Saving Rotterdam From Destruction Arie de Geus (1999)

Imagine that it is 1920 and you have somehow been granted absolute power to predict the future.

You happen to visit the mayor of Rotterdam and, during that time, you describe in vivid detail what is going to happen to his town over the next 25 years.

Thus, in an otherwise perfectly normal working day, the mayor hears about the advent of the Weimar Republic, hyperinflation, the 1929 stock exchange crash, the Great Depression that followed, the rise of Nazism in Germany with its (for Rotterdam) damaging economic policy of autarchy, the outbreak of the second world war, the carpet bombing of the town’s city centre and, finally, the systematic destruction of the town’s port installation during the calamitous winter of 1945.

The mayor listens to this information placidly. He gives every sign of believing you. And then he asks, “If you were in my shoes, hearing all of this, amid all the other opinions and facts that reach me during the course of my day, what would you reasonably expect me to do about this information?“

What is it reasonable to expect the mayor to do?

When I ask this question in discussion groups, we always reach the same answer: there is nothing the mayor can be expected to do.

Even if he gives your prediction a higher degree of credibility than most of the other information which reached him, he would have neither the courage nor the powers of persuasion to take the far-reaching decision that is required by such a prediction.

The future cannot be predicted. But, even if it could, we would not dare to act on the prediction.

Credit: Arie de Geus

Comment: Suppose a time traveler returned to the present day from 2120 and told you in graphic detail the devastation inflicted on the world due to global warming. You already have a pretty good idea of the consequences, but now you know. Do you think you could do anything? Even with perfect knowledge, even if we could accurately predict the future, we rarely have the ability to act on that knowledge.

Source: The Living Company by Arie de Geus

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