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programmer’s line, runs on a very fast clock in a world of constant innovation, and it applies to nations and ideologies, your habits and mine. Think of General Liu again for amoment: “A major state can lose many battles.” Those five lost American wars over the last 50 years weren’t fatal. They wore only a bit on our national pride and our position because they weren't strategic losses. But our next errors, which may come without the firing of a single shot, could be far more costly because of the slick, strategic slope on which we are now moving. “It is one thing to struggle heroically to get out of danger,” Liu wrote in another manifesto. “But it’s better to see the danger before it even begins to sprout.”5¢ Six paradoxes trace the immensity of the gaps we now face. First: We find ourselves confronted, almost daily, with an unnerving mismatch between our interests and our means. The most powerful nation in human history finds itself unable to achieve even simple military and diplomatic goals. Second: A global crisis of faith in our institutions is now under way. No significant institution, from the US congress to the Euro to your local newspaper, is more trusted than it was a decade ago. Many of our most essential institutions seem destined to be victims to the logic of “forced obsolescence” that makes our phones, our cars and our televisions of ten years ago feel like antiques. Third: The connected age lets us see and measure, with historic precision, the problems we face - yet we can do almost nothing about them. Global warming, wealth inequality, species destruction, nuclear accidents, terror killings - we can see all of these in rattlingly sharp detail, instantly, miraculously. Watch the Fukishima reactor meltdown! See BP oil leak into the Gulf of Mexico in HD! The rise and fall of markets, the moves of distant wars, rivers of refugees appear almost as if we were tuning into a football game. But we can only watch. “Hey, do something!” we want to shout as we see financial or ideological or religious chaos spill towards us. But nothing seems to move; and what does move makes the problems worse. This impotence of being “just spectators”, works like a nutcracker on the credibility of the people and institutions we expect to fix these problems. Fourth: Many new challenges exhibit a worrying non-linearity. Small forces produce massive effects. One radical teenager, a single mis-placed commodity order, or a few bad lines of computer code can paralyze an entire system. The scale of this whiplashing grows every day, because the network itself grows, it turns pindrop noises into global avalanches. Dangers, accidents, crises were once local. A drought in California was, largely, a drought in California. A slowdown in China hit Shenzhen or Shanghai, not South America. Now, as networks overlap and influence each other, crises cascade at a new, stunning and comprehensive scale. And while we know 56 “It is one thing to struggle”: Liu Yazhou, “Tan junshi gaige yu quojia anquan wenti” 46 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018278