Life has become exponentially nuanced and complex, navigated now in the shadows between light and dark, not the extremes of black and white. The US still moves the pieces, but no longer alone.
Aristotle laid down the three principles for persuasion in his seminal work Rhetoric. They are ethos, pathos and logos — an appeal based on the credibility of the speaker or an appeal to authority; an appeal to the audience’s emotions; and finally, logic backed by facts and figures.
The war for competing truths has, since time immemorial, been fought on these battlegrounds and all the advent of technology has done has been to make the war more immediately accessible and more weaponisable.
It’s immensely difficult to compete against arguments that come from credible sources, trigger our sensitivities and appear backed by facts and statistics — or as Mark Twain once said;: “Lies, damned lies and statistics.”
Something can be logically valid yet premised on entirely incorrect facts. We shouldn’t need any reminding of how seductive and yet immensely dangerous these arguments can be: Ivermectin during Covid-19 or climate denialism in a world beset by extreme weather events are just two examples that have many of us scratching our heads — so much wiser after the event.
It’s the same when we look at the flood of executive orders from the White House in the month since President Donald Trump took office. They are unprecedented in both scope and scale; applauded by some and derided by others in equal measure.
Creative destruction
The Austrian Joseph Schumpeter gave the world the concept of creative destruction, destroying the existing world to make room for innovation that will herald the new epoch. Neither he, nor Karl Marx, could have foreseen the quantum of disruption that has happened before even the conclusion of the first quarter of 2025.
To some commentators this has been nothing less than the augur of the catastrophic second coming so beautifully described by WB Yeats in The Second Coming a century ago; the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
To others it is a far more literal second coming, a divine archangel to save us all, a deal-making tsunami to both put America’s interests first and reset the world order — “we restored the idea that in America no one is forgotten, because everyone matters and everyone has a voice”.
Is the truth at either pole or somewhere between them? The difficulty is discerning which and calibrating yourself between them.
In an era when we have unparalleled access to information, it seems the cruellest irony that we are perhaps more uninformed than we have ever been. It can be ascribed to confused overload, intellectual laziness, wilful stupidity or just confirmation bias, but the good news is that there is an antidote — education.
A good education premised on debate and critical thought is a critical foundation block, but it’s more than that. You also need incredible self-awareness.
There’s the great managerial case study of the soldiers lost in the Pyrenees who found their way to safety using the wrong map — of the Alps. But it worked because it broke their prison of inaction wrought by fear of the unknown, galvanising them to take that first step and make sense as they moved.
A great education teaches you the skills to create a map to get you out of the mess, but then to hold yourself accountable when you realise after those critical first steps that you’re sinking deeper into the morass. And it gives you the vulnerability to accept you are wrong and the ability to change.
Lean in to oppositional thinking
Sometimes that is the hardest step to take, but a key attribute to achieving it is learning to lean in to oppositional thinking to understand how other people are thinking.
Sometimes it can change the way you think by testing your prejudice and shattering it. At other times, you prove your own hypothesis and maintain your original course.
We often speak — too glibly — of the need to decolonise our education, to rid ourselves of Western constructs, especially within an African context. Little did we know that it was only part of our journey. To properly decolonise our education, we need to globalise it, because we live in an increasingly multipolar world.
To survive — and indeed to thrive — we must understand not just the styles of how business is conducted in different markets like the US, Russia, Africa and China, but what their rationale for business is.
And as we master that, we need to conquer yet another complexity; the imperative to be dispassionate to see the big picture while mastering compassion to ensure we never lose sight of the individuals within the teams that make everything possible, because our own humanity is premised on the humanity of others; ubuntu: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu reminds us that we are who we are because of others.
In South Africa’s case this is not just who we are in the Cape, as opposed to Gauteng, and not just who we are in relation to the US — and more than just because of the African Growth and Opportunity Act — but who we are in relation to Russia, China, India and Brazil, and once again not just constrained within the context of BRICS either.
We celebrate entrepreneurship as a universal force for progress, yet Western ideals — Silicon Valley, venture capital, the lone genius — dominate, overshadowing rich traditions of innovation that have thrived worldwide for centuries.
The United States still moves the pieces, but no longer alone. The board has grown crowded, the game more subtle, and the rules no longer solely its own. We need to see that and react accordingly. China might be our biggest trading partner, but is it our optimum trading partner, at the expense of Brussels and the EU or even Dubai and the Gulf?
Depending on your context, your answer will differ, and understanding your context is dependent upon education. One of the best programmes in this regard remains the MBA because business builds economies and economies build the world. Good business leaders know this, great business leaders can navigate seamlessly between different communities and cultures.
Life has become exponentially nuanced and complex, navigated now in the shadows between light and dark, not the extremes of black and white.
Global warming
Global warming is widely accepted as potentially the beginning of the end, but (to paraphrase Winston Churchill) it’s also the end of the beginning of a new reality; the opening of the Northwest Passage through the erstwhile impassable Arctic could create a brand-new trade route, linking the US with Russia, Russia with the Far East, China with Europe. This would bypass the historically important Suez Canal, while maintaining the importance of Panama to the US.
Recognising this helps explain the strategic import of Greenland and indeed Canada for the White House, and makes sense of executive orders that might have seemed to lack logic before.
The best way to deal with these competing conundrums is through compassionate leaders whose default is dispassionate systems-thinking, underpinned by robust self-awareness and a determination to act.
These leaders are best prepared to see the truth beyond the foggy clamour of the mob and engage with that, rather than pander to popular prejudice wherever it may occur.
We need to nurture them now, while we still can. DM
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