Prophecy in Politics

Ralph Wigram is an obscure name. He was a minor British bureaucrat who is known to a small part of posterity only because Winston Churchill paid tribute to him as the man who warned of the Nazi threat with such persistence, conviction, and hard evidence, that he, Churchill, had the wherewithal to make the case to the British people. Wigram may well have worried himself to death: he died at the end of 1936, just before the war he warned against had begun. He might also have changed the course of history? if only people had believed him. Prophets like Wigram are a permanent fixture of a world without certainty. Oracles, shamans, wiseacres, astrologers, and swamis of all shades populate our myths, legends, and Bibles. Today our lives are inundated with the wisdom of professional forecasters, intelligence analysts, and threat mongers. Why do many of us, and especially our leaders, find it so difficult to heed warnings? We tend to underreact to some, overreact to others, and then point fingers when what 'nobody ever anticipated' comes to pass. Why is prophecy so dogged? This short book takes up a vast, complex, and well-worn subject - the future - and reduces it to its most essential aspects, one of which, following Wigram - belief- is important to understand. It revisits a half-dozen familiar and not-so-familiar incidents of prophecy - from the warnings given to Stalin about Operation Barbarossa to those given to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush about 'terrorism' to the Cassandras periodically promising collapse in the financial markets - in order to uncover a pattern of complacency and neglect. And then to propose what all of us might do to overcome it, to make prophecy work better for us. This is not a handbook or an attempt to stand in the vanguard of political or strategic thought on futurism, futures studies, or futurology; rather it is a concise overview, idiosyncratic but nevertheless, I hope, useful guide to thinking about the past and present condition of prophecy.