The Age of the Unthinkable (9 page)

Yet before we move on to discuss a new idiom that should make our world more comprehensible, if not more predictable, it is
vital that we understand the sources of this confusion. Only by examining these fractures, by feeling out the rough edges
of our old ideology, can we assemble a new theory of how to think about the world. And there is no better place to begin than
the moment at which the old models completely failed. What happened in the USSR was revolutionary, to be sure, unthinkable
in almost every sense. The lessons we learned from that collapse, however, weren’t revolutionary enough. Worse, they blinded
us to the future we do face.

It is my contention that Bak’s avalanche law has an important implication that we have to master so we can see the world clearly,
honestly, as it is — an essential precursor to creating a new approach to our security. You remember the first part of Bak’s
theory: small things can trigger a big change. Well, this also means that when a big change occurs, it isn’t always the case
that something big is responsible. We all saw the USSR implode and thought, wow, something
giant
must be behind that. We figured that the giant force was the end of history, the arrival of a global era of democracy and
capitalism, or a result of our unmatchable defense spending. It was seen as a sign of the triumph of our ideals — more than
the triumph, the
rightness
of those ideals. President George W. Bush, in the 2002
National Security Strategy of the United States,
the document that is supposed to capture the most essential ideas of American security, explained it this way: “For most
of the twentieth century the world was divided by a great struggle over ideas: destructive totalitarian visions versus freedom
and equality. That great struggle is over.” But was it? Did the end of the USSR really prove that?

To many of the people who were part of it, the collapse of the USSR was and still is baffling. Even Gorbachev has never quite
delivered a compelling explanation. Gaddis, the Cold War historian, calls his memoirs “voluminously unreflective,” which was
more or less the same caliber of answer I got when I asked him directly. It was as if he had no language to describe what
had occurred. In a way, that’s not a surprise. Almost by definition, most status-quo power figures can never quite make sense
of revolutionary energy, even after it has unzipped and discarded them. This is as true for blame-shifting Wall Street CEOs
watching their banks collapse as it is for overthrown political leaders. Revolutionary ideas threaten everything most great
men prize: how they think, where they make their fortunes, their sense of identity, often their very lives. Gorbachev was
educated and raised with a whole taxonomy of thoughts about the nature of power that made understanding what happened around
him impossibly difficult.

Once you start to unpack the details of the Soviet collapse, you discover that the real lesson is a lot more complicated —
and frankly a lot more interesting — than the linear “input Western ideas, output implosion” explanations that make up the
bulk of our thinking. It turns out that the end of the USSR wasn’t the story of some historically inevitable process but,
rather, the result of a complex and unpredictable set of interactions that could have shot off in any number of directions.
Was the country facing certain economic failure in the 1980s and 1990s? Well, the economy was a mess, but the Soviet Union
had been exposed to periods of far greater economic and social pressure without imploding. And badly performing economic and
political systems, many far sicker than the USSR in the late 1980s, have been reformed, not overthrown: 1930s America and
1970s China, for instance. If the political system was so deeply fragile and rotten, then why had the entire predictive superstructure
of Soviet
and
foreign experts missed the signs? Why, in a democratic referendum less than nine months before the USSR imploded, had more
than 75 percent of its citizens said they wanted it to remain intact?

Why, when you talked to people, like Gorbachev, who had stood inches away from this collapsing behemoth, did each one tell
a different, more complicated story? Did American defense spending really bankrupt Moscow? Then why did Soviet officials later
observe, as diplomat Anatoly Dobrinyin wrote, “Increased defense spending provoked by Reagan’s policies was not the straw
that broke the back of the evil empire. . . . In fact, if [Reagan] hadn’t abandoned his hostile stance towards the USSR, Gorbachev
would not have been able to launch his reforms.” Most everyone agrees that the USSR was creaky, slow, and morally broken on
a vast scale. But no serious Russian scholar born and raised in the Soviet era would tell you twenty years later, “Yes, it
was inevitable.” They would openly laugh at suggestions that the U.S. military threat, smuggled
samizdat
propaganda, mimeographed newsletters, or popular discontent had finally tipped the USSR over. Those features, they were quick
to remind you, had been a part of Soviet life for decades.

In the mid-1990s, two Western researchers on the USSR set out to answer the question of what brought the USSR down — and to
do so without assuming that the final result was inevitable. David Kotz and Fred Weir, both Russian experts who had lived
and worked in the USSR, interviewed hundreds of senior Soviet officials, men and women who had been in the halls of Russian
power as the empire peeled away from them day after day. “Great powers have declined in history,” they later wrote, “but never
so rapidly and unexpectedly.” Kotz and Weir’s research concluded that the USSR didn’t collapse because of popular pressure
upward from the grass roots of Soviet life — pressure that could have been suppressed at any time — but largely because of
the ruthless power math of Soviet elites themselves and some terrible miscalculations by Gorbachev. Politburo members like
Gorbachev certainly held sway on the macro level, but the Soviet
nomenklatura,
a label that means “list of names” in Russian, actually ran the country. The
nomenklatura
were the army officers, professors, and officials who had managed the day-to-day work of the USSR since the 1917 revolution.
These elites were a very small percentage of the Soviet population. But, Kotz and Weir found in their discussions, the
nomenklatura
decided, once Gorbachev began reforming a system that had protected their rights and privileges, they had more to gain by
letting the USSR fracture than by holding it together. If you were sitting on top of the empire when it fell down, the
nomenklatura
logic went, you would surely be in the best place to pick up the pieces. This was a cold, selfish decision. It was also,
fatally, one that Gorbachev hadn’t anticipated in full.

“The ultimate explanation for the surprisingly peaceful and sudden demise of the Soviet system,” Weir and Kotz wrote, “was
that it was abandoned by most of its own elite.” Had the USSR collapsed in the face of a real revolution, like the one that
created the Soviet Union in 1917, it would look very different today. After all, the mark of a true people’s revolution is
that the old leaders are shot, exiled, or forgotten. But two decades later, all across the former USSR, the top leaders, the
richest billionaires, and the most powerful politicians were usually the same men who had lingered near the top of the system
in the old days. Was Vladimir Putin, the two-term Russian president who followed Boris Yeltsin, some up-from-the-streets ideologue?
No. He was once an elite KGB agent, a prince of the old order.

The idea that the
nomenklatura
sold out their own system is important, not least because it shows us how many small variables conspired in the downfall
of the USSR. Changing even one of them — higher oil prices to boost the economy, a more ambitious military commander or two,
Gorbachev getting sick — could have produced a very different and possibly a more violent world. The end of the USSR was a
case of internal implosion due to faults, twists, and kinks in the society that even today we cannot map clearly. All the
more reason that we need to abandon the idea that our “triumph” in the Cold War was inevitable. Even Gorbachev offers at least
this guidance: “It is a mistake,” he writes, “to think that the West won the Cold War.”

The great physics error of the collapse of the USSR involved an assumption that the internal tensions of the Soviet system
would be predictable or at least manageable once the overpowering force of freedom was released. The USSR would snap into
alignment and eventually come to resemble the USA, with a smooth and controlled stream of wealth and democracy. But the internal
dynamics, as Bak might have warned, proved hard to predict. Gorbachev made his system more complex and unstable rather than
less.
Perestroika
means “restructuring.” But the sort of refurbishment Gorbachev got was, in the end, very different from what he had in mind.
And in the difference between a “move the chairs around” redecoration and a “tear the house down” demolition, there is an
encyclopedia of lessons about what happens when you misanalyze the world. Gorbachev’s story is, yet again, one of those unnerving
reversals of intention and outcome (fight terrorism, get more dangerous terrorists) that should be familiar by now. He set
out to reform the USSR, but in the end he helped destroy it.

The collapse of the USSR wasn’t a proof of determinism (input democracy, get stability) but rather proof of the opposite (input
democracy, get the unimaginable). And it’s this lesson that is useful as we look at places as different as the Middle East
and China. Change produces unpredictability and surprise. That means that any time we push for change — and my contention
is that we need even more change than we have today — we have to prepare ourselves for the fact that much of what we’ll get
is unpredictable. This inherent instability has to change how we make policy for our nation or how we plan our own lives,
the problem we’ll turn to in the second half of the book. Of course it also makes the game of pushing for radical reform in
any society an uncertain proposition. Americans who press political liberalization on China, for instance, usually assume
that what would emerge would be a democratic, pro-American government. But there’s at least as much evidence that a sandpiled
China might avalanche to the lowest common denominator of nationalist identity, emerging from radical change as virulently
anti-American.

There’s a temptation, of course, to jam all this complexity into tightly constrained models. Actually, it’s more than a temptation:
it’s a habit suggested by every intellectual twitch since Aristotle began classifying actions and reactions. In discussing
U.S. policy toward Russia, President Bill Clinton once complained to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, “You’ve still
got to be able to crystallize complexity in a way people get right away.” He added, “The operative problem of the moment is
that a bunch of smart people haven’t been able to come up with a new slogan, and saying there aren’t any good slogans isn’t
a slogan either. . . . We can litanize and analyze all we want, but until people can say it in a few words we’re sunk.” Clinton
and his team never found such a model. The lesson of sandpile dynamics is that you can’t really crystallize, because that
implies freezing a picture of a world that can be profoundly shifting even as you try to fix its most basic dimensions into
some sort of map. It’s far better to speak and think and, as Clinton said, “litanize” in terms of dynamism.

The constant shifting and adjusting of our world, the unpredictable clashing of internal forces, didn’t end in 1989. Today
our sandpile order is churning out new ideologies as fast as it produces new computer software: Islamic fundamentalism, Indian
caste capitalism, Venezuelan charismatic democracy, Putin-style centralism, and dozens of others we have not yet seen enough
of to name or understand. As it becomes ever clearer that the idea of capitalist democracy is failing to deliver on its promises
— and, in many cases, is delivering the opposite of what was intended — new ideas will explode into view. “Our job,” Secretary
of Defense Robert Gates said in 2008, “is to prevent the emergence of another ‘ism.’ ” But the emergence of a new ism is inevitable.
And there won’t just be one. There will be thousands.

In the middle of 2008, as the global financial crisis was just getting rolling, Simon Levin — the geeky Princeton mathematical
ecologist you’ll remember from the post-9/11 biological-risks panel — sat down with two other colleagues and penned a short
article called “Ecology for Bankers.” Too much of what he was seeing in finance reminded him of natural systems he had seen
slip into uncontrollable chaos — the chaos of the “take out one species, destroy the ecosystem” variety, a small change triggering
huge disaster. His goal in 2008 was to draw a few connections between the complexity of environmental webs and the dangers
that lurked in an interconnected financial system. In particular, he said, he wanted to discuss “regime shifts,” which is
the term ecologists use to describe rapid, usually unexpected, reorganizations. (A regime shift was what happened to Mikhail
Gorbachev.)

“For banking and other financial institutions,” Levin wrote, “the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression epitomize
such an event. These days, the increasingly interlinked financial markets are no less immune.” What triggers these collapses,
Levin said, often has little to do with big outside forces. Rather, he wrote, “catastrophic changes in the overall state of
a system can ultimately derive from how it is organized, from feedback mechanisms within it, and from linkages that are latent
and often unrecognized. The change may be initiated by some obvious external event, such as war, but is more usually triggered
by a seemingly minor happenstance or even an unsubstantial rumor. Once set in motion, however, such changes can become explosive.”

We’ve now seen clearly that Levin and his colleagues were right: our financial markets are rigged so that rapid fundamental
change is possible. They are organized, as Bak would have said, into instability. But many other parts of our world may be
as well. This suggests that we need to constantly examine the world around us for hidden faults and connections, for other
lurking regime shifts. Levin’s message for us (Gorbachev’s too, in a way) is that we may have underestimated the cracks, faults,
and tensions of our own system, the other disasters that may now await us if we don’t plan properly. Addressing these risks
fully will require radical new thinking and commitment — national energy at a historic level. But before we turn to that,
it’s worth looking at another example of how, inevitably, wrong ideas have led us to some very dangerous, very wrong choices.