Asking Only Answers
assessing our web of modern risks without questions
It’s the height of hubris to approach an answer without a question. And having just looked up the meaning of hubris, I now know it’s either 1) a food-borne pathogen or 2) the condition of not knowing or caring about all that you don’t know…either way, I don’t know or care but it sounds like something to avoid. Therefore, I should start this answer right off with some questions, such as:
- How did I go from a hopeful short story writer to a CIA case officer then to an ex-CIA case officer and then on to a non-fiction writer and consultant focused on modern risks?
- How can we understand insideus risks if we can’t see them and I can’t spell n’sydeeous?
- If I say, after a dozen years of assessing some serious risks in some “are you serious?” situations, that I now see how modern risks form a real web that entangles us in surprising ways, do I really have to include a sweet picture of a real web to complete this metaphor?
- and lastly but buried-the-lead-most-importantly, seriously, why on earth are we not being creative enough in addressing the many risks of which we are creating more than enough?
Hopefully one day I’ll have learned enough about hubris to throughly cook poultry or to accept that I can’t answer a great many questions. But not just yet. Because, through these pages and perhaps through discussions with my fellow readers here, I want to answer that last question…or at least ask it creatively enough so that someone else may.
This is a series about our web of modern risks, from terrorism to terroristic weather, from cyber crime to cyber snooping, from shrinking economies to spreading conflicts, from disruptive technologies to slumbering traditions. This is a series about asking meaningful questions after having spent so much time in my previous careers asking only answers…and sweet pictures of real webs.
