The Bridge
The Bridge
Meet Your Host, Alan Weiss
Alan Weiss is one of those rare people who can say he is a consultant, speaker, and author and mean it.
His consulting firm, Summit Consulting Group, Inc., has attracted clients such as Merck, Hewlett-Packard, GE, Mercedes-Benz, State Street Corporation, Times Mirror Group, The Federal Reserve, The New York Times Corporation, Toyota, and over 500 other leading organizations. He has served on several boards of directors in various capacities.
His prolific publishing includes over 500 articles and 60 books, including his best-seller, Million Dollar Consulting (from McGraw-Hill) now in its 30th year and sixth edition. His newest is Your Legacy is Now: Life is not about a search for meaning but the creation of meaning (Routledge, 2021). His books have been on the curricula at Villanova, Temple University, and the Wharton School of Business, and have been translated into 15 languages.
Get to know AlanShow Notes
In 1973, D. Keith Mano wrote his only science fiction book, the bridge.
It takes place in 2035, over 60 years since its original publication, but only 12 years from today.
It is about radical environmentalism run amok with a “green” socialist government.
The government decides to give earth back to nature, after already protecting all animal and plant life, but the fact that we destroy microbes every time we breathe is the final straw.
Cars have been eliminated, people return to the fields. The world is incapable of complex technology. Obesity is social standing.
There is resistance, but it is ineffective. Diseases must go untreated. Tumors are declared autonomous life forms, and protected.
Everyone must commit suicide, squads are deployed to kill those who don’t and then they will commit suicide, until the earth is free of all humans.
The hero, Priest, is determined not to die but to find his wife. He must cross the decayed and destroyed George Washington Bridge, hence, the book’s name.
When I read the book, 50 years ago, six years out of undergraduate school, I felt it was dystopian fiction, imaginative but implausible.
Just yesterday I read of a scientist in a scholarly journal who discussed the “full life of plants, including their communications and emotions.”
Barry Goldwater was urgently warned in his presidential bid in 1964 NOT to say that extremism is sometimes justified. Yet he said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” He lost in a landslide to Lyndon B. Johnson.
Exercise, religion, philanthropy, volunteerism, education, travel: You name it, anything that takes you to extremes is likely to be terrible for you, even if moderate amounts are positive for you.
I’m predicting that the inhumane harvesting of animals will be a major and divisive cause in the near future, and it deserves to be remedied. But ending the consumption of animals by law is well on the way over the slope.
Do you think you can’t be arrested for harming a tree or a bush? A woman just petitioned the Rhode Island legislature to make it a felony to use your fingers to pretend to point a fictitious gun at someone.
When everyone’s every grievance is a demand that the entire world observe and honor, otherwise there is oppression and resultant entitlement, we may just be heading for the bridge. Good luck trying to cross it.
Alan Weiss’s The Uncomfortable Truth® is a weekly broadcast from “The Rock Star of Consulting,” Alan Weiss, who holds forth with his best (and often most contrarian) ideas about society, culture, business, and personal growth. His 60+ books in 12 languages, and his travels to, and work in, 50 countries contribute to a fascinating and often belief-challenging 20 minutes that might just change your next 20 years.
Introduction to the show recorded by Connie Dieken
