So I'll tell it through a story.
Think of the falling of the Berlin Wall, what
happened that night.
Well the story of that night is that somebody
who was a press attaché of the East German
regime during a press conference, gets a piece
of paper sent by the Politbüro,
stuck in his hip pocket, didn't have a chance to read
it.
And then there's a question about "What about
the travel policy?" and he says, "Well wait a minute,
I just got a piece of paper, let me read it."
And it's a complicated paragraph, and it's
not quite clear what it means.
"Well I guess that means the wall is open."
He gets off, goes home, has dinner, goes to
bed.
And then he wakes up three hours later and
there's lots and lots of car's lights streaming
towards the wall and he's suddenly realized
what's happened.
This is our conventional understanding of
how the Berlin Wall opened.
It was a set of flukes, basically.
But that's only one story.
That's what I call 'protean power'; somebody
then at the border you know, calls up his
superior and said, "All these people are saying
the wall is open.
What the hell are we supposed to do?"
Nobody picks up the phone.
Somebody picks up the phone says, "I don't
know."
So in the ned the guy says, "Well, I'll just
open the wall."
There was another story.
That's the story which we all sort of understand,
but nobody tells it.
The East Germans were running out of money.
The only thing they had was Soviet oil, which
they refined and sold to the West.
Nobody wanted to buy their stuff.
But increasingly, from 1985 on, the Soviets
say, "We don't have any oil to give to you
at preferred prices."
So they had to make a deal with the West Germans.
And they actually had decided to open the
wall by the end of the year, to get a preferential
deal from the Germans for more credits.
Now that second story is the conventional
wisdom.
That is how world politics works.
But in fact, we all believe the first story,
right?
The one which I'm telling in my book "Protean
Power."
Neither of these stories is true in and by
themselves, it's the interaction of both stories.
And that's a basic point of the book.
So what's nice about this illustration is
that many people actually believe what the book says,
the 'protean power' story, but they've
convinced themselves that that's the wrong
argument.
