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According to Lewis Bornheim, a crisis is a situation in which a previously tolerable set of circumstances is suddenly, by the addition of another factor, rendered wholly intolerable.
The noted scholar Alfred Pockran, in his study of crises (Culture, Crisis and Change), has made several interesting points. First, he observes that every crisis has its beginnings long before the actual onset.
Pockran also observes that a crisis is compounded of individuals and personalities, which are unique:
A crisis is made by men, who enter into the crisis with their own prejudices, propensities, and predispositions. A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored.
A characteristic of all crises is their predictability, in retrospect. They seem to have a certain inevitability, they seem predestined.
3 per cent of all earth bacteria are capable of exerting some deleterious effect upon man.
men had known germs caused disease since Henle’s hypothesis of 1840,
Suddenly, in the 1950’s, the first penicillin-resistant strains of staph appeared.
In the deepest, blackest regions of the oceans, where oxygenation was poor, and where light never reached, life forms were known to exist in abundance. Why not also in the far reaches of the atmosphere? True, oxygen was scarce. True, food hardly existed. But if creatures could live miles beneath the surface, why could they not also live five miles above it?
Before making a decision, an individual can predict various reactions, and he can assess his original, or primary-mode, decision more effectively.
But there is also a category which cannot be analyzed by contingencies. This category involves events and situations which are absolutely unpredictable,
Enzymes, the matchmakers of life, helped chemical reactions to go forward at body temperature and atmospheric pressure.
SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL ONCE SAID that “true genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.”
One is reminded of Montaigne’s acerbic comment: “Men under stress are fools, and fool themselves.”
