The Fifth Risk is Us

Run for your life while you still can

"It's what you fail to imagine that kills you." 

That's the ending line to the nonfiction book titled The Fifth Risk written by Michael Lewis.  You might not know that book, but you've probably heard of his book-turned-Hollywood-film-starring-Brad-Pitt -- Moneyball.

I'm late to The Fifth Risk.  It was published in 2018 and took a deep dive into the 2016 transition (actually the lack thereof) and the purely political position-filling by brain-addled Donald Trump. The book spent 14 weeks on the NYT best-seller list. And somehow, I never heard of it until a few weeks ago when a smart friend dropped it off at my house because she thought I might enjoy it.

Lewis'  book is a scare-you-shitless-must-read from start to finish. It's hard to say I enjoyed reading it.  I couldn't put it down, though, despite it's harrowing narrative -- I devoured it, even as it horrified me.

And that's why I want every single one of you to read it.

So you can be horrified right along with me. Because a lot of what he wrote three years ago has come home to roost, and the depth and breadth of the reasons why is something we all need to understand.

In his prescient story-telling, Lewis outlines the potentially catastrophic risks of having people in key government positions who are woefully inadequate or disinterested (or in the cases of most of the Trump administration, both) in doing their jobs or protecting the American people or system of government.

 With a slow-to-act administration, in some cases willfully subverting science, and undercutting budgets that might oversee such things -- Lewis, in 2018, raised the spectre of the then "so remote as to be unreal" likelihood of "some airborne virus [wiping] out millions ... ."

And we all know how that turned out -- and why.

So what exactly is the fifth risk that Lewis lays out?

In his book, Lewis asked people he interviewed to tell him the one big risk they were most worried about.  His interviewees -- most of them with long careers of devotion to and high performance in public service -- gave him a laundry list of things that kept them up at night ... and that sadly, all to frequently came to pass under Trump's watch:

• the politicizing of science (check √!)

• endangering young minds (and health) through rolling back nutrition standards (check√ — but thank God that didn’t work!)

• and little things like keeping a watch on nuclear waste and theft (putting Rick Perry in charge of the DOE even though he'd gone on record saying the DOE should be eliminated? — check √! check√! and check√!)

Mostly, the fifth risk illumined in the book is about having someone in place who is standing watch.  Someone who is thinking ahead.  A lot of someones who are capable of managing the millions of projects in play at any given moment across the country that keep us all with electricity, transportation, social services, and somewhat safe from viruses running amok, and nuclear annihilation. 

Lewis and those he interviewed describe the lack of project management as the most crucial "fifth risk."

In my own work as a communications consultant, lack of appropriate project management within organizations is the single biggest differentiator between success and a hot mess. Over the years, I've seen some clients who do invest in project management and  others who don't.  The ones who don't are always playing catch up and cleaning up messes that could have been avoided.

And that's just at a very low level of importance.  Imagine how full-stop important project management must be at levels where life and death and the survival of democracy and humankind are at stake.

But people who are in place to watch, report, stand guard, and lead projects and areas of oversight truly can't do their jobs -- which is basically to keep the rest of us safe -- safe from salmonella in our food supply, safe from drunk truck drivers transporting nuclear materials, safe from presidents who deny science or who actually forbid the use of the term "climate change," -- these people who are tasked with keeping vital projects and systems in place -- they really can't do their jobs if the people leading them aren't doing theirs.

Which is why we need better leaders and better people in public office.  But ask the next intelligent person you see to run for public office to make a difference in their community or in their nation and you'll hear:

"I don't have the time."

"I don't have the money."

"It wouldn't change a thing."

 "I wouldn't want the public scrutiny or loss of privacy."

The problem with a lot of very smart, capable, thoughtful, experienced, Earth-friendly, humanity-friendly, and democracy-friendly people NOT running for office is that we're increasingly left with the opposite.

So, we’ve got to put aside our selfish reasons for not running for office.

We've got to run as if we're running for the survival of democracy; to prevent the utter annihilation of intelligence; for the oxygen that keeps all of us breathing and living with beating hearts; to save the planet before it's too late.

Because we're either going to run FOR all that ... or we're going to be running FROM the results of our failure to imagine the outcomes. And that, as Lewis ends his book by saying, is what will kill us.

Lewis wrote about The Fifth Risk in the middle of Trump's presidency, before we all understood the full extent of what happens when idiots are in charge (or deserting their charge). 

What I took away from his book however, is that the biggest risk -- the fifth risk and the risk to end all others -- isn't "them" ... it's us.

What we fail to do by not running for public office -- others will be all-too-happy for all-too-self-interested reasons to do. 

We're the fifth risk.  We're the final risk.

If we don't step up, out of our comfort zones, and run for public office, we get this:

or this

and eventually this:

If you don't run for office, the way things are going, you'll be running -- for the rest of your life --  from the dumbfounding and increasingly catastrophic outcomes of the ones who do.

Know some people who should run for office? Share this essay with them!