Why we forget lessons learned from collapsed bridges, burned towns and financial crises |
Rubble from the collapsed Morandi motorway bridge is strewn along the railway line in the northern port city of Genoa on Aug. 14, 2018.VALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
Cosimo Pacciani is head of research and chief economist at Poste Italiane in Rome.
Laurence B. Mussio is chair of the Long Run Institute and fellow of the Royal Historical Society of the United Kingdom.
Giorgio de Chirico’s 1914 oil painting The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street presents a landscape of haunting precision: empty arcades casting long shadows, a solitary child running toward darkness, a distant statue observing. It captures not merely abandonment, but something more subtle: the persistence of structures after their animating intelligence has departed. This is precisely what occurs when institutions maintain their architectural presence while systematically eliminating their capacity for history and memory – and with it, their ability to comprehend risk.
From collapsed bridges to grounded fleets, from burned towns to frozen banking systems, the pattern is remarkably consistent. Three interlocking failures produce catastrophe: the fragmentation of knowledge across silos until no single authority possesses the complete picture; the absence of accountability for synthesis, ensuring that warnings are recorded but never compel action; and economic incentives that make proceeding more profitable than pausing. This trinity of institutional failure transforms memory from strategic asset into archived irrelevance.
In an age of cascading crises, the ability to remember is the ultimate competitive advantage; this essay launches a four-part series called Futures @ Risk on why that capacity is the most critical – and most endangered – asset for institutional survival.
Today, De Chirico’s empty arcades find their parallel in the silent server rooms of the global economy and the hollowed-out bureaucracies of the modern state. We have constructed systems of profound complexity – from high-frequency trading algorithms to transcontinental energy grids – that operate with what we might call ghost intelligence: the departed consciousness of their original architects persisting only as code, while the human understanding of why they work has been lost to turnover, outsourcing, and the attrition of time. Like De Chirico’s arcades, these systems retain their imposing form but have been emptied of the animating minds that created them. They function seamlessly until they don’t. And when they fracture, we discover that ghost intelligence cannot diagnose itself.
Cultural theorist Richard Terdiman diagnosed this condition as modernity’s “memory crisis”: we confuse storing information with actually remembering it. We build vast archives specifically so we can feel safe ignoring their contents. But the deeper pathology lies in what Mr. Terdiman calls the conflict between “Story” and “Body” – between our bureaucratic narratives (safety reports, economic models, political optics) and the stubborn physical reality they purport to describe. Gravity, geology and rust do not read reports. When the paperwork diverges from physical truth, reality eventually........