Ramo is an economist who has ruminated through many think tanks and is now the managing director of Kissinger Associates, a geostrategic advisory firm. Quite in keeping with the subject of his alarmingly-titled book, Ramo is also a competitive aerobatic pilot. What begins as the foreboding argument that destabilization is inevitable, and even necessary, becomes a case for radical new ways of thinking—new ways of “thinking” that are ambiguously “unthinkable.” Such innovative thought processes involve phenomena like power physics and mashups, a kind of perspective shared by artists, such as Picasso’s concept of Cubism or Anselm Kiefer’s painting, Deutchslands Geisteshelden; or the science of Danish physicist Per Bak. The latter struggled with the limits of language to describe the states of “organized instability” he encountered in his work; he was confronting nonlinear science, which moves from the unthinkable to the indescribable. Baffling? Yes. Incomprehensible? No.
