…we live in a world that has to make decisions concerning its future under conditions of manufactured, self-inflicted insecurity. [T]he belief that modern society can control the dangers that it itself produces is collapsing — not because of its omissions and defeats but because of its triumphs.
Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (2009)
We cannot truly plan because we do not understand the future — but this is not necessarily bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (2007/2010)
HKW conference on the Anthropocene — keynote talk of historian and post-colonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
The Anthropocene Project An Opening
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin — January 12, 2013
Plans fail because of what we have called tunneling, the neglect of sources of uncertainty outside the plan itself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (2007/2010)
The ‘clash of risk cultures’, the collision of culturally different ‘risk realities’ (i.e. perceptions of risk), is developing into a fundamental problem of global politics in the twenty-first century.
…risk is not an objectively measurable quantity. What does the ‘reality’ of risk mean? Risks do not have any abstract existence in themselves. They […] count as urgent, threatening, and real or as negligible and unreal only as a result of particular cultural perceptions and evaluations.
Ulrich Beck, World At Risk (2009)
