Transformational Intelligence, or How Not to Sink With the Ship

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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Hi! How’s everyone? Take a breath if you’re still feeling the bad stuff. Welcome new readers, welcome back old friends. Apologies for being a bit slow lately, and many thanks again for your overwhelming interest in Havens. The first set of emails will go out later this week, and we’ll try it together.

We’re going to continue our discussions today about life in the age of collapse, and what to do with yours. We’ve been discussing an interwoven set of principles—let me recap them:

• Don’t Sink With the Ship
• Minimize Risk, Maximize Agency
• Shift from a Reactive Orientation to an Anticipatory One

I want to offer you another principle today.

How do we do all the above? If anticipation versus reaction is how we minimize risk and maximize agency—think of the many ways the world’s imploding around us now—then how do we anticipate well? 

We need to develop a new ability, a new competence, that allows to be smart enough not to Sink With the Ship. I call that Transformational Intelligence.

Think for a moment of all that’s happened just very recently. Trump announced heavy tariffs on China and Mexico. His new friends want to slash employment in very, very large numbers. What’s this a recipe for? Many of you have asked me financial questions lately, and we’ll tackle those in depth tomorrow, but the short answer is: all of this is a classic recipe for starting a depression. It’s exactly what happened in the 1930s. Not kind of, sort of, history-rhymes, but exactly.

And yet even at this juncture, you can read plenty of people “debating” it. They are not anticipating well, and as a result, they’re going to end up trapped having to react to the shock this is going to create. Don’t live that way. That is how you end up Sinking With the Ship.

Now. What does all that tell you? What it tells me is something very simple.

You are going to have to be smart to survive what’s coming next now. 

The world is on a path to a certain set of calamitous outcomes, and I know how it sounds when I write sentences like that, so rest assured, I don’t want to have to. The 1930s now unfold before us in eerie repetition, right down to the macroeconomics and the macropolitics. Remember how all that ended?

Let me say the ugly part out loud. A lot of people are not going to survive what’s on the radar now. I don’t mean that in an obnoxious way, nor in a childish one. No, it’s not a Hollywood Movie. I don’t mean Everyone’s Going to Die. But I do mean that people will find their possibilities shrinking, wracked by everything from depression to autocracy to the chaos caused by climate catastrophe and so on. Human potential is going to wither, and that’s very much a slow kind of death, too, the death of possibility.

Don’t let it happen to you.

What Being Smart vs Being Not Smart Means Now

You need to be smart now. When you’re smart, you can act. When you’re not smart, you’re bewildered. When you’re really not smart, you act in self-destructive ways. Of these three outcomes, only the first category of people will really survive with fruitful and constructive lives now. By finding, creating, making their Havens. Does this seem like an age, though, where many people are being wise at the moment?

So I mean smart, too, in a certain way. I don’t mean it in the Ivy League sense, so let’s about discuss why not.

Who just got the future very badly wrong? The Democrats did. Don’t worry, I’m not here to complain, we’re going to investigate this example and learn from it.

Why did the Democrats get destroyed? Because they listened to the wrong people.

So here is the first lesson about being smart. Listen to the right people. I’m going to tell you what that means in a moment, and again, I don’t mean that in an obnoxious or childish way—in fact, you’re going to discover I mean it in a very different way than you probably think.

The Democrats became obsessed with a set of…Ivy League bloggers. Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and so on. They took all their advice from them. This isn’t about point scoring. They could have taken advice from…whom?

You think I mean the guys on CNN. I don’t. I mean history's great minds, to begin with. Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau. They could have listened to the guys that went through this last time around: Camus, Sartre, Brecht, etc. All of those warnings are still as resonant today as they ever were.

But the Dems listened to..Ivy League bloggers…instead. LOL. Because these are the smart guys, right? Only it turns out they’re not smart at all. Not in the sense that you need to be if you want to make it through this troubled age, instead of getting destroyed by it, like the Dems just did.

So. Ivy League smarts are not what we’re talking about. You don’t need to know abstruse theories and whatnot. This isn’t about that. And by now, those theories are largely discredited anyways, which is why these guys were so badly wrong.

So if we’re not talking about “smart” in the sense that society’s come to tell us it should mean, which is the Ivy League kind of thing…

What am I even talking about?

Why We Need New Kinds of Intelligence in an Age of Collapse

I’m talking about new kinds of intelligence.

Or very old ones.

They are what you are going to need now, and I’ll sum them up for you in a concept.

Transformational Intelligence.

Let’s now distill the different kinds of intelligence.

• Analytical intelligence, the sort prized by investment banks, which hire Ivy League grads
• Emotional intelligence, which you need if you want healthy relationships with loved ones
• Social intelligence, navigating the human maze around you
• Creative intelligence, the ability to construct ideas and express yourself well

There are many kinds, and you’re familiar with most, by now.

But in a period of history like this one, you are going to need to develop a new kind of intelligence.

I’ve come to call it Transformational Intelligence.

Let’s go back to those Ivy League bloggers for a moment. What didn’t they have? They had all the kinds of intelligence above, and more. They’re so good at navigating human relationships they’ve got a chokehold on the Dems.

But they lacked transformational intelligence. They had no idea how things break, systems erode, how disjunctures and discontinuities happens, or why. All of that is transformational intelligence.

Now. I’m not singling them out. Most of us don’t have transformational intelligence, for a very simple reason, which is that as a civilization we haven’t really developed it as a field, discipline, or skill, and so of course we don’t even teach it, since we don’t have much of it.

Think for a moment about how many big and famous corporations are in trouble. Starbucks, Nike, McDonald’s—it’s a long list, and growing longer by the day. And if you read their reports, which I do, the very first few sentences go like this: we had no idea the world was going to be in this much trouble.

So. They assumed what most people assume. Linearity. Stability. Continuity. They simply assumed, for example, in the case of the beauty and luxury industries, that China would get richer, and people would keep on buying stuff forever. Bad assumption. Didn’t happen. 

So transformational intelligence is something that we lack. We lack it all levels. I gave you the examples above so that you can see we lack at systemic, institutional levels in broad, sweeping ways—not just the Dems, but right down Nike and McDonald’s, who are way, way better at predicting stuff, spending fortunes, and still got it wrong.

See the theme here?

Thinking You’re Thinking, Versus Really Thinking

Instead of developing transformational intelligence, all these institutions…listened to the wrong people. That’s a series of mistakes. 

• One, not developing the kind of intelligence you need for this age
• Two, listening to the wrong people, which now you can understand much better, as meaning
• Three, those who tell you what you want to hear, but don’t really understand the world anymore

Make this series of mistakes? And it’s going to be over for you. You are going to Sink With the Ship, because you will end up in exactly the sequences of reactivity, confusion, and shock that we’ve been discussing lately. 

You have to grow now.

To grow also means to outgrow. The Dems will need to outgrow the Ivy League bloggers who call their shots, and blew it all up for them. The corporations will need to outgrow outmoded forms of corporate intelligence and decision-making, like today’s “analytics” or what have you. And you as a person will now need to outgrow your old ways of thinking, and really begin to focus on transformational intelligence.

How to Begin Developing Transformational Intelligence

So who should you listen to?

What’s the secret of transformational intelligence?

The person you should listen to is you. I don’t mean that in a trite way. I mean it in a paradigmatic one.

Why do the parties above fail to develop transformational intelligence? Because transformational intelligence is a synthetic form. It transcends the old kinds.

That means that it synthesizes them, combines them, and the sum is greater than the whole of the parts. OK, hold on, that’s abstract, let me make it concrete.

Your mind and your gut have been in conflict for the last several years. It goes like this. Your gut says: we need a plan, we need to make a move, things are going to get bad. Your mind overrules it, with all kinds of “rational” objections and arguments. 

Which side was smarter?

Now. I put “rational” in quotes because for people who’ve been doing this, which is most people, right down to the Dems and Nike and Starbucks and CEOs and whatnot, what happens is that they think they’re thinking, but they’re not really thinking.

What does that mean? It means that the “rational” arguments and objections that your mind has used to overrule your gut, your gut instinct, your primal knowledge, your inner wisdom, come from…think about…where do they come from?

Not from you. They come from newspaper articles. YouTube videos. Somebody on Twitter. For the Dems, they came from Ivy League bloggers, for the corporations, they came from well-paid consultants from McKinsey or what have you.

See what I mean? Let me make it even clearer. That’s not really thinking. That’s regurgitating someone’s else’s thinking. Often, without really thinking it through. And using that as a way to overpower your gut.

This is the Biggest, Biggest single mistake you can make right now. So Big, in fact, that I want to simplify and emphasize it.

Actually thinking? It’s very, very different. It involves the gut and the mind. The gut doesn’t just “not” think. It is telling what our unconscious is trying to say, and our unconscious knows a whole, whole to more than our conscious minds, and in deeper ways, wiser ones. It can associate and predict using depths of knowledge we don’t have to verbalize much, much faster and better than our conscious minds can merely analyze.

And if you doubt me, again, tell me: wasn’t your gut right, and your mind wrong? Over and over again, these last few years?

So. What have we learned? Thinking—the real thing—involves heart and mind. The gut provides a sense called “intuition,” which leads us down different avenues, which, sure, we can use analysis and so forth to investigate. But if we make the mistake so many did and are right now—we let our minds overpower, scare, browbeat, our guts into silence, and that way…?

You’’re Going to Sink With the Ship.

Transformational Intelligence and the Power Not to Sink With the Ship

Right Now. This moment. Your guts is probably saying a lot of things, right? And even now, your mind is trying to overrule it. Stop making that mistake.

Now we can talk about transformational intelligence in a coherent way.

Transformational Intelligence

TI begins with the gut. And the mind can investigate, and do its analytical thing.

But the gut provides the instinct, the impulse.

Let’s take right now as an example.

How bad will things get? Your gut is telling you. It already knows.

How is that? How can that be? Because you’re a smart person, but many people make themselves dumb. You’ve read books of all kinds, about history, politics, you’ve read myths, you’ve read Camus, maybe Sartre, maybe Brecht.

The mind can’t “think” about this analytically. But the gut can sweep through it in an instant, take it in, digest the messages, form associations, and provide you with a message. What do all these minds, all these events, all this context, say will happen next? Here is what it all says: things will get this bad.

Now. The role of your mind isn’t to dispute that. Maybe to reality check it a little. The role of your mind is to act on that. Now that you know that, what are you going to do about it?

If you can just do this much, see how much agency you will regain? Reclaim? Just to do this much will radically alter your orientation, your possibilities, your way of being, and ultimately, your chances.

The mind should focus on action. On strategy. On plan. Let’s go back to our earlier example. If we know that situations like this create depressions, the mind should be put to work not disputing that, but analyzing it, and acting. What do I do with my career? Are my finances in order to survive five years like that? What kinds of investments make it, if any? What societies will be hit least hard? What resources can I marshal right now, and what choices can I alter this moment?

This is transformational intelligence. Just a glimmer of it. Now, this has gotten too long already, so let me continue this tomorrow if you guys are interested in this concept.

We need to talk, I think about, transformational intelligence in a richer way, meaning, what it is. I’ve told you how to begin practicing it, but to really grasp it, you need more of what it is. So a quick summary: TI is understanding how things change. Transform. Suddenly, at moments of rapid bifurcation. Collapse, renewal, implosion, explosion, meltdown, shattering, fragmentation, disintegration, reinvention. 

Those are all forms of transformation. Now we need to develop intelligence about transformation, because this is what the rest of our lives will consist of. Series after series of rapid, often sweeping transformations, and unless we can anticipate them well, and act, we will be trapped in reaction-bewilderment-paralysis, and that’s how you Sink With the Ship.

Ok, whew. That was a lot for today! More tomorrow, and here’s a big hug from me and Snowy. Lots of love <3

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