| Mehmet Murat BEKDİK | |
| Editor-in-Chief |
|
THE WORLD IS FLAT |
“When thinking about last fifteen years of the flattening of the globe, I noticed that our life was shaped by two dates: November 9, the destruction of the Berlin Wall and September 11, the attacks to the Twin Towers. These two dates represent to dreams of today’s world; 9/11 represents the creative dream and the 11/9 the destructive dream. The first date destructed a wall and opened a new window to the world. It unlocked the door of the half of our planet and made the people living there potential partners. And the other date destructed the World Trade Center and completely closed the windows of the world and re-erected the wall seemingly vanished in 9/11 in an invisible but concrete way. The Berlin Wall was destructed in 9/11 by people dreaming a more open world where each individual will be free to mobilize all their potentials and powered with that dream. But 11/9 radically changed these. It showed us the power of a completely different dream. It showed us the power of a group full of hatred, who had calculated during long years how to kill as many as innocent people as possible. Consequently, the world closed in itself as a seashell.
The imagination of the human being has always been important throughout history. But writing this book helped me to understand that imagination is today more important than ever. Because, in a flat world, ideas and collaboration turned to be commodities accessible to everyone. They are there just to be fetched. There is only one think that resist to become a commodity: Imagination.
That’s why it’s very important to think about how we can spark our positive imagination. As Irwing WLADAWSKI - BERGER, computer science expert of IBM, stated, we have to encourage people to focus on the progress oriented and unifying positive results of the civilization. The way to do this passes through minimizing the alienation, the interdependence instead of self- sufficiency, the pluralism instead of exclusiveness. In this context, we have think more than ever about how to encourage peace oriented dreams emphasizing openness, creating opportunities and hope instead of doubts and complaints.
Let me give an example to illustrate this. At the beginning of 1999, two men started separately into the aviation business from scratch, one some weeks after the other. The first one was called David NEELEMAN. He founded the company called JetBlue. He found a risk capital of US 130 millions $, established a fleet of Airbus A-320s, employed pilots for seven years and started its booking system through housewives working from their computers at home around Salt Lake City.
And the other entrepreneur was, as we have learned from the report of the 11/9 Commission, Osama Bin LADIN. In a meeting held in Kandahar in March or April 1999, he approved the project of Khalid Sheikh MOHAMMED, the Pakistani mechanical engineer who is the architect of the 11/9 attack. The motto of JetBlue was “Same Altitude, Different Approach”; and the slogan of Al Kaida was “Allah is Great”. Both of the planned to land on New York: NEELEMAN to JFK Airport and Bin LADIN to Manhattan.
The world flattens. I didn’t start this process. You can not stop this without paying a big price like preventing the progress of the humanity and your own future. But you are able to lead it to the good or to the bad. If you lead it to the good, you and your generation will live without fear from terrorists and the future nor from Al Kaida and Infosys. You will make progress and grow rich on the flat globe. But a true imagination and appropriate motivation are needed to do this. Your lives have been strongly shaped by 11/9. But the world needs you to be the eternal 9/11 generation. The worlds needs very much the generation strategic optimists, the generation that dreams rather than remembering, the generation of people that don’t reconcile themselves to merely imagine what can be better done, but mobilize to realize those dreams.”
As the Editor in Chief of the review TUGIAD ELEGANS, which has completed its 20 years of publication, I feel the obligation to express my gratitude to all the entities and institutions, and particularly our interactive customers that contributed and supported our review in many different ways.
Please accept my deepest respects with the conscience and belief that your support will bring to more 20 years.
