Our thoughts and prayers are with the innocent victims of 9/11 and subsequent tragedies across the globe and also with the innocent victims of the subsequent War on Terror. We are grateful to Dr Charles Hampden-Turner for his submission to ATCA, 5 years post 9/11 -- Schizmogenesis: Towards a Development in the Concept of Asymmetry.

Dr Charles Hampden-Turner has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, UK, since 1991 and a consulting supervisor for the Institute for Manufacturing at their School of Engineering. He is co-founder of an Amsterdam based consultancy on cross-cultural communication, Trompenaars-Hampden-Turner, acquired by KPMG in 2002, but bought-back, post-Enron. He is the author of seventeen books, four with Fons Trompenaars, including Riding the Waves of Culture which has passed 180,000 copies world wide and Maps of the Mind which sold over a 100,000 copies and was a "Book of the Month Club for Science" selection. He is a pioneer of dilemma theory, or paradox theory, which he devised in 1974 in a half-way house for ex-convicts in San Francisco. He received an MBA and a DBA from the Graduate School of Business, Harvard University, after studying history at Cambridge. From 2002-2005 he was the Goh Tjoe Kok Distinguished Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He was the Cambridge University Hutchinson Visiting Scholar to China in 2003 and toured Chinese Universities at the invitation of the Li Ka Shing Foundation. He is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, an Honorary Fellow of Arts and Business. He is a past recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships and a past winner of the Douglas McGregor Memorial Award.

Dear DK and Colleagues

Re: 5 years post 9/11 -- Schizmogenesis: Towards a Development in the Concept of Asymmetry

I began receiving ATCA Socratic Dialogues only a few weeks ago, for which I am grateful, and since then, I have been trying to tease out the concept of asymmetry. What follows are my own reflections on the topic 5 years post 9/11.

One characteristic of asymmetry is a relentless ambiguity. We are used to murderers and to the suicidal, but suicidal murderers are perplexing. What happens to "deterrence"? This new challenge seems to "spook" us and we are not far from collective hysteria. We outgun our opponents by at least a hundred to one and yet we are afraid! My mentor was the social anthropologist Gregory Bateson. He coined a word which never even got into a social science dictionary, much less a general dictionary. He described the progressive splitting of ideas in a culture as Schizmogenesis. He wrote a prophetic essay on German fascism in 1937 in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a book still in print today. German culture was characterised by nationalism and socialism, draconian discipline and wild disorder, huge physical courage combined with existential cowardice, love of insiders and an all-consuming hatred of outsiders. And these values formed vicious circles, biting each other like Uroboros, yet escalating in intensity.

I find the concept almost impossible to convey in writing, yet a few moments with a movie camera says it all. You cut from goose-stepping soldiers to Krystal Nacht and flaming torches, "better a terrible end than an endless terror" as the brownshirts liked to say.

Or look at the last ten minutes of The Godfather. They have chosen to massacre the rival Mafia family at the least likely moment, during the christening of their own child. The camera cuts from the christening service to the massacre, from the Sacred to the Profane, from life beginning to life ending, as a married couple are machine-gunned in their bed, from total Innocence to utter Malice. In the film, religion is used as the cloak for murder, much as the Ku Klux Klan set fire to a cross, the symbol of compassion ablaze with race hate.

These are, of course, deliberate assaults on the human nervous system. But some of our asymmetries occur without our intending this. Take the Vietnam War and the much publicised "body count" which showed that America was "winning". Surely if we kill many more of them than they of us we win, right? 2 million Vietnamese lost their lives, very asymmetrical, much as the ratio of Lebanese deaths to Israelis today. That is why the Americans and Israelis persist with such vehemence. Soon now the enemy will break and our harsh necessity will be vindicated. We can forgive ourselves. But unfortunately the Vietcong and Hezbollah believed they were winning and perhaps they were, because each side was counting different "gains".

Every time the Americans won their lopsided victories in Vietnam they were killing more enemies but causing thousands to defect to the enemy's side. Remember France's "victory" in Algiers. It broke the FLN through a regime of torture, a great silence fell and then the entire population burst into the streets acclaiming the "losers". One can win militarily even as one is losing politically and ideologically.

Let us for the moment try to identify with the luckless civilian population during these brutal wars. Let us suppose that they heartily detest both sides, which seems to me likely. But they cannot stay neutral. For the sake of survival they must join one side or the other. Which side will they choose? They will choose the side that best knows who they are. They have a good chance of saving their life if they join the Vietcong or Hezbollah because their allegiance can be read after a fashion. Also the resistance can help them dig a shelter, share their food, while Americans may tend to distrust all "gooks" even those formally allied to them. They rain defoliants impartially on everyone and "destroy the village in order to save it", the "pitiful, helpless giant in a quagmire."

One major complaint against terrorists is their tactic of indiscriminate savagery. They blow up innocent Australian tourists in Bali and kill ordinary Spanish commuters. But if the terrorists are genuinely less discriminating than we are then take heart, we will win in the end. The Algerian population turned against the Islamists after a particularly grisly series of massacres. My question is whether on most occasions we discriminate even more poorly than they do, notwithstanding "smart" bombs which may be able to take out a particular house but have no idea who else is sheltering there. "Smart" bombs are socially quite dumb. The chance of being killed accidentally by Americans is very high indeed. If you emerge from a side street in Baghdad within 25 feet of an American vehicle you can expect to be machine gunned whatever were your real intentions.

It is time we took a hard look at "terror". What is "shock and awe" if not terrifying and intended to terrify? Let us suppose that everyone suffers moments of terror before they die violently. If we routinely kill ten of them for every one of us then who is the chief instigator of terror? Can we only "defeat terror" by creating more of it than they do! The War on Terror makes no sense at all if we ourselves become the source. The only real "weapons of mass destruction" were our own.

The West uses a Rational Model which makes eminent sense to us but for our opponents is the mark of Satan. We reason that people do not want to die and can always use money. So we develop the capacity to kill all Iranians around fifty times over and offer HUGE bribes of USD 25 million for anyone who will betray their leaders to us. It makes good sense doesn't it? Americans have always had bounty hunters. But when you concentrate on over-kill in the way we have, do not be surprised when the answer comes back, "but we are not afraid to die." It is the only possible answer to the level of threat we have prepared and refuse to relinquish. As for offering USD 25 million to betray your leaders, it amazing what few takers there are! Perhaps "money makes the world go around" not as perfectly as we imagine. In the meantime they see us as subverting their faith, which in a sense we are.

What is starting to happen is that our opponents are deliberately presenting us with dilemmas and these unhinge us. Imagine a good looking young woman approaching a group of Americans with a bunch of flowers. How sweet! How charming! Now suppose that just 5% of those bunches have a bomb inside them and you want to go home again. A lot of innocent young women are going to die who only wanted to greet you! You cannot just arrest her, she will detonate the charge as you try. De Mendez could be just the beginning. The present crisis will demand the sacrifice of our values upon the altar of security.

We have to drop this pretence that we are "too moral" to be able to talk to extremists and that any concession we make is appeasement, We disagree. We both draw on the weapons we have at hand, Our weapons, launched from far away to save casualties, are generally less accurate then theirs and cause more "collateral damage". That we were not aiming for women and children is no excuse. You cannot build and run an Empire without being a more effective killer than your subject peoples. Is it not time we faced up to this?

Best wishes

Charles Hampden-Turner

[ENDS]

We look forward to your further thoughts, observations and views. Thank you.

Best wishes

For and on behalf of DK Matai, Chairman, Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance (ATCA)

---

ATCA: The Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance is a philanthropic expert initiative founded in 2001 to understand and to address complex global challenges. ATCA conducts collective Socratic dialogue on global opportunities and threats arising from climate chaos, radical poverty, organised crime, extremism, informatics, nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, artificial intelligence and financial systems. Present membership of ATCA is by invitation only and has over 5,000 distinguished members: including several from the House of Lords, House of Commons, EU Parliament, US Congress & Senate, G10's Senior Government officials and over 1,500 CEOs from financial institutions, scientific corporates and voluntary organisations as well as over 750 Professors from academic centres of excellence worldwide.

---

Intelligence Unit | mi2g | tel +44 (0) 20 7712 1782 fax +44 (0) 20 7712 1501 | internet www.mi2g.net
mi2g: Winner of the Queen's Award for Enterprise in the category of Innovation

[ENDS]

intentBlog:

5 Years Post 9/11 -- Schizmogenesis and Asymmetry

mi2g is at the leading edge of building secure on-line banking, broking and trading architectures. The principal applications of its technology are: 1. D2-Banking; 2. Digital Risk Management; and 3. Bespoke Security Architecture. For more information about mi2g, please visit: www.mi2g.net