An Army Ranger is rafting the Gauley River. He falls overboard and, exhilarated, laughs at the idea of running the rapids in nothing but a life jacket. After all, it’s a piece of cake compared to his training and combat experience. He waves off rescue. Moments later, he is sucked into a souse hole, pinned against the rocks, and drowns.
A snowmobiler in the Canadian North waits with his group at the base of a mountain. One rider decides to “hammer-head” straight up the slope. Minutes later, the mountain seems to dissolve. An avalanche thunders down. The others gun their machines and race to safety. This man simply sits there, watching, as the wall of snow buries him alive.
Both men were competent, experienced adventurers. What they lacked was a visceral feel for what was actually happening around them.
The Ranger had never been in big whitewater, so the river didn’t register as truly dangerous. The snowmobiler had never seen a mountain fracture and collapse, so the oncoming avalanche didn’t feel real. In both cases, raw emotion overruled reason. It didn’t feel dangerous, therefore it simply wasn’t.
I first wrote this in October 2014, when the leadership crisis was just entering public consciousness. At the time, I was thinking particularly of the Obama administration and the rising influence of the World Economic Forum’s networks — those early efforts to shape a new global elite through shared frameworks and training programs. Efforts were made to confront the gathering challenges, but those with the most influence largely tried to restore or extend the old order rather than genuinely build for the future.
The funny thing is, the metaphor still stands more than a decade later. It applies just as sharply to the Trump administration and to the many leaders shaped by WEF-style training and networks. The crisis hasn’t gone away.
It has simply changed form.
Today’s global leaders remain intelligent and deeply experienced, yet many still operate with mental models anchored in a world that no longer exists. Whether shaped by 20th-century institutions, Davos-style consensus thinking, or more recent populist reactions, the underlying issue persists: a failure to develop an updated, gut-level sense of the dangers and possibilities in our accelerating 21st-century reality.
We now face rapid technological disruption (especially AI), geopolitical fragmentation, economic volatility, institutional erosion, and a fractured information environment that undermines any shared sense of truth. Some leaders charge forward obliviously, like the Ranger cheerfully swimming into the souse hole with outdated instincts. Others freeze in place, watching systemic risks approach like an oncoming avalanche, unable to act because the scale of change still doesn’t feel real enough to demand a fundamentally different approach.
The result is a persistent mismatch. Restoration efforts — whether nostalgic returns to past glories or polished globalist continuations — have mostly prolonged the disconnect rather than resolving it. The early 21st century demands leaders who can recalibrate not just their policies, but their very instincts: developing the visceral feel for rapid, nonlinear, interdependent change that the Ranger and snowmobiler so tragically lacked.
We cannot afford for those steering the planet to keep wearing these blinders. The stakes — technological governance, geopolitical stability, economic resilience, and basic societal trust — are far higher than any single river or slope. When leaders fail to update their sense of danger and possibility to match the world as it actually is, the rest of us risk getting swept away.
Not a good thing. Not a good thing at all.
(Originally written October 6, 2014. Updated and expanded, May 2026)