We are more important that "National Intelligence" can even consider

There are so many lenses through which to contemplate our individual existence, our relationships, our purpose, our identity, our patriotism, our theology, our philosophy, and our death.

And while these various lenses, and their respective parameters continually ebb and flow, sometimes in concert and other times in tension, the continual movement of their various ‘sources and methods’ as well as the objects/targets of their attention offer a reservoir of moving films, some that borrow from others, while some that shed new images and new light on old scenes and scenarios.

National intelligence is renowned for its intense focus on preserving the secrecy, as well as the content of all of its ‘sources and methods,’ that phrase that encapsulates the various overt and covert policies and practices, interactions and reflections, attitudes and beliefs, not to mention perceptions and intuitions that both guide and blind all of its operations.

Any comparison of the national intelligence ‘fortress’ and the individual human being, will, on the one hand seem preposterous and presumptuous, and on the other insulting and condescending, also depending on the perspective of both the writer and the reader. So, while these caveats offer both an expansive and awesome view across a Grand Canyon of nature’s beauty and a narrow, dark, secretive and sinister almost forensic and clinical peering into the shadows, let’s begin to unwrap this conundrum of a comparison.

National intelligence is designed to protect a nation from whatever interior and external ‘enemies’ that might sabotage the integrity and the authenticity and the freedom of the nation. And while each individual is not primarily taught to adopt an exaggerated ‘intelligence’ system to protect itself, and its significant others from ‘harm’ of sabotage and dismemberment and devolution and destruction, the undercurrent of competition in the West, is embedded in our traditional ‘developmental’ societal nurturing.

John Donne once referred a trip to the continent and his apparent absence from his love, to the two points on a geometric compass, connected at the centre, and never fully separate even though apart at the extensions. Metaphysical poetry, in general, tended to deploy images seemingly unrelated to their subjects, as a method of connecting the physical and the abstract in imaginative images. And while this scribe does not aspire to the heights of the metaphysical poets, borrowing their ‘method’ offers a model for our highly prosaic and much more mundane comparison.

 Surveillance, including the collection, curation and sharing of information, in order to arrive at a most intelligent exegesis of the information, in national intelligence, requires a host of professionally trained sleuths, highly disciplined reporters and recorders, a layer of curators that attempt to connect the various ‘dots’ of data, and then another ‘school’ of historians, linguists, criminologists, legal minds, political guru’s, and psychological wizards to “make sense” of the various files and their implications on each other as well as on the practitioners responsible for decisions in the public interest. If you think that represents a complex system designed to “protect” a nation, it is. And, then, if we consider that all of those various functions, on a personal level, are expected to be conducted by each individual, often in the secrecy of his own mind, often with barely a nudge of observation and interpretation by a family member or a teacher or a clergy, of even a counsellor, we begin to grasp the seemingly overwhelming task of each person to live a life of purpose and meaning in whatever context s/he finds him/herself.

The national security edifice obviously has a budget reaching into the millions or perhaps even billions depending on the perception of need by those setting budgets. It also has a documented legal foundation and institutional framework, a range of instruments, teams of personnel and a circle of public observers, critics and even opponents all of whom are working in parallel, to ascertain the effectiveness of the protective system. Naturally, the political operatives will ‘shade’ the tendencies of the intelligence system to spend more time in a certain direction, focussed on a region or nation that seems most threatening, thereby releasing funds in that regard and moving funds away from other potential threats.

The multiple equations, algorithms, hardware, cyber professionals, and the capacity to ‘peer’ into places never before available, are all considered essential in the conventional wisdom that envelops the ‘national intelligence’ institution. Mathematical ‘thinking’ “provides methods for organizing and structuring knowledge so that, when applied to technology, it allows scientists and engineers to produce systematic, reproducible and transmittable knowledge. Analysis, design, modeling, simulation, and implementation than become possible as efficient, well-structured activities.” (Mathematical Sciences, Technology and Economic Competitiveness 1991, Chapter 4: The Technology Base, on nationalacademies.org)


Satellites, linked to each other and to the ‘ground’ computers and their digital operatives, as well as hacking opportunities and their discoveries, as well as the capacity to dismember various important resource facilities of enemies, are all within the gambit of the intelligence professionals. Of course, so are the multiple opportunities to mis-read, mis-interpret, mid-calculate and mis-inform not only between and among the devices, between the personnel and also between the devices and the personnel. Reproducing or at least emulating the human brain, in a process known as Artificial Intelligence, (AI), while still in the developmental stages, has come a long way and will inevitably find its way into the national intelligence services, if it has not already found a home there.

The individual with the seemingly inexplicable and irreproducible complex process of the human brain and mind, on the other hand, has a family, a school system, a sports team, an employer, perhaps a church or synagogue, mosque or temple, from whom and from which to gather the skills and the processing muscle to both detect the signals and to curate those symbols and then to interpret and decide on the bases of those ‘theories’. What most of us do not have, however, is that “team/army/batallion etc.” that comprises the established institution, based on the military model, working on our personal intelligence systems. We have occasional water-cooler observations, rants, critiques, and the occasional piece of hard data that seep into our ears and minds and perhaps into our memories and our unconscious. We also have our eyes, ears, noses and fingers that are all engaged in a process not only of ‘providing’ data to our sensibilities, and of engaging with other ‘humans’ either viscerally or virtually, in a dialogue that offers a pencil-thin sketch of our universe, including the threats and opportunities for our personal careers, the organization in which we are engaged, the families we come from and the social networks in which we find ourselves.

We can read books, magazines, journals, watch movies and documentaries, and we can integrate our conversations with those of others who both agree and disagree with our world view. And we can be engaged in a continual process of reflection,  review, recall, re-interpretation and revisiting of past observations, perceptions, attitudes and decisions.

Our personal/familial/professional/academic/religious affiliations, however, do not operate on the same technological, scientific and mathematical equations/algorithms/co-variant calculations and digital efficiencies. In fact, attempts to compare human ‘efficiencies’ with those of the digital world, soft and hardware as well as the professional personnel, render us almost inefficient. And, increasingly, we are asked and even expected to ‘measure up’ through STEM educational programs, so that we can both compete and integrate into the new technological world of employment, even if it isn’t inside the specifically ‘national intelligence’ system.

However, we are at risk of elevating the technological universe, including the national intelligence component of that universe, to a level of significance and relative importance in our public square, dialogue, budgeting, and future planning, that threatens to eclipse the relative importance, value, significance and even competence of the individual human being. Just last week, a local political candidate, in referring to a human being, uttered these words: “He may think highly of you as a person, but merely wants to retain and obtain increased leverage in and through you.”

Those words, from the benign mouth and mind and intelligence of a friend, as conceptualized by an octogenarian, rattled around for days, begging for reflection, rebuttal and review. “Leverage” that word that renders all persons, all data, all decisions and all public policies into a “means” for some “ends” that remain undefined, unspoken and unacknowledged.

If and when individual “ends” trump shared public “ends” as embodied in a shared vision, that is defined whether through “projects” completed, or through a process of review and evaluation to which a majority can and do agree, personal transactions will continue to trump anything resembling a shared vision, including respected and valued and aspirational “ends”.

We have to guard against the ‘technology’ and the “leverage” that comes from the technology, for example, in and through such instant searches as ‘how does math impact technology” even for those of us devoid of a math education, substituting for the meandering, confused and confusing, the ambient and ambulant imaginings of a human being’s mind, brain, heart and soul. That last word, considered not as an empirical component of the human being, but rather as a way of seeing the self, the other, the wider universe, including the notion of something that is far beyond the intellectual and emotional capacity of most of us, the national intelligence establishment, cannot and will not ever be replaced by the highest achievements of the algorithms, the equations, the schools of both relativity and quantum mechanics and their successors whatever and however they may emerge.

Indeed, it may ironically be, the blindness of the technology and the mathematics, and their highly schooled operatives, to the sameness, and the inherent decencies, dignities, and aspirational potential of all human beings, if ensconced in a personal, familial and communal nest of support that can and will eventually sabotage the very premises of the national intelligence forts that we continue build in the belief that they and they alone are keeping us safe and protected.

National intelligence fortresses, by definition, are envisioned, designed and constructed in the belief and the conviction that there are always others who are determined to destroy us. And therefore such forts of protection must be built and maintained regardless of the cost, in direct terms as well as in the loss of funding support for other worthy social projects and needs.

Human intelligence, on the other hand, regardless of its religious or philosophical underpinnings, holds that human beings of all nations, races, languages, and economic or educational or social background and status, have common needs common aspirations, and a common universe from which to sustain their individual and their shared lives. And it does not require a billion-dollar establishment of technological and military prowess to discern that each of us needs clean air, clear and accessible fresh water, access to health care and work with dignity, along with a societal commitment to foundational and sustaining human respect and dignity from all of the power structures and their operatives in all countries.

And all pretence of our need for bombs, missiles, and the many systems to operate and deploy them have a tendency if not a determination to both degrade and to deny the basic human intelligence of a human nature that is both shared and  worthy of support.

And that dignity, respect and honour that each human warrants has to come from and continue to be supported by Asian, European, North American and African continents and all of the various nationalities within the continents.

National Intelligence is not the shield that it purports to be. Indeed, we have collectively shared in deferring to those who have and will continue to argue that its protection, like most insurance policies for those enduring floods and hurricanes, is feeble at best and inoperative at worst.

We can no longer sustain a social, political and corporate mind-set that ascribes such glittery and glossy significance to something like the national intelligence edifice and to the people who operate that machine, while continuing to deny the real, basic, and indisputable human needs that are and will continue to be compromised by our fixation with our substitution of hard power for our capacity to attend to and to meet real human needs.

Let’s agree, in a new world of G-Zero, (borrowing from G-7 and G-20) that we no longer need to be blind to ourselves and to each other.