While the Pentagon was spending billions on stockpiling smart bombs, … Alex was concentrating on building the one weapon of war he knew would be effectible: human beings. Treadstone’s mission from the first day of its inception was to build the perfect human weapon…
From The Bourne Objective by Eric van Lustbader.)
For all its unquestionable technical superiority, the US has not done well particularly in wars with relatively technically primitive adversaries in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq.
For all the high-tech encryption algorithms, hackers continue to exploit the most easily manipulated link in the information security chain continues to be the human operators.
When in comes to the arts in Singapore, the government clearly prefers to invest in concrete over concepts. Local artists struggle for funding in the midst of underutilised beautiful performance spaces.
The people currently in positions of power, who makes the decisions, simply don’t seem to get “people”, or are afraid to. The systems (social, political, etc) we have collectively set up do not allow this acknowledgement of humanity. The systems fear the greyness of humanity (because they cannot effectively handle this greyness); preferring to hide instead in the clinical black-and-white-ness of simple numbers and statistical trends and generalities.
Humans are an inevitable part of any system. Greyness is creativity. In continuing with this pattern we stand to repeatedly miss the opportunities to maximise our potential; and instead maximises the fallibility of our systems.
Realistically I guess we all need to work within these systems, and hold our expectations of humanity in check. Unless there are enough of us to fundamentally reboot the systems…
