The Cultural Roots of Strategic Intelligence

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Strategic Intelligence is a form of meaning that promises the possibility of strategic advantage, dignity, the achievement of objective, and the fulfillment of potential in hostile environments. In The Cultural Roots of Strategic Intelligence Gino LaPaglia demonstrates that the strategic aspect of reasonarising in human experience, encoded as value, and born by culture as a strategic resourcehas been encoded as values that have been memorialized in culturally authoritative sources in various Eurasian cultures for thousands of years. These sources have validated a strategic orientation in the world, legitimized the strategist as a heroic identity, and transmitted a coherent world view that enables the practitioner of strategy to overcome asymmetric threat. By excavating the provenance of strategic thought expressed in the cultural identity of the strategist in the most culturally authoritative mythological, literary, philosophical and religious sources, and excavating the underlying strategic values expressed in cultural products, LaPaglia demonstrates that the strategic aspect of human rationality is one of the most basic structural dynamics of human meaning, and that the transmission of this strategic way of being and acting in the world offers hope for lifes underdogs.

Reviews

The Cultural Roots of Strategic Intelligence is compelling and urgent not just for those involved with the professional intelligence community, but also for anyone seriously committed to interdisciplinary studies, cross-cultural understanding, and most importantly, to the development of a rigorous discipline of cultural genetics. It is exemplary as a demonstration of those elements of human culture which, while remaining distinctive and localized, are at the same time unmistakably repetitions of patterns of behavior that are as old as humanity itself and which are vital to human survival and flourishing. It thoroughly rewards the reader with the exciting range and depth of its insights into the problem of understanding human behavior in all its fateful twists and turns. -- Francis Ambrosio, Georgetown University
Gino Lapaglia unfolds an incredibly colorful and delicate scroll of depiction of Strategic Intelligence (SI) across the continent of Eurasia. Through a methodology of comparative cultural genealogy, SI is rediscovered as a pivotal linguistic metaphor in indicating essential characteristics of human living and civilizational thriving. The book furnishes a number of innovative interpretations of traditional and modern Western and Chinese texts, and it would greatly appeal to readers in subjects such as philosophy, religion, business management, military thought, and international relationship, to name a few. -- Bin Song, Washington College

"Gino LaPaglia has done a great service for scholars and practitioners by uncovering the roots of strategic thinking in the humanities and comparing its expression across Eurasia. That humans in all societies share a concept of the strategic goes without saying, but seldom has its tenets been self-consciously laid out and clearly labeled in strategic treatises. LaPaglia's insight is that strategic thinking is, rather, embedded in and taught through the stories at the core of our culture. His tour of The Cultural Roots of Strategic Intelligence in Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian and Chinese sources is erudite, thought-provoking, often humorous, and it helps us understand how we think and act, be it in the situation room, the boardroom, or the playroom."--James Millward, Georgetown University

Author Bio

Gino LaPaglia is a Washington D.C.-based scholar practitioner with a doctorate from Georgetown University and expertise in East Asian Affairs and Cultural Studies.