The ancient Greeks believed that true leadership in crisis came down to what they called pronoia — the Greek word for “strategic foresight.”
Some statesmen, such as Pericles and Themistocles, had it. Most others, such as the often brilliant and charismatic but impulsive Alcibiades, usually did not.
“Foresight” in crisis means sizing up a nation’s assets and debt, then maximizing advantages and minimizing liabilities. The leader with foresight, especially in times of irrational despair, then charts a rational pathway victory.
Such crisis leaders do not fall into panic and depression when the media shouts “Catastrophe!” Nor do they preen when the same chorus screams “Genius!” in times of success.
The English poet Rudyard Kipling would have defined such a gift as, “If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,” or, “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two impostors just the same.”
Some American military leaders — such as Gens. George Patton, William Tecumseh Sherman and Curtis LeMay — sounded as scary in times of peace as they did in times of war. The traits ensuring that peacetime life stays predictable are not always the same as those required to return it to predictability when times turn utterly terrifying.
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln knew the overwhelming advantages of the Union could eventually defeat the South, but only if he could hold the nation together through disasters such as the battles of Bull Run and Chancellorsville, and only once he found brilliant generals such as Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant.
In World War II, Winston Churchill proved perhaps the most impressive wartime leader in history. During Britain’s darkest hours of nonstop German bombing of London, he knew that declining British assets were still greater than an ascendant Germany’s advantages. Eventually, despite razor-thin margins of error, these assets would ensure victory.
Churchill was assured that Britain had a great navy and Germany did not. Britain would soon have as allies America and Russia, both far stronger than German partners Italy and Japan.
Churchill foresaw that the economies of those future allies would be far superior to those of the Axis. And Churchill grasped all this even as defeat loomed and some in his own party were calling for him to negotiate with Adolf Hitler.
Franklin D. Roosevelt likewise had foresight. In the nightmarish days after Pearl Harbor, FDR calmly unleashed private enterprise to rearm America at what he knew would be an astonishing rate.
Roosevelt promised victory not because he knew it would be quick, but because he calculated that if he just made the right choices, the ensuing advantages of the U.S. world surely ensure victory.
Even in the first bleak days of the war, FDR kept reminding the nation why and how America would win. That confidence was not based on fantasies but on rational calculation and justified optimism.
In the present crisis of the coronavirus, what will determine the effectiveness of President Trump’s leadership is not what the media screams today or the polls say tomorrow. The praise of his supporters or the predictable damnation of his enemies won’t matter.
Rather, Trump will win or lose on whether he has strategic foresight. If he panics and keeps the country locked down for too long, we will enter a depression that will cost more lives than the virus. But if Trump prematurely declares victory and urges Americans to rush back to normal life, he may reboot the virus and reignite another cycle of panic.
Instead, Trump will have to possess the confidence to see how the world’s greatest economy, greatest medical talent, greatest military and greatest energy and food production can all be marshaled in a symphonic fashion. That correct formula could fend off a potentially biblical plague without destroying the largest economy in history.
If Trump exhibits such cunning and wisdom, then he can balance the consensus of his medical experts that the virus is existentially dangerous with the warnings of his economic advisers that shutting down a multitrillion economy can become even more ruinous — and lethal — for Americans.
The M.S. Media trying to blame trump for this whole thing since most of these low-life reptiles are Democrat voters and supporters this comes as No Surprise these lying journalists need a nasty surprise no not catching to Coronavirus just losing a few dozen more reades and subcribers to their newspaper their working for
And with calm our representatives make 2 trillion dollar decisions for us.
He’s a damn buffoon. Is that still not clear?
@Karl Drake: I’m not sure your partisan-hacked lens allows you see anything “clearly”.
Biden is actual buffoon…or at least a senile one. Bernie can’t really explain his own ideas, and Obama sat real pretty for the camera…but didn’t do much.
Trump, on the other hand…flawed, but better ideas…and real achievements.
Isn’t that clear?
@Nathan Blue: Oh look at what slithered out from under the bridge a Karl Marx Drake.
@kitt: Look, it’s okay that everyone doesn’t like the President. I thought Obama was a joke. Didn’t matter, in the end.
But what does matter is that we actually respect the office of the Prez, and I did with Barry.
@Karl Drake: You’d be surprised what is clear.
The left is foaming at the mouth for this to be Trump’s “Katrina”. Instead, it may be his Apollo 13.
@Nathan Blue:
The measure of a great president is the quality of the guidance he receives from the experts he surrounds himself with. Trump has had his problems in this regard, but he makes up for some poor personnel choices (he’s had a lot of staff “turnover”) by sooner or later arriving at the right decision. Is it instinct? Is he really a “stable genius”? I can’t say because I’m not in his head. But after some fairly off-target fits and starts, he found his mark with the COVID-19 issue and is playing at bad situation to the best possible political advantage. I’m not thrilled with the snarky tone he takes with his opponents, but that’s his style. And unless he really screws up and kills a lot of people in the process, he’ll get re-elected in November, because Biden really IS senile (relatively speaking) and he is the only person who is competing for Trump’s job.
The really scary thing for me would be if the scientists are three ways wrong and Trump is right that: New York DOESN’T need 40,000 more ventilators, that the virus WON’T kill ten times more people than the flu, and that it will be essentially gone by Easter Sunday. Scary, because that would discredit science in America enough to kill our chances of competing on a level playing field with the scientific research being conducted in other countries. As far as science is concerned, we’d become a third-world country.
@George Wells: What if real science is reborn? Consensus science is the worst thing that ever happened, chasing grants to come to a desired conclusion altering data to get money.
@kitt:
I did research and analytical chemistry for a succession of companies that owned my lab, and I saw many instances of doctored data led by desired conclusions, but no grants were ever at stake, so that part of your question I cannot authoritatively address.
While I was in school, I never dreamed that professional competition would present an ethical dilemma to lab personnel who SHOULD be focused solely on the accuracy of their results. Sadly, life was not what I expected. Every time data was manipulated, the results were inaccurate at best, and damaging to the company’s bottom line at worst. Even more sadly, scientists in all fields are routinely influenced by all the wrong things: ego, politics, greed. That pie-in-the-sky graduate who sought innocence and dedication to the truth in the pursuit of “pure science” was sorely mistaken in his expectation that science is different than any other human endeavor.
“Human” means ALL of the myriad frailties of the species, and those frailties dog us in everything we do. For GOD’S sake, even priests diddle little boys! So I’m not really sure what you mean or expect when you say “What if science is reborn.” I’m guessing that you are proposing a “rebirth” in the same sense that faith-based “rebirth” suggests a second chance to get something right – all well and fine if there is some REAL incentive to correct past mistakes. But just as many criminals relapse – including those priests once caught and reassigned only to diddle again – people are only human, and our experience has been that there is virtually no threat of punishment that dependably deters “human nature.”
Just to make matters worse, all this “bad” science is being bought and paid for by commercial interest, one of the most powerful incentives to do mischief. I am not sure how the two could be separated. How would a capitalistic commercial concern fund pure science without biasing results by interjecting the details of its own self-interest? I dealt with that dilemma for 25 years and found no satisfactory answer.
@George Wells:
Do you think we need to seriously — culturally I mean — separate science from R&D?
R&D has an agenda. Science does not.
Do you think we could build a new scientific academy that is insulated from commercial concerns?
@Nathan Blue:
Interesting question.
I would first suggest that every last human being has a whole host of self-interests and personal biases complicating his or her perspective on EVERYTHING. I would then observe that when you say “we,” as in “we could build a new scientific academy…” that “we” would consist of a group of those same human beings, with attendant baggage, and some one or ones would end up managing/directing/paying for the work done by such organization. You can’t separate the work of humans from human nature.
With respect to R&D, it was my experience that occasionally, R&D actually DOES conduct pure science. It is almost never by accident. Neither is it ever done as the principle goal of management. It IS done to answer questions that must be answered in order for the company to make a profit, usually, but the end result is also a contribution to the corpus of (sometimes) public knowledge. I actually was awarded a patent for a discovery I made that was absolutely worthless to my company – they gifted me a token $100 in exchange for the patent (required by law for the rights to it), so I got the better end of the deal. It was pure science, paid for more or less by accident by the company I worked for. Just for the record, companies don’t LIKE their employees to do pure science, but it is tolerated when the net contribution by R&D to the company’s bottom line is positive.
Just as another example, Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project was chock-a-block full of pure science of the noblest sort, never mind that its goal was the production of an instrument of mass destruction. There were reams of pure science discoveries paid for by that enormous effort, just as loads of valuable dividend discoveries came out of our efforts to put a man in space.
Those examples show successful science being conducted to solve specific problems of national interest, the best use of the creative spirit. Lacking a specific agenda, a “pure science” academy would wander aimlessly among the many interesting fields, ultimately picking projects that were either nonsensically irrelevant or the thinly veiled personal priorities of the people in charge of the purse-strings. I suspect that the commercial option gives the best chance to effectively employ limited resources.
@George Wells: I don’t know…I believe in the Academy….at least as it once was…
Pure, non-political, and only interested in discovery.
Call me old-fashioned….
@Nathan Blue:
Are you referring to a fictitious “Academy,” like where the “special” children under Doctor Xavier are taught to grow up into X-Men?
Or are you referring to something like the American Academy of Sciences? I was a member of that group long ago, but it was a social club, a collection of accomplished scientists who enjoyed meeting regularly and talking about the things that interested them, but that academy didn’t control or do much of anything. They had no budget to speak of, or laboratories in which to conduct research, pure or otherwise.
How did/does your hypothetical academy decide which “pure, non-political, and interesting discoveries” to work on? The Devil is in the details. SOMEBODY has to be the decider, and experience teaches us that NOBODY is in ANY way perfect. That fact stands directly in the way of a perfect World, a “pure,” non-political organization of ANY type.
Just out of curiosity, Nathan… how old are you? You seem younger, more idealistic, less cynical and insulting than the dozen or so other entities that post here regularly. I hope you manage to keep your refreshing perspective as your years accumulate.