RV

The challenge is to maintain optimal individual freedom while obtaining maximal security; hence a degree of compartmentalization is required in the intelligence effort in order to avoid the acceptance of regimes condoning the direct use of force in lieu of a more circumspect approach to management of untoward and potentially conflagrative circumstances.

As a result, the capacity required for such cognitively based approaches to security, are necessarily fraught the same dangers one would anticipate resulting from failure to insulate adequately dangerous matters of intelligence from the opposition (real or envisioned). It is certainly to be expected that the evolution of security measures and training in the present age of non-nation-state encapsulated conflict should lead to innovative research surrounding the cognitive aspect of predictive security; however the adoptation of a particular mode of education as a new modern political institution (Machiavelli’s ‘intitutions’ being the basis of the modern state) is merely the initial step (for it is not fully adequate in itself) toward understanding the modern security problem in toto.

The problem itself is of course as anceint as politics; however, the process of civilization has been able to accommodate quickly enough at each new turn without resorting to a completely militaristically polarized form of governance; and the hope to retain this grace for the modern era is presently challenged as it never was before by the recent emergence of a third modern cofactor to the pre-existing cofactors inherited from the cold war era (weapons of mass destruction & the WOMD-driven geometric proliferation of competitive intelligence efforts): the establishment of a global hegemony, i.e. Mr. Fukuyama’s “End of History.”

The realization of this latter factor, while being both beneficial and relatively benign, does not make immediately make manifest the consequent change in the framing of poltical militaristic conflict in the present era, nor does it make manifest the implications of said change; what is consequent is the shift from more predictable localized conflict to non-localized conflict, driven by decentralized intelligence sources, fueled by increasingly more dangerous weapons of mass destruction, and pregnant with the absolute necessity of urgency of the latter.

The consequences are far-reaching indeed. Moreso than might initially be imagined; however there is hope in the institutionalization of such congnitive methods. For while intellect may spring up naturally in the wild, its allegiance may be to some degree naturally suspect, for which reason it is more cautious to implement such measures.

I can only hope that the casualties amongst those whose creative facutlies were unpredicted, unexpected, and undesired will be few. Rare gems cannot be manufactured; neither can human beings. Where would Einstein and the other great minds that have contributed so much to society have gone had we not been there?

May Liberty never drop that torch, gentlemen.