The Art of Victory: Strategies for Personal Success and Global Survival in a Changing World [精装] 1416524703
Award-winning historian and global strategist Gregory R. Copley draws from decades of experi-ence advising political and military leadership to offer a holistic and balanced view of simple success strategies, with 28 maxims for survival and prosperity in the advancing wave of social, technological, and environmental change we now face. Not since Sun-tzu's The Art of War has a blueprint for success offered so much to so many, with lessons that speak to every walk of life. In The Art of Victory, we learn that victory itself begins with a single act. . . is the principal goal of a society...is beyond the power of any individual. . . is never created or sustained by weakness. . . can never be total, and this is its beauty. . . cannot be bought or sold; it can only be won. . . and much more.
From the halls of political power to the corporate boardroom to the living room, the timeless lessons in The Art of Victory will ensure that individuals and societies not just survive but thrive in the new century.
Turn and take one last look around at your life, at the life we humans have built over the past few thousand years. It is already gone. The granite columns of antiquity remain, though they crumble, and humanity, more vast in its numbers, remembers little of its past. This great upheaval we see today is how the epochs change.
Our ego, our strong and vital sense of self, tells us that this era of change is different from all past human experience, that the future is unchartable and unmanageable. But that is not so. We can shape the future, as we have always done, perhaps more so now than ever before. There are golden times again for us to make.
And yet we are in the eye of the hurricane, an Age of Global Transformation, a pivotal time for humanity. The pace of change has been accelerating, and not just in science and technology: Human numbers are surging, and flooding into urban, mostly coastal, populations. As with organisms at any level, increasing the population within a confined space generates activity, friction, heat. We cling to the known world, but are also fixated by the promises and fears of the future. But we have forgotten that in the past mankind was more aware of the tools of survival with which nature equipped us.
It is approaching four decades since Alvin Toffler, in Future Shock, noted that humanity was entering an age when the pace, scale, and embracing nature of change would be overwhelming. Add to that the impact of compounded population growth, coupled with climate change. Little wonder that much of humanity feels a deep sense of unease, and searches for answers, though futurists John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene, writing in Megatrends 2000 in 1990, optimistically forecast "a period of stunning technological innovation, unprecedented economic opportunity, surprising political reforms, and great cultural rebirth."
They were not wrong, but they foresaw only part of the emerging world.
There are indeed many reasons for optimism, but the obsession with current technology and with imagined future innovations obscures the fact that human nature itself has not changed. It is only when faced with great threats to our existence -- or merely to our comfort -- that we contemplate who we are, and what we must do to reach that promising future. And we have largely forgotten the implicit, innate laws of survival, which remain critical to our ability to cope with the massive change we now confront.
Man, unique among species, uses technology to improve his chances for survival. These tools enable, with increasing certainty, the existence of an ever-greater number of humans in an environment once only capable of supporting far fewer people. Massive population growth coupled with vast changes in weather and the globalization of communications and the tools of human interaction, such as computing, and abstraction and "remote engagement," have created vast swaths of people disconnected from any sense of the past, motivated solely by the present and self, yet with ready access to cheap technologies. Through such changes do we now see, for example, great tools in the hands of the historically illiterate. "Knowledge" has replaced wisdom.
This maelstrom, gathering pace over two centuries -- like a burgeoning hurricane over the ocean -- has obliterated from our consciousness the intrinsic principles of human societal survival. But the survival of our bloodlines and societies is our victory over nature and our rivals. The reality is that we have seen great change before. Not on the same scale. Not at the same speed. Not with the same glittering technologies. There are core principles -- for the moment obscured by the accumulating detritus of centuries -- which can allow us to find our horizons in this new age. They can give us comfort and direction, and enable us to control our own environment, as individuals and as societies.
Society has become, perhaps inescapably, obsessed with change and the fear that permanence is illusory, and that durable items and the structures of the past are but obstacles to our access to the future. But this obscures the reality that change is only possible because it builds on an historical base, a constantly expanding base, of lessons and evolving tools. There is an acceptance that calculators and computers have replaced the need to be able to do simple arithmetic. But what if everyone forgot the principles of mathematics? Even this would not present a problem until a crisis arose, but somewhere, someone has to understand how the process works; how the tools of society and victory were -- and are -- built. An understanding of that context builds confidence in facing future crises.
To control our own destinies, we need to reach back and rediscover the aspects of human nature which guide our survival instinct, and then apply this understanding to our Age of Global Transformation. This book, based on a considerably larger historical study I compiled for the intelligence and strategic policy community on the concepts and origins of victory, looks at how future trends -- many even more surprising than those forecast by Toffler, Naisbitt, and Aburdene -- are emerging. More important, it looks at how we can cope with these changes and master our own destiny.
This is not the work of a Nostradamus. It is based solely on some four decades of intelligence work, on observation, and on managing a complex information-gathering network with hundreds of field collectors and thousands of sources. It is the result of looking always to history, of functioning daily within an existing current intelligence apparatus, and of working over these decades with governments, institutions, and leaders in attempting to solve the major problems facing societies. What has become clear during that time is that out there are the answers to most of our challenges in a rapidly transforming world. These answers are in our genes and in our historical experience.
Understanding How Our Past Relates to Our Future
We know that global warming threatens coastal environments and island communities around the world and the viability of life in regions like the arid lands of China's Xinjiang Province or Africa's Sahel. But we cannot know how aware the people of the lower Indus River Valley were that their world was changing as the last Ice Age drew to an end around 10000 b.c.e. By 8000 b.c.e, the major cities of the lower Indus Valley were beneath the sea. Higher up the Indus Valley, a number of major population centers continued to thrive for several thousand years after the last Ice Age, and archaeologists began in the twentieth century to probe their ruins and runes for the secrets of their civilization. Of greater significance, however, was the work begun at the dawn of the twenty-first century into the secrets of the cities that for ten millennia had lain hidden on the bed of the Arabian Sea.
Glaciers melted and the sea rose, in history's forgotten time before Egyptian pharaohs. The changes faced by the inhabitants of these cities were gradual. The waters lapped incessantly higher over the years. Societies had time to adjust, and to drift away to higher ground.
Even earlier, the development of human language was slow, haltingly and erratically enabling the development of concepts, because concepts require the use of words and definitions of things. This enabled mankind to move from nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes and clans to fixed locations, learning how to engage in agriculture. And as agriculture ensured consistent food supplies, towns and cities became feasible, emerging in the lower Indus Valley, and at Jericho and other locations in what is now Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The transformation and urbanization of societies through agriculture moved slowly, steadily, and irrevocably, in most places, although some clans of hunter-gatherers ignored the transformation of humanity and persisted, even into the twenty-first century, in their nomadic way of life.
Society was again transformed with the explosion of literacy following the development of movable type and printing in 1450. The portability of knowledge caused by this development created new wealth and power. Those societies with widespread literacy and easily reproduced languages became prosperous and dominant.
Civilization profoundly altered direction yet again with the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century, and then still more with the Industrial Revolution, which agriculture and urbanization had combined to create and which the growing complexity of human society had demanded.
All this is our heritage. But -- our egos tell us -- these upheavals are in the past, and we do not need to learn them again. We are different. The future is different. We have tamed change.
Or so the people living today in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius believe. No volcanic eruption will again rob them of their homes and lives. Despite the patterns of history, people are more densely packed into the towns beneath Vesuvius than at any other time in history, even though the mountain has erupted violently many times in recent centuries. The famous eruption occurred nearly two thousand years ago -- it was in 79 c.e. that Pompeii and Herculaneum were swamped with lava and pyroclastic flows and with scalding ash -- but it has erupted again about three dozen times since then, most recently in 1944.
Life changes constantly, and we still have not absorbed many of the changes which occurred even during the twentieth century.
After World War II, in the triumphant nations of the Allied West, a "baby boom" created a population bubble in the rich, industrialized societies. This demographic trend skewed and indeed paralyzed the economic and political thinking of our present generation. This moving demographic bloc of "baby boomers," who are now approaching retirement, will also pass. Yet few are thinking about the economic consequences beyond this blip. And what if once again totally new reproductive patterns transform the shape of ...
| 出版社 | Threshold Editions |
|---|---|
| 作者 | Gregory R. Copley |