The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

people don’t learn what is imposed upon them but rather what they freely seek, out of desire or need. For people to learn, they need to want to learn.

Inside the United States government were all these little boxes. The boxes had been created to address specific problems as they arose. “How to ensure our food is safe to eat,” for instance, or “how to avoid a run on the banks,” or “how to prevent another terrorist attack.” Each box was given to people with knowledge and talent and expertise useful to its assigned problem, and, over time, those people created a culture around the problem, distinct from the cultures in the other little boxes. Each box became its own small, frozen world, with little ability to adapt and little interest in whatever might be going on inside the other boxes. People who complained about “government waste” usually fixated on the ways taxpayer money got spent. But here was the real waste. One box might contain the solution to a problem in another box, or the person who might find that solution, and that second box would never know about it.

“Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence,”

The fifth, their thirty-three-year-old leader, the beautifully named Wag Dodge, survived. His was the most interesting story, at least to Carter. At 5:55 p.m., with the fire just a minute away and rushing toward him at ever greater speed, he’d lit a second fire, up the hill he needed to climb. As his fire burned the grass in front of him, he walked into it and threw himself onto the hot ashes. He’d called for his men first to abandon their packs and Pulaskis, and then to follow him into the fire he’d set. Either they didn’t hear him or thought he’d lost his mind; at any rate, they didn’t really know Wag Dodge or have any reason to trust him. Dodge alone heard and felt the main fire passing by on either side of him, leaving him unscathed. Until that moment there was no history of a firefighter having done such a thing, but it became an accepted strategy in the fighting of grass fires. “Escape fire,” was what they’d call it.

“We are reactive and tend to only intervene when things are getting bad,” wrote Carter. “And what we underestimate is the speed that what’s bad moves.”

In Park’s time with the federal government, he’d dealt with one technology crisis after another. He’d noticed a pattern that he’d first identified in the private sector: in any large organization, the solution to any crisis was usually found not in the officially important people at the top but in some obscure employee far down the organization’s chart.

It told you something about big organizations, and the L6s buried inside them, that they were able to turn Charity Dean into a person in need of excavation.