The unpredictability of history

I was in graduate school--many times sleeping in a corner of USC's philosophy library or Doheny library--as the the Soviet Bloc started coming apart.  It was surreal to watch the entire system come down.  All of a sudden there was Latvia and Estonia and Lithuania, and soon after all that there was Yeltsin holding on to a new Russian beginning.  Having grown up on Russian literature, I was all the more fascinated with the events and Gorbachev became my hero for carefully walking down the path of perestroika and glasnost.
The crazy thing for me as a student was that none of my faculty even remotely talked about such a possibility, say, in 1987 or 1988. 
As Yogi Berra remarked, "Prediction is very hard, especially about the future"


Years later, as the summer season of the university's calendar was winding down, it was early in the morning as I was drinking coffee with NPR in the background when I thought I heard something about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center in NY.  For two days after turning the television on at that moment, I sat transfixed and absolutely depressed by the even more surreal sights--I even skipped out on the back-to-school events on campus where, I later learnt, the university president had apparently highlighted a research work that I had just completed.
As much as people would like to assign blame as if it were all a pin-the-tail-on-the-elephant game, the reality is that this changed the world as much as the fall of the Berlin Wall changed the world.  I am amazed that I have already lived through such major game changers in world history!

But, in recent years the dramatic game changers in global history have been quite regular, about a decade apart:

1968: the Tet Offensive
1979: annus horribilis
1989: The Berlin Wall tumbles down
2001: 9/11

It is then tempting to worry that the next event is round the corner.  But, what I have learnt is this: I don't know where that will happen.

I don't think even Bruce Bueno de Mesquita knows
 :-( Sphere: Related Content