i'm eaging to take these all the way back to the single guy, you know, princep right there at that corner where the, you know, the automobile backed down, and it went backwards cause it didn't have reverse. And there they are. And shot him. This whole thing, the entire twentieth century catastrophe, and it turns on these little, tiny contingencies, little and a series of really bad decisions that were made in the wake of them. It doesn't, i win, the chancellor of germany understand that britain is going to go to war over what he calls a scrap of paper. There's a really good example of just failure to understand
This conversation takes a deep dive into disruptions. How do things change? The question is critical to the historical study of any era but it is also a profoundly important issue today as western democracies find the fundamental tenets of their implicit social contract facing extreme challenges from forces espousing ideas that once flourished only on the outskirts of society. Not all radical groups are the same, and all the groups that the book explores take advantage of challenges that have already shaken the social order. They take advantage of mistakes that have challenged belief in the competence of existing institutions to be effective. It is the particular combination of an alternative ideological system and a period of community distress that are necessary conditions for radical changes in direction. As Disruption demonstrates, not all radical change follows paths that its original proponents might have predicted.