FEATURES
Creating the
Future
with Open Source Everything
By Robert Steele
I have not had a near-death experience in the traditional sense, but I
have given eight of my nine lives for my country or myself (half on duty,
half youthful stupidity), and I treasure this last life, my final 20-25 years,
for knowing it is my last of those nine lives.
M
y consciousness of how far
removed our government,
our economy, and our society are from reality – and
humanity – came in 1988.
I had spent $20 million of
the taxpayer’s money on
a super-secret, super-technical intelligence analysis center for the Marine Corps, only to learn within
two weeks that 99% of what we needed to know
– about places like Burundi, Haiti, and Somalia –
and the humanity that lay within those countries
– was not in the secret “system” that concerned
itself only with the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and a couple of other state threats. That was
my “aha” moment. That was the moment I realized that all of my confidence in government was
misplaced, and that new means were needed for
speaking truth to power on the one hand and more
fundamentally on the other, for accessing truth in a
holistic fashion useful to the entire community. In
fairly short order thereafter, I recognized that there
were eight information “systems” critical to humanity, seven other than government, and that all
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of them, without exception, were broken beyond
repair. I list all eight here in alphabetical order: academia, civil society including labor and religion,
commerce especially small business, government
especially local, law enforcement, media, military,
and non-government/non-profit.
Many years of research later, starting with a second
graduate thesis on strategic information mis-management, I realized that government was not only
operating on roughly 2% of the relevant information in all languages, but that at the political level, decisions were being made on the basis of who
paid to be heard, not on the basis of ethical evidence-based decision support or the public interest.
I set out on a journey that turned out to have the
wrong destination – fixing government intelligence
– but the right path. Years later, over 1,900 books in
98 categories reviewed at Amazon, over 20 countries visited, over 750 international speakers engaged, over 7,500 mid-career intelligence officers
trained, I reached a half-way point. I understood
that there is no such thing as governance of, by,