:

• The rise of the United States is only beginning. As the only power to bestride the sea lanes between Europe and Asia, with command of both shores, and of inner (near earth)  space,  it is going to continue to rise in importance through the next century.
• China will implode.
• Europe is decadent.
• The Islamic challenge never will amount to much, though Turkey will become a major power by the middle of the century.

Major observations:

• Population growth is crashing everywhere, to be followed by population loss in almost all major countries, with the United states least affected.
• Global warming is irrelevant.
• The computer will continue to reshape economic activity.

My take-away was from his early chapter, on the distinction between barbarism, civilization, and decadence.

• barbarism is the belief that the mores and virtues of your tribe or village are what all of humanity should embrace, and you are ready to take fire and sword to your neighbours or foreigners to make them agree.
• Civilization is the acceptance that the world is full of barbarians and that one needs to fight  selectively, if barbarically, to save civilized codes of conduct.
• Decadence is the belief that there is no real distinction between civilization and barbarism, and if there is, it is hardly worth fighting for.

On the computer, he says that it causes us to de-emphasize all aspects of reality and of our engagement with it that cannot be quantified – the contemplative, the playful, the religious. The corporation is the creature of the quantitification of the computer, and no one can compete with the United States who does not embrace the methods of the computer. To the extent that the computer does not allow for any values other than its own, it is barbaric in the sense of the term used above, and the corporation is a barbarian: exclusively focused on the goals, rules and mores of its own tribe.

I recommend it for a fast read.