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AudioAugust, your Forbes.com article, Goosebump Leadership and the Death of the Big Idea implies that the reason we’re not getting goosebumps is that we don’t have a goal worthy enough to be universally motivating.
But why, exactly, did the nation get galvanized by NASA’s mission of space flight anyway? It was Sputnik that galvanized us . . . not just the idea of space flight itself. It wasn’t just that we wanted to go to space – we needed to go to space, because if we didn’t the Russians were going to rain destruction down upon us from above. Yes, space flight is very cool and very sexy and very exciting – but that wasn’t enough to make it a generational mission. There has to be some urgency involved.
By that standard, I would say environmentalism is the closest thing we’ve got to a generational, unifying goal. Everybody and his dog is trying to show how they are getting on board with the collective effort to save the planet. There is a lot of attention and excitement about alternative power, not because most people are that excited by kilowatts, but because it represents the technological race with the highest stakes in world right now. Whoever solves nuclear fusion is going to bring world peace. It’s technologically interesting, but everyone is also feeling some urgency about it because they think (rightly or wrongly) that the end of the world is nigh if we don’t solve this problem.
Why are people nostalgic about Second World War? Because everyone pulled together to avert a threat to everything we held dear.
It doesn’t really matter what the proximate goal is. What matters is that everyone recognizes, more or less all at once, that something needs to be done. It’s the fact that everyone is all together that makes it exciting. I agree with you that it is the job of leadership to envision a future that will get everyone together. But it’s not the ideas that are lacking these days – just the leadership to articulate them.
Georg Buehler
Solutions Architect
Relevant Automation
http://www.relevantautomation.com/
Right you are, the real challenge is the paradoxical problem that peace brings. To wit, what will a PEACEFUL society use to replace the urgency that war used to provide? Again as I point out in my essay, peace and environmentalism are essentially conservative. They seek to conserve human capital and resources. But for what? What will we apply these resources to?. Again peace and environmentalism are not missions. They provide optimal conditions for the next Big Thing.
I also feel that the frontier of the mind is the flip side to the exploration of outer space. The urgency to explore the mind is created not by external threats like green house gas, but by the internal threats we see in the pandemic of depression, obesity, drugs, alcohol, and the billions spent of porn. So much of this is the wasted energy of a civilization that has “too much time (and money!) on its hands.” The World Health Organization just named depression as the number one disease afflicting western civilization.
By the way, part of Kennedy’s genius is that he didn’t just react to the Soviet threat by arguing for something like a Star Wars defense or a technological solution. He aimed past that target toward putting a MAN on the moon. This is the way vision works. This is why I don’t buy all these eminently practical scientists who argue for unmanned space exploration citing the fact that we can get all the knowledge we need that way.
Finally Big Ideas and the Leaders to articulate them are one in the same thing. Saying we have great ideas but no one to articulate them is like saying I have a great product but no one buys it. Somehow being bought is essential to being a great product. So saying we have no leaders to articulate Big Ideas is really just another way of saying we have no Big Ideas. August
