Get over yourself, Tom
Give me straight, white, middle-aged men and I can rule the world without understanding it!
In teaching my How to Become a Grand Strategist bit today at Syracuse’s Maxwell School, I ask a couple of questions mostly just to get a rise out of the students:
More productive orientation?
Straight or gay?
Male or female?
Then I argue for the two off-key answers — gay and female.
Gay because an outsider’s perspective is more powerful and homosexuality forces that perspective by being somewhat orthogonal to how society is constructed — and enforced.
Same for female.
Hell, same for lefties!
When you encounter a system NOT built for you but optimized for, and largely ruled over by, THOSE NOT YOU, you view it differently and that difference is, by and large, more productive for understanding a volatile, complex, uncertain, and ambiguous (VUCA) world.
And yes, I would bet serious money that VUCA was coined by White, straight, middle-aged men whose apprehension of all those dynamics is — to an uncomfortable degree — driven by their sense that OTHERS generate a lot of it.
I mean, just think about a world where EVERYBODY ELSE gains more visibility, centrality, authority, and power!
VUCA indeed!
How can you possibly make that B.S. DEI/woke argument?
A thought experiment:
8 billion people in the world
Divide by 2 and you get 4B males
Whites are about 15-16% of the world’s population, so 4Bx.16=640M White males
Middle-aged people (40-65) equate to 27% of the world’s population, so 640Mx.27=173M White middle-aged men in the world
Gay men estimated at 10%, so 173Mx.9=156M
156M/8B=almost exactly 2% of the world’s population.
TWO PERCENT!
Can you come up with a similar sub-population designation whose members more define power and rules and global cultural centrality than middle-aged straight White males?
I don’t think you can.
Pick up any history book and it will be crammed with these guys seemingly doing and getting credit for EVERYTHING!
Did/do they do EVERYTHING?
No. Still, it’s more than their raw share would suggest, no doubt.
Are they dominant in power categories throughout a concentration of the world’s most powerful economies?
Yes.
Have they been dominant for centuries?
Yes.
Today, in America, who holds the most power most pervasively?
When queried, Perplexity will tell you that:
White men hold 65% of all elected offices in the U.S., despite making up only 31% of the population.
White men have 8 times as much political power as women of color in elected offices.
71% of elected officials are male and 90% are white. [Which gets you the 65%.]
White men hold most leadership positions and decision-making power in U.S. society.
Let me be the first to admit: My briefing on grand strategy and grand strategic thinkers is overwhelmingly White and male and middle-aged and straight. There are exceptions (Angela Merkel), but the bias is profound.
I’m not here to argue against the past. But I am here to argue (and teach) about the future.
My point is this: if you rely almost exclusively on the thinking and mental patterns of middle-aged White straight males, you’re capturing a solid 2% of the human experience — unweighted, let’s say.
That is a STUNNING blind-spot, is it not?
You want to be/get good at thinking on a grand strategic level about this world, then you have to be able to access and understand the 98% of humanity that is not you (or, more specifically, this 62-year-old White straight male).
Two of my six kids are queer. Four are women. Three are women of color (Asian, African) and immigrants.
Our family continues to be an education for me — and a powerful one for this self-described grand strategist.
I can only imagine so much. The rest I must learn from others.
