Opinion | Is America Headed for ‘Greater Disorder’?

I think everybody should be most worried about what they don’t know about the future. OK. I am worried about that. That’s why I’m — That’s why I’m asking you to tell me —— What I’m saying, we do not know a lot about what the world will look like in three to five years. What we don’t know is much greater than anything we know. I think we know that we are in increasingly disorderly times. And these are the greater risks. So it is like the plaque building up. And so it’s like you saying, I haven’t had a heart attack yet. And I can say —— I feel OK —— You haven’t had a heart attack yet. I understand you haven’t had a heart attack yet. Can I show you the M.R.I. of this plaque building up in your system? And can you understand what I’m saying about what that plaque — that you will have a heart attack if that plaque then starts to get that, can you understand that? Can you understand where the numbers are and where you are? Look, it’s your life. It’s your choices, OK? And ask yourself: Is that right or is that wrong? That’s what you need to do for your own well-being. And so in your story, it sounds like if you combine that diagnosis with your sense and my sense of how the American political system currently works, then you’re going to get at least a mild version of the heart attack before you get change. Are you optimistic that we could have, I guess you could call it, a minor heart attack and recover? I think we’re going to come into a period of greater disorder, and we won’t know what it is like in the future, because it’s to our human capacity to anticipate what it’ll be like in three to five years. So I think over the next five years it’ll be like going through a time warp. And at the other side of that, it’ll be almost unrecognizable. It’ll be very different. And it’ll be a period of great change, a great turbulence.