Hello. My name is Jesan Sorells and this is the Leadership Lessons
from the Great Books podcast. Bonus. There's
usually no book reading on these bonus episodes.
These are usually long form rants, raves, or interviews
with interesting people doing interesting things at the spacious
intersection of literature and leadership.
Because listening to me talk with interesting people about interesting projects
is still better than reading and trying to understand yet
another business book.
In the continued spirit of violating our own
rules and boundaries this year on the show, or at
least maybe not this year, maybe this quarter, we are introducing to you
today a short essay that relates to leadership
even though it happens to be a critique of literature
and storytelling from the late nineteen thirties.
I discovered this essay as background to yet another
essay I was reading that was critiquing the
postmodern problem, the uniquely postmodern problem
of providing narrative advice or wisdom in
a postmodern world of fragmented communications
to people who are desperately in need of, well,
wisdom. In reading the essay
that we are going to cover today on the show which comes in at 14
pages and is subdivided into 19 different sections,
it is not an easy one to mentally digest.
However, on this show we have covered many difficult texts and
we aren't going to stop now.
The author of the essay we are analyzing for leaders
today would appreciate, I think, the ultimate
conceit of what we are attempting to achieve on our podcast
by discussing his work and leveraging insights
from it to offer solutions to a core problem that
bedevils us in leadership even almost a
century later, especially
at the end of our fourth turning.
Today, we will be reading excerpts from and
summarizing some of the interesting ideas within
the essay, The Storyteller, Reflections on the Work of
Nikolai Lesko by Walter
Benjamin. Leaders.
The communicability of experience is decreasing, which has
damaging results for the transference of wisdom based on life
experience and book knowledge across generations.
And despite our best efforts in the West to locate it, the abyss of
the problem seems to have
no bottom.
And so we're going to pick up today from The Storyteller,
Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov by Walter
Benjamin. You can get a copy of this essay. It is
open source online. You can actually get it
from, Stanford University, MIT,
Cambridge, and a number of other locations
online. I wouldn't recommend going and grabbing the
PDF of it. It's worth your time as a leader to read.
Starting at the beginning, we're gonna read section one paragraph
one. Familiar though his name may be to us, the
storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present
force. He has already become something remote from us and something that is
getting even more distant. To present someone like Lescov as
a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us, but rather increasing
our distance from him. Viewed from a certain distance, the great simple outlines
which define the storyteller stand out in him
or rather they become visible in him just as in a rock a
human head or an animal's body may appear to an observer at the proper distance
and angle of vision. This distance
and this angle of vision are prescribed for us by
an experience which we may have almost every day.
It teaches us that the art of storytelling is coming to
an end. Less and less frequently do we
encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly.
More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to
hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to
us, the securest among our possessions were taken from
us, the ability to exchange
experiences. One reason for
this phenomenon is obvious. Experience has fallen in
value, and it looks as if it is continuing to fall into
bottomlessness. Every glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a
new low, that our picture, not only of the external world, but of the
moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never
thought possible. With the first World War, our process
began to become apparent, which has not halted since then.
Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the
battlefield grown silent, not richer, but poorer in communicable
experience? What ten years later was poured
out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth
to mouth, and there was nothing remarkable about that. For
never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than
strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic
experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical
warfare, moral experience by those in power.
A generation that had gone to school on a horse drawn street car
now stood under the open sky, a countryside in which nothing
remained unchanged but the clouds. And beneath these
clouds, in a field of force, of destructive torrents and
explosions, was the tiny, fragile
human body.
There are several points in that first section of the
essay that resonate, with me,
particularly as a person who reads literature looking,
searching, examining words of the
past and seeking out wisdom that can be
applied in the far flung future from when
those words were originally written.
I wasn't the only one looking for wisdom in
leadership and when you look into and
explore and learn a little bit about the life of Walter
Benjamin who is a name that I had
known, or at least I had recognized floating around
underneath several other essays that I had read
over the course of many years. You begin to realize that
his ideas about the need
for experience and his philosophy and cultural critique
of media influenced many many
folks including Marshall McLuhan and
many others down through the twentieth century.
Walter Benjamin was born July 1992
and died 09/26/1940.
He was a German philosopher, cultural critique, media
theorist, and of course an essayist.
He was associated with the Frankfurt school in Germany which
automatically tags him as a Marxist. However,
he was a contextual thinker who combined insights from
German idealism because he was German, Romanticism,
of course Marxism, Jewish mysticism, we'll talk a little
bit more about that later, and Neo Kantianism,
to understand a post world war one Germany and a
world in general that was in the
intergerum between the end of world war one and the beginning of world war
two consistently and permanently in chaos.
Sound familiar? He was friends with the
playwright Berthold Brecht whose plays we will be covering later on this
year on this podcast so stay tuned for that. He's
also related by marriage to Hannah
Arendt whose book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann,
we will also talk about on this show in June.
That's gonna be a vibrant conversation that you won't want to miss.
Benjamin considered his research and writing to be theological in
focus though he eschewed recourse to understanding the world
through the lens of either a Christian or the presence of a Jewish
God. He was much like Kierkegaard
looking for the transcendent without actually
wanting to talk about or deal with the
actual meaning of the transcendent.
In 1940 to escape the encroaching Third Reich
who was looking for him desperately as they were for any intellectual Jew
in Europe, Benjamin committed suicide at the age of
48 and he had always flirted by the way he'd always
flirted with suicide, and flirted with thoughts
of suicide. So he even had friends
who had committed suicide. So this was not something
that was sudden or an idea that was
unknown to Benjamin. Upon his
death, his work achieved more recognition than in the
decades than in the decades following his
death, than it ever did in
his life. He had the unfortunate
bad fortune, depending upon your perspective, to be born at
a time when a man such as him
was merely seen as a person howling
impotently at the moon.
Back to the essay, back to the storyteller reflections on the work of
Nikolai Lesko by Walter Benjamin.
By the way, I think Benjamin would be fascinated by the presence of the
internet. I think he would drown in the deluge
of social media but I also think that he would
have severe critiques for a communication
culture in which instant communication
that would seem to say nothing actually now
has fully manifested at scale.
But don't let me try to convince you. Let's
listen to what Benjamin has to say.
We're gonna read section five of his
essay. And I quote, the earliest
symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the
rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes
the novel from the story and from the epic in a
narrower sense is its essential dependence on the
book. The dissemination of the novel becomes possible
only with the invention of printing. One can be handed on orally. The wealth
of the epic is of a different kind from what constitutes the stock and
trade of the novel. What differentiates the novel from all
of the forms of prose literature, the fairy tale, the legend, even the
novella is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes
into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in
particular. The storyteller takes what he tells from experience,
his own or that reported by others, and he in turn makes
it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The
novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the
solitary individual who is no longer able to express himself by giving
examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled
and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means
to carry the incommesurable to extremes in the representation of
human life. In the midst of life's fullness and
through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence
of the profound perplexity of the living.
Even the first great book of the genre, Don Quixote,
teaches how the spiritual greatness, the boldness, the
helpfulness of one of the noblest of men, Don Quixote, are
completely devoid of counsel and do not contain the slightest scintilla
of wisdom. If now and then in the course of the centuries,
efforts have been made most effectively perhaps in Wilhelm
Meister's Wanderer to implant instructions in
the novel. These attempts have always amounted to a modification of the
novel form. The Bildungsroman, on the other
hand, does not deviate in any way from the basic structure of the novel.
By integrating the social process with the development of a person,
it bestows the most fragile frangible justification on
the order determining it. The legitimacy
it stands it provides stands in direct opposition to
reality, particularly in the bildungsroman.
It is the inadequacy that is
actualized.
The nature, the true nature of storytelling
there put forth by Benjamin
is that of a process
that should come out of the oral tradition. Right?
It should somehow deliver
profundity. It should somehow deliver wisdom.
The storyteller, to quote from Benjamin, takes what he tells from
experience, his own or that reported by others, and he in
turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his
tale. The technology of the novel, and we'll talk
a little bit about technology not in this section but in the next area, the
next part, the technology of the novel disrupts
that just like the technology of the cell phone or the
technology of the movie camera or the technology of
the computer or the technology of the Internet or the
technology of the car. Technology seeks
ruthlessly to disrupt the
transference of wisdom via telling of a story
from one human to another and of course at scale
this fractures and has terrible consequences
for all of us. This is because
storytelling is an artisanal form of communication that
can be tied deeply to craftsmanship care,
and the best parts of articulating wisdom from
contending with the boundaries of material reality.
By the way, this is reflected in the book that we
covered last month in our bonus episode, Matthew
Crawford's shop class as soul
craft. Storytelling,
which again is an extension of the oral tradition
as Benjamin noted was killed probably five
eighty five years ago by the gradual grinding forces of the
technology of the printing press.
The nature of the technology that underlies the
novel itself resists the transmission of
wisdom in a way that the oral tradition does not.
There's an example that Benjamin points to, in
his essay, and it's in section
six seven, section seven, in the second paragraph.
It's a it's a story, that he relates
from, the Greeks, and I'm gonna read you the story.
He says this and I quote, the first storyteller of the Greeks was Herodotus.
In the fourteenth chapter of the third book of his histories, there is a story
from which much can be learned. It deals with, Semonites.
When the Egyptian king Semonites had been beaten and captured by the Persian king
Cambyses, Cambyses was bent on humbling his prisoner.
He gave orders to place Semoniteis on the road along which the
Persian triumphal procession was to pass, and he further
arranged that the prisoner should see his daughter pass by as a
maid going to the well with her pitcher. While
all the Egyptians were lamenting and bewailing the spectacle,
Pasa Minaitis, sorry, stood alone, mute and
motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground. And when
presently he saw his son who was being taken along in the procession to be
executed, he likewise remained unmoved.
But when afterwards he recognized one of his servants, an old
impoverished man in the ranks of the prisoners, he
beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs
of deepest mourning.
Make from that what you will in our modern
time, But that's a story,
not a novel, not a novella, not a movie,
not a TikTok, not a Facebook post, not a tweet,
not a YouTube video. That
is a document. That is
a set of information, right, that does more than
just give us facts. It gives
us a feeling. It might be a feeling we don't like. It might be a
feeling we have to struggle with. It might be a feeling that causes us psychic
trauma, but it is a feeling that comes
directly out of the oral tradition nonetheless.
The preference of people for consuming information via new technologies,
which are many of which I've already mentioned like the printing press, novels, newspapers,
magazines, cell phones, even social media versus accepting received
wisdom via an oral tradition has a psychological
basis. People like
the new. That's why people read the
news. Heck, this goes back even
further than Walter Benjamin if we want to get
real. When the Apostle Paul was going
to speak to folks in Athens,
the men of Athens were curious to hear from him. You can
read about this in Acts seventeen and and eighteen. They were curious to
hear from him because, and I quote, they always
wanted to hear about new things.
Back to the essay, back to the storyteller, reflections on the work of
Nikolai Lesko by Walter Benjamin.
By the way, in this, essay, he does, in
his attempt to analyze storytelling
wisdom and the transfer the psychological transfer of
wisdom from one generation and even from one
society to another. Benjamin does critique
the work of the Russian writer Nikolai Lesko. And I'll say a
little bit about him. Lesko was a contemporary
of Tolstoy and even Dostoyevsky,
but he was less read than both Tolstoy and
Dostoyevsky. As a matter of fact,
in the essay, Benjamin has this
has this quote when he talks about craftsmanship
and he says and I quote, This craftsmanship storytelling was actually
regarded as a craft by Lascaux himself. Writing he says
in one of his letters is to me no liberal art but a craft it
cannot come as a surprise that he felt bonds with craftsmanship but
faced industrial technology as a stranger
Tolstoy must have understood this occasionally touches this nerve of
Lescov storytelling tap to sorry. Tolstoy who must
have understood this occasionally touches this nerve of
Lescov's storytelling talent when he calls him the first
man who, quote, pointed out the inadequacy of economic
progress. It is strange that Dostoevsky is so widely read,
but I simply cannot comprehend why Lescov is not
read. He is a truthful writer,
Close quote. That's from Tolstoy. Right?
And I think the reason why Leskov was not
read and Dostoevsky was is because of the impact of
nihilism. A craftsman attempting
to deal with the bonds of material reality without
being nihilistic or defeatist
particularly in the early days of the Industrial Revolution
when no one knew anything and the industrial revolution in
a Russia that had just come out of serfdom,
well, that writer was going to be seen as naive
at best and uninteresting at worst.
Particularly as a formerly oppressed people. We're in
a rush to consume the new.
So we're gonna pick up with section eight.
I'm gonna read this paragraph from Walter Benjamin,
and I quote, there is nothing
that commends a story to memory more effectively than the
chaste compactness, which precludes psychological
analysis. And the more natural the process by which the
storyteller foregoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the
story's claim to a place in the memory of the listener. The more completely
it is integrated into his own experience, the greater will be his inclination
to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or
later. This process of assimilation,
which takes place in-depth, requires a state of relaxation, which is
becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical
relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation.
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His
nesting places, the activities that are intimately associated with boredom
are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well.
With this is the gift of listening is lost,
and the community of listeners disappears.
For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost
when the stories are no longer retained. It It is lost because there is no
more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to.
The more self forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what
he listens to impressed upon his memory.
When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tale in such
a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by
itself. This then is the nature of the
web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled.
This is how today it is becoming unraveled at all its
ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the
ambiance of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.
Matthew b
Arnold would agree, the author of shop class as soul
craft. He would agree that
this process of assimilation, which takes place in-depth, requires a state of
relaxation, which is becoming rarer and rarer.
There are authors, some of whom will remain
unnamed, who have said and who have agreed
with Benjamin on this one as well, and I quote, if sleep
is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental
relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg
of experience. Well, what is the thing we
demand from our technologies today? What is the thing we demand
from even our stories?
Well, we demand that we never be relaxed because we live in a
world of anxiety which is the obverse of
depression. We demand that we never be bored.
I think of the titular line from
Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana.
Oh well, whatever, nevermind. Yeah, okay. That's not
the titular line. The titular line is here we are now.
Entertain us. The
yapping cry of the twentieth century was to be
entertained particularly after the horrors of both World War one
and World War two. I mean the Harlem Renaissance
and the jitterbugging of jazz of folks in jazz clubs occurred at the
exact same time in New York City as the
jitterbugging and entertaining of folks in the Weimar Republic occurred
in Germany at the exact same time that
f Scott Fitzgerald was noting
that Gatsby couldn't find himself no matter how
much booze and how much dancing and how many
women he bedded
spastic activity does not bring wisdom
medicating for anxiety and for depression does not
bring wisdom being
entertained constantly either by
a supercomputer in your pocket or by other people at a
party does not bring wisdom
boredom silence sleep
these things allow us to integrate
all of the wide variety of experiences that we have in
our lives that we seem
to take for granted and they allow us to
use our brains which by the way we talk a lot about evolution in
our society and cultures this is just a side thought we talk a lot about
evolution in terms of natural selection but we don't talk
about evolution in terms of the evolution of silence
when the Egyptian king who beat
his head upon seeing his
house servant in a Persian procession
when he beat his head with frustration he did
so in a world where noise did not
abound he actually had to think about
it unfettered
capitalism progressive socialism authoritarian marxism
quote, unquote our democracy or constitutional republicanism
can't provide wisdom to the postmodern
western man. A man drowning in
noise so loud he can't even get bored enough
to relax, much less to hear
himself think.
The essay that drove me in the direction
of this particular essay and got me thinking about this, which I
think is relevant for our podcast and for the leaders
listening to it, the essay that drove me here was out of the
Hedgehog Review by a fellow named Alexander
Stern, published this year,
in 2025 in late January.
And the title of the essay is, the story of advice,
Narrative Wisdom in a Fragmented World.
And, in the essay right at the beginning, he relates
this, and I quote, in a column for The Point
magazine, Agnes Callard, a philosopher and professor at the
University of Chicago, comes out against advice.
She makes her case using an anecdote involving the novelist Margaret Atwood.
Asks about her advice for a group of aspiring writers, Atwood is stumped
and ends up offering little more than bromides, encouraging them to write every day and
to try not to be inhibited. Callard excuses
Atwood's banality, blaming it on the fundamental incoherence of the
thing she was asked to produce.
Advice for Callard occupies a nebulous terrain between what she terms,
quote, instructions and, quote, coaching. You give someone instructions,
she writes, as to how to achieve a goal that is itself instrumental to
some further goal, Whereas coaching affects in someone
a transformative orientation towards something of intrinsic value
and athletic or intellectual or even social triumph.
The problem with advice, according to Callard, is that it tries to reduce and
condense the time intensive personal work of coaching into
instructions. The young person is not approaching
Atwood for instructions on how to operate Microsoft Word. This is from
Callard's writing that Stern is quoting. Nor
is she making the unreasonable demand that Atwood become her writing
coach. She wants the kind of value she would get from the second, but she
wants it given to her in the manner of the first, but there
is no there.
There. Close quote. I agree
with mister Stern. There is no there. There.
And in his critique of instructions in his critique of
coaching and advice he mentioned
benjamin essay and thus got us here.
By the way, other writers have commented
on this problem of there being no there there.
Steven Pressfield talks about it in his book, The War of
Art, and Seth Godin talks about it
in his great non business business book
linchpin. One of the ways I think to overcome
this problem of a lack of boredom are our
confusion with instructions and coaching with wisdom.
One of the ways to overcome this postmodern
deeply fragmented incoherence we have in the world.
One of the ways leaders I think can be helpful to have the positional
authority and the status to be able to insist
on a certain standard. One of the things that we need to do, one of
the things I think that would that would benefit us one of
the pieces of well advice I would give
leaders is that the reprioritization of memory
has to occur and it has to occur as a way to deal with the
death of the past But it also has to occur
as a tool, designed to create epistemic meaning for
the future. Because this is the thing that we have been
robbed of as leaders in our postmodern era,
which makes us open to all kinds of information, but
not real wisdom based on promises
delivered by split tongued technologists.
So you may say that I don't,
I'm a I'm a little bit of a split tongue hypocrite myself. You might say
that. You might say, hey. You have a podcast and you offer
advice and you offer instruction and you read these pieces
of literature and you you read these essays, and
you read these nonfiction books, you assiduously try
to avoid business books, but you go into
places, novels included,
where, you know, everything that Benjamin talks
about the novel itself is guilty of. And so what are you
doing? Are you undercutting your own project? I
don't think so. I don't think I'm undercutting my own project by talking about what
Benjamin or by addressing Benjamin here and introducing Tim to
you in this episode today. I don't think I'm undercutting myself
at all. Matter of fact, I think I'm I'm I'm shoring up
the eroding beachhead
of this podcast. So podcasting
technology in and of itself is designed to tell stories.
Think about maybe the true crime podcasts that you listen to
or think about a really really good Joe Rogan
interview or Theo Vaughn or
whoever. When you listen to those people
they, yes, are seeking to pull information out of their guest or
out of the topic but at a certain point a switch happens
and people start telling the host, telling
themselves, telling the listeners
stories. Storytelling,
and this is where I separate from Benjamin, is going
to be consistent in our lives. It's gonna be something
that we as human beings can't abandon, but we
will, and this is the hard part, we will
abandon the the transmission
of wisdom through that storytelling
medium because we actually don't have any wisdom
to give. The piece
that sent me off on thinking about this the critique
of fragmented a fragmented
fragmented communication world.
The piece that set me off on this critiqued Margaret Atwood.
Now I got to admit I don't think much of Margaret Atwood as
a novelist. I don't think The Handmaid's Tale was
that brilliant. I've tried to read a couple of her other books.
I just can't get in to Margaret Atwood.
For me personally with Atwood as an author
there's no there
there. But that doesn't mean that there's no there there for others.
Right? And so what may not be for me
might be for someone else. By the way, that's wisdom. That's
not instruction. But how do I get to there? How do
I how do I make that determination?
How do I wind up lapping up on the shores where it's
okay for me to dislike Margaret Atwood and use the technology of the podcast or
dislike Margaret Atwood? I don't know her. Dislike her writing. Podcast or dislike Margaret Atwood.
I don't dislike her. I don't know her. Dislike her writing. Right? And for me
to say that on the technology of a podcast, utilizing the technology of a
podcast, imagining myself talking to someone who is sitting
across from me today, even though no one is is sitting across from me today
this is a solo show and to do it in a way that hopefully
gives some sort of wisdom to leaders who might be listening
and might be along this journey with me.
How do I get there from here? Well, Benjamin, of course,
gives me an idea. In section nine, he says
this of his essay, and I quote,
the storytelling that thrives for a long time in the middle of work,
the rural the maritime and the urban is itself an
artisan form of communication as it were. It does not aim to
convey the pure essence of the thing like information or a report.
It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller in order to
bring it out of him again. Thus traces
of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of
the potter cling to the clay vessel.
Close quote I love that when you
tell a story you're bringing a piece of yourself to it
and in the best forms of human communication human interaction
I can see people still insisting
that the clay pot they are getting, yes, it must contain
something in it. But even more importantly even more
importantly, it must have the it must have the
handprints of the potter embedded in it.
What does this mean for us
here at the end of the fourth turning as leaders? Well I think it
means a few things. Number one: every generation has to relearn the wisdom that
the previous generation considered to be table stakes for existing
in the world, for understanding reality and for preserving
the gift of feedback which is also a story by the way to the
future. There is wisdom that
defies the technologies used to transmit it. Some of
that wisdom comes out of some of our oldest books like the bible,
the Torah, the Quran, Benjamin
even brings up Herodotus those things
will survive regardless of what technological form they
are put in and they may even outlast
the earth itself these
forms of wisdom ancient and deep encompass
the oral tradition but the oral tradition then leverages
the technology to avoid being rendered extinct
by it and if you are a leader
that's really the wisdom there not the tip
such as it were that's the wisdom leverage technology to
avoid being rendered extinct by it
we are coming up at the end of the fourth turning
we are turning into a high into a first
turning and the wisdom
achieved and attained the hard won wisdom achieved and
attained in a previous chaotic fourth turning
during a first turning, during a high, when the
jitterbugging is going on, the alcohol is flowing, the
jazz is thumping, and everyone's feeling pretty good. The
wisdom that was attained in the
past chaos, no matter how it's transmitted
or what technology is used to transmit it, is typically
ignored, dismissed, or shuffled away. And this is
because of the principles of the first turning the
ideas and the psychological posture that underlie
the people who are living through it and I
quote from the wikipedia article about the first
turning according to Strauss and Howe the first turning is a high
which occurs after a crisis during the high institutions
are strong and individualism is weak society is
confident about where it wants to go collectively
though those outside the majoritarian center
often feel stifled by conformity.
Close quote. The next generation
of folks we have coming up, generation alpha
and behind them generation beta, I
guess we're gonna start with the alphabet again, are
going to be profit idealists in the mold of
folks who, well the mold of
folks who in the last great turning in
America were either very very
hyper confident GIs coming out of World
War II or if you go back a little bit further
were the folks that were very very confident going into the
civil war profit
idealist types always exist in a high
and folks like myself nomads the thirteenth
generation such as it were we always get dismissed
in a high our wisdom gets shuffled
away all the way to the edges outside
the majoritarian center.
This time will be a little bit different though because of technology, because
of our insistence on the internet, because of social media. It will be a little
bit different this time, but I don't know that it's going to
be that much different. I think our technologies
that I think I know our technologies serve us
and increasingly we serve them But it's a
weird symbiotic story that we tell each other.
What I do know is this this is a piece of wisdom at the close
here leadership will still be necessary even in the first turning. As a matter of
fact leadership will probably be even more critical in the
first turning because the naive,
the ingenues, and the people
just not paying attention will need
all of the wisdom they can get from
wherever they can get it because wars
strife depression and upheavals
insist on happening in
every turning.
And, well, that's it
for me.