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512 pages, Hardcover
First published May 7, 2019
There is a large body of research and anecdotal information, built up by therapists, about the resolution of personal crises. Could the resulting conclusions help us understand the resolution of national crises?========================================
Successful coping with either external or internal pressures requires selective change. That’s as true of nations as of individuals. The key word here is “selective.” It’s neither possible nor desirable for individuals or nations to change completely, and to discard everything of their former identities. The challenge…is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and don’t need changing and which parts are no longer working and do need changing.Diamond begins with a look at the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston. 492 people died there, and the trauma of the event spread like a ripple on a pond disturbed by a large stone. One result of this event was recognition of the long-term effects of short-term events. Mental health approaches changed as a result, developing a new treatment modality. Diamond uses the perspective gained in the development of Crisis Management Therapy to make his historical analysis accessible.
…individual crises are more familiar and understandable to non-historians. Hence the perspective of individual crises makes it easier for lay readers to “relate to” national crises, and to make sense of their complexities.He leads us through a comparative example, using a moment of truth from his own life, and shows similarities to the identity crisis that was extant in the UK in the 1950s and 60s, as that nation’s relative power position in the world had changed dramatically after World War II.
Today, the risk that we’re facing is not of societies collapsing one by one, but because of globalization, the risk we are facing is of the collapse of the whole world.-----The Guardian - Jared Diamond: So how do states recover from crises? Same way as people do - by Andrew Anthony
…one thing that we can learn is to look at other countries as models and disabuse ourselves of the idea that the United States is exceptional and so there’s nothing we can learn from any other country, which is nonsense.