Global strategic plan for coronavirus pandemic?

Coronavirus -- Global Plan, Doughnut, Torus, Helix and/or Pineapple? (Part #2)

In response to the chaos of coronavirus and its expected aftermath, there is widespread quest for a "plan" (Selman Gebrekidan, The World Has a Plan to Fight Coronavirus, The New York Times, 12 March 2020; Ari Schulman, What's the Plan? Yes, the Covid-19 shutdown is necessary -- but it won't work without a vision of how it ends, The New Atlantis, 21 March 2020),). This is now being articulated in terms of a "Global Marshall Plan" (Isabel Silva, A new Marshall plan? MEPs debate coronavirus response, Euronews, 26 March 2020; Next EU budget should be 'Marshall Plan' for Europe: EU's von der Leyen, Reuters, 2 April 2020). As noted by the latter:

"We know in this crisis that we need quick answers. We cannot take one, two or three years to invent news tools", she told a news conference, adding that the long-term budget, known as the multiannual financial framework (MFF) was its strongest tool. "We want to shape the MFF in such a way that it is a crucial part of our recovery plan... Many are calling right now for something which is called this Marshall Plan. I think the European budget should be the Marshall Plan we are laying out together as a European Union for the European people", she said.

In its focus on "quick answers", the argument is unfortunate given the absence of clarity on the questions to which they are expected to respond. It recalls only too readily the much-cited adage: For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. Should the crisis frame new questions to which far more imaginative solutions are required? Or is another management adage appropriate: Having lost sight of our objectives, we redoubled our efforts?

Calls are indeed made for joint action and collaboration (OECD Secretary-General: coronavirus "war" demands joint action, 21 March 2020). The latter Commits policy support, saying efforts must have "Ambition of Marshall Plan, vision of New Deal". Commentators note that any appeal for a more proactive, unified Europe may already be too late, with each country focused on its own strategy.,

Variants of that model have been articulated for the World Economic Forum (Erik S. Reinert (Why we need a Global Marshall Plan, 22 April 2015; Robert Montenegro, Economists propose a Global Marshall Plan for lasting peace through the 21st Century. Big Think, 1 May 2015). Most recently the possibility has been articulated by Henry Kissinger following his earlier promotion of that approach (Mike Whitney, Henry Kissinger Calls for a New Post-Covid World Order, Global Research, 6 April 2020; Henry Kissinger, Reflections on the Marshall Plan, Harvard Gazette, 22 May 2015). The best humanity can hope for in the way of "new thinking"?

Such a Global Marshall Plan was first devised by former American Vice-President Al Gore (Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, 1992) giving specific ideas on how to save the global environment. A Global Marshall Plan Initiative was subsequently instigated as an integrative organizational platform for a "world in balance".

Spreadsheet thinking? As in the cited declaration with respect to Europe, the primary possibility is understood to be through use of the Multiannual Financial Framework. This necessarily takes the form of a complex accounting spreadsheet, namely the means through which planar thinking with respect to a global system is articulated and reinforced. No questions are asked regarding the possibilty that such a framework could be seen as a factor in the negligence which resulted in the current strategic disarray, as previously suggested prior to the systemic chaos of 2008 (Spherical Accounting: using geometry to embody developmental integrity, 2004).

With respect to strategic dilemmas, that spherical perspective highlighted the distinctions made between the "geometry" of:

"Bottom lines": double bottom line, triple bottom line, qiuadruple bottom line and quintuple bottom line -- understood as nested, but of which little is said in relation to any global Marshall Plan
Transformation of a spreadsheet to a torus
Synergetics and tensegrity
"Sustainability" through "golden mean accounting"?
Towards a "semantic dome"
Construction of "semantic shelters" or "memetic vehicles"?

Are the strategies planned and deployed in response to the pandemic to be compared to the much-cited management adage: If your only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail?

Unfortunate homophones? Given the relation between "marshall" and "martial" as homophones, this reinforces the probability of highly unfortunate confusion between "Marshall Plan" and "Martial Plan" when there is already a degree of discussion of martial law, mobilization, conscription and "compliance" (U.S. combats martial law conspiracy theories as the National Guard assists in coronavirus response, The Washington Post, 23 March 2020; Corona Coup: Secret military plan to impose martial law and stop civil disturbances if government is crippled by coronavirus, The Sun, 22 March 2020; Stephen Dycus, et al, Martial Law Would Sweep the Country Into a Great Legal Unknown, The Atlantic, 27 March 2020).

A further concern with the focus on "plan" is the manner in which this has long been associated with the strategic skills developed in "board" games, most obviously chess and go. Can the global strategic challenges be appropriately and comprehensibly transformed into such a 2D framework without highly problematic distortion -- as is indicated by the challenge of map projections from 3D to 2D (exemplified by the extensive List of map projections in Wikipedia)?

A frequently cited example of homophones is that with respect to "board" and "bored". This potentially justifies suspicions regarding the efficacy of any "Bored of Directors" and the nature of its decision-making, especially given extensive metaphorical use of a "strategic plank". A sobering reflection on the metaphor is offered by the closing verse of a much-cited poem by the American poet Emily Dickinson:

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -
(I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain)

Whilst warfare has long been planned with 2D depictions in situation rooms, from a strategic perspective the point is further emphasized by the exploration of the variants of Three-dimensional chess (Millennium 3D chess) and 3D go (3D Go Game with AI Player). Such a framework has already been highlighted in the popular imagination by a depictions of 3D Chess from Star Trek (Chess Variant Pages). Such three-dimensionality now has greater relevance with the deployment of space forces by the USA and Russia. Other complications are evident from 3-player chess variants and multi-player go as discussed separately (Destabilizing Multipolar Society through Binary Decision-making Alternatives to "2-stroke democracy" suggested by 4-sided ball games, 2016).

Plans within unrecognized polyhedral frames? The argument above calls into question the cognitive and strategic limitations of thinking in terms of a "plan" as being quintessentially two-dimensional when the challenge is one demanding three-dimensional geometry (or more), if only when understood in "global" terms. The contradictions could even be seen as evident when applicable to a "planet" -- as a little plan? If Christianity is to be understood as reinforcing such a framework, a vital distinction in comprehension of planning in a global context can be highlighted from a different perspective (Adhering to God's Plan in a Global Society: serious problems framed by the Pope from a transfinite perspective, 2014).

The need to handle complex dynamics appropriately from a strategic perspective can be stressed otherwise through the contrast between a planar perspective and the extensive insight into a so-called complex plane. The question is whether any strategic plan is imbued with such insights from complexity theory. The question can be taken further through experimental animations (Comprehension of Requisite Variety via Rotation of the Complex Plane: mutually orthogonal renderings of the Mandelbrot set framing an eightfold way, 2019).

The polyhedral models in the earlier paper are indeed helpful in clarifying the challenge in that they are necessarily composed of a configuration of "planes" -- with which a multiplicity of "plans" could be associated as indicative of distinctive perspectives on a larger whole of higher dimensionality (however elusive). This has the potential of addressing the obvious challenge that many alternative plans are already "on the table", each in the guise of a singular "Global Plan" -- but without the slightest effort to consider how they might be interrelated and coordinated. In that spirit there can be only the "One Plan" -- and any failure to adhere to it is to be subject to the severest criticism and condemnation (as with respect to the current global lockdown). As is evident from the multiplicity of sets of global strategies at this time, this could be readily recognized as irresponsible.

Given the icosahedral form primarily adopted by viruses, the point could be further emphasized that structurally they imply a pattern of interlocking planes (D. P. Wilson, Protruding Features of Viral Capsids Are Clustered on Icosahedral Great Circles, PLoS ONE, 11, 2016, 4). Are distinctive global plans to be understood as related in that way -- with the vertices of individual planes corresponding to the elements of their corresponding plans? More complex polyhedra would necessarily have planes with higher numbers of vertices. The image on the left below suggests how three "Global Plans" might be quite distinctively oriented with respect to one another, possibly with little recognition from each such framework of the global relevance of the others. Such "mutually orthogonal" plans are explored separately through what might be considered the archetypal variants (Mutually orthogonal Abrahamic symbols from the perspective of projective geometry, 2017).

Golden rectangles suggestive of internal coherence of a set of operational insights
Dodecahedron (20 vertices)	Icosahedron (20 faces)	Icosahedron (15 golden rectangles)

Reproduced from Coherence, comprehensibility and credibility of a cognitive toolkit (2018)