My co-author R.P. Eddy and I noticed what
we thought was a pattern, that every time
there was some great disaster or catastrophe
there was usually an investigation after the
fact.
What went wrong?
And that investigation almost always revealed
that there was some person, before the disaster
occurred, who said it was going to occur.
That person was always an expert.
They always had data that was telling them
that there was going to be something happening.
That person was an outlier.
They were an expert but the other experts
disagreed.
And we wondered, is this a phenomenon that
occurs with some regularity?
Because if there are people who can see disasters
coming before the rest of us, if we could
find them before the disaster that would be
enormously valuable, if we could find them
and listen to them and pay attention, if we
could tell the difference between Chicken
Little and a Cassandra.
Cassandra in Greek mythology was a woman cursed
by the gods.
The curse was that she could accurately see
the future.
It doesn’t sound so bad until you realize
the second part of the curse, which was no
one would ever believe her.
And because she could see the future and no
one was paying attention to her she went mad.
So the Cassandras that we looked for were
people who accurately predicted some future
disaster.
Not people who woke up in the middle of the
night with a premonition.
Not people who predicted all the time and
once in a while get it right.
But people who saw a specific thing coming.
People who had what we call “sentinel intelligence,”
the ability to see something over the hill
before other people see it.
And we found that pattern and in the first
half of the book we go through seven case
studies of past events where we found Cassandras
who were right, and we tried to learn something
about those seven Cassandras from the past.
And the second half of the book we look at
seven people today who might be Cassandras
who are predicting things that might happen
in the future.
So we talk about a failed warning as a Cassandra
event.
And we try to ask ourselves in the book, why
did this Cassandra event happen?
We find that there are four overall factors.
There is the quality of the Cassandra herself
or himself.
There are several things about that person
that make them a Cassandra or not.
And then there’s the audience: a decision
maker, a king, a president, a CEO—there
are qualities about them that contribute to
an event becoming a Cassandra event.
Then there’s the issue itself and the qualities
about the issue that make a warning relevant
to it hard for people to accept.
And then the last is the critics, the critics
of the person giving the warning, the critics
of the Cassandra.
What did they say and what did they not say?
And in those four column headings—the Cassandra,
the decision maker, the issue itself, and
the critics—under each of them there are
several different criteria.
By applying that template to a potential Cassandra
event, we think we can begin to tell who’s
right and who’s Chicken Little.
So in the book we look at a number of different
fields.
We look at biology, astronomy, civil engineering,
computer science but we also look at foreign
policy and economics.
And one of the foreign policy issues we look
at in the first half of the book was the rise
of ISIS.
We found a Cassandra in the person of Robert
Ford.
Robert Ford is a career foreign service officer
and a career Arabist.
That means for the United States Foreign Service,
the State Department, he’s lived and worked
for decades in countries in the Middle East.
He speaks Arabic like a native in a number
of different dialects.
He can walk onto the street of almost any
Arab city and go into any souk and hear what
the locals are saying and have a dialogue
with them.
He became our Ambassador to Damascus before
the civil war broke out there.
And when he got there, just as the Arab Spring
was percolating in other countries, Robert
Ford began to realize that there was a vacuum,
that unless the United States stepped in and
helped the opposition to President Assad in
Damascus that somebody else would.
And that somebody else, he posited, would
be a new terrorist organization.
That it would rise up not only in Syria against
President Assad as part of the Arab Spring
but it would also rise up in Iraq, where the
Shia government was making it very difficult
for the Sunnis in Iraq.
And so what Robert Ford said would happen
would be that, for the first time in history,
terrorists would own a large chunk of territory
bigger than many nations.
And that in that territory would be very large
cities—cities of over a million people in
population.
And he therefore urged President Obama to
do something to head this off; have the United
States fill the vacuum by giving serious amounts
of training and equipment to the opposition
in Syria.
And he wasn’t listened to.
In part, he wasn’t listened to because his
prediction was outlandish.
The creation of a terrorist state with controlling
cities?
That had never happened.
This is one of the things we find over and
over again, that our Cassandras are rejected
because they’re predicting things that had
never happened before.
And we call it “first occurrence syndrome”.
No terrorist group had ever built a country,
run cities.
And therefore, implicitly, decision makers
in Washington thought, “He’s exaggerating.
He’s being hyperbolic.
This can’t possibly happen.”
Why?
Because it had never happened before.
Now, we know that throughout history things
happen for the first time.
Things that have never happened before are
what we study in history.
The old days, we remember dates in history—1492,
1066, 1776.
These were all dates when things happened
of significance that had never happened before.
So decision makers ought to know that just
because something hasn’t happened before
it doesn’t mean it won’t.
But implicitly, decision-makers hearing Robert
Ford and thinking about things that have never
happened before, they think they have good
justification for ignoring a prediction if
it’s a prediction of an initial occurrence
syndrome.
And then there’s the problem of all the
other experts.
When Ford’s analysis was shared with trusted
Middle Eastern allies, like Israel, like Jordan,
people who have expertise in the Middle East
like the British and the Germans, they all
didn’t see it.
Like so many of our Cassandras, Ambassador
Robert Ford saw something first.
And in the amount of time it took for everybody
to catch up with him it was too late.
By the time the experts saw what he saw, ISIS
had come into existence, had taken over large
cities and had created a nation state.
The same phenomenon that we saw with Robert
Ford applied to people involved prior to Katrina,
in predicting that the dams in New Orleans
would burst someday if there were a Category
4 or 5 hurricane.
The Cassandra we found in New Orleans was
fired for making a prediction that the city
would flood.
In the case of Fukushima in Japan, four nuclear
reactors melted down and contaminated a huge
swathe of territory and cost the Japanese
government billions of dollars.
But yet, before those plants were built there
was someone who said, “If you build it here
there will be a tsunami someday, and the plants
will be destroyed and melt down.”
And that person testified in open hearings
and was ignored.
So we found in many, many cases, all of these
Cassandras said the same thing.
They said, “I don’t want this to happen.
I don’t want to be accurate.
I want to be proven wrong.
Here is my data.
Tell me what’s wrong with my data.”
And no one could.
