The Perils of Forecasting

Outside of the intelligence and business communities, which actively appreciate hard-nosed, non-linear thinking in the Huntington manner, being too far ahead of the curve can be problematic to an academic or journalistic career. For even the most clairvoyant theory can be only, say, 80 percent accurate, and colleagues inevitably will concentrate on the 20 percent that is wrong. That is how reputations suffer. And precisely because the pathologies that the theorist has described are only in their early stages at the time of his or her writing, they lack an obvious context, so that the audience reacts with offense or sheer disbelief (or both) to his work. It gets worse, actually. A day may arrive when your theory is vaguely legitimized by events, at which time your views, rather than be celebrated, are merely consigned to the conventional wisdom, and thus are of rapidly diminishing relevance. If you protest that such trends as you predicted were not obvious at the time that you wrote about them, nobody is interested.