The Unheard and Forgotten Voices in the Wilderness

I. The Voice in the Wilderness

The image is old and has changed its meaning. In Isaiah and in the Gospels the voice in the wilderness is no futile caller. John the Baptist was heard; people came to the Jordan in crowds. Only our own time has turned the voice in the wilderness into the one nobody listens to.

The Greeks already knew this second figure. Cassandra, daughter of the king of Troy, had received the gift of prophecy from Apollo and then his curse: she would speak the truth, and no one would believe her. She warned against the wooden horse. They pulled it into the city.

II. Who Called Out

In 1847 the physician Ignaz Semmelweis noticed in Vienna that on the ward where doctors came to deliveries straight from the dissecting room, far more mothers died of childbed fever than on the midwives’ ward. He had hands washed in chlorinated lime, and mortality fell drastically. His colleagues resented him, for in essence he was saying that they themselves carried death on their hands. Semmelweis died in 1865 in a mental asylum. Only decades later did bacteriology prove him right.

In 1912 the meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents had once been joined and had drifted apart. Geologists took it for the fantasy of an outsider. Wegener died in 1930 in the Greenland ice. His idea was accepted in the 1960s, as plate tectonics.

In 2000 the financial analyst Harry Markopolos wrote to the American Securities and Exchange Commission that the returns of the fund manager Bernard Madoff were mathematically impossible. He wrote again in 2001, and in 2005 under the title “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud”. In December 2008 the Ponzi scheme collapsed, with losses running into tens of billions.

And at the beginning of 2013 the German federal government presented a risk analysis to parliament. It played through a pandemic caused by a novel SARS virus originating in an Asian market, with dry cough and fever, particularly dangerous for the elderly, in several waves over three years. It recommended stockpiles of protective equipment and disinfectants. The document was circulated and filed. When the pandemic came in 2020, there were not enough masks.

III. The Jolt That Did Not Come

In April 1997 Federal President Roman Herzog gave a speech at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin that immediately became famous. “Germany needs a jolt,” he said. The country had frozen in its vested interests and lacked the courage to renew itself. Everyone quoted him. No one acted.

The jolt came six years later. In 1999 “The Economist” called Germany the sick man of the euro. In February 2003, 4.7 million people were unemployed. Only then, in March 2003, did Chancellor Schröder announce the Agenda 2010. Whether one considers it right or not: it came not when the caller called, but when necessity forced it. And the credit went not to the caller, but to the one who acted in the emergency.

Hubertus Hoffmann, once chairman of a CDU foreign-policy committee and founder of an international security foundation, published a book in 2021 entitled “Mission Zukunft” (Mission Future), almost six hundred pages with two hundred reform proposals. He called for “not more of the same”, but for a reform policy without ideological blinkers, for new, small ministries as “speedboats instead of great political steamers”, for ministers chosen by ability. One chapter is headed “Why Politics Rejects Creativity”. He belonged to the system and knew its people and its language. He was hardly heard. Germany did get a Ministry for Digital Affairs in 2025. Whether anyone thought of his book at the time, we do not know.

IV. Too Early, Too Late

The cases follow a pattern, and it has three phases. In the first, people say: “Exaggerated.” Things are still going well, the caller is considered a doom-monger, and anyone who followed him would have to give something up today for a benefit that would only become visible tomorrow. In the second, people say: “Something must be done at once.” The crisis is here, action is hectic and expensive, often taken by the very people who waved the warning away. In the third, people say: “It is too late anyway.”

The nasty thing is that the first and the third phase are comfortable. Reassurance beforehand and resignation afterwards spare the same effort. Only the second costs anything, and so it is cut as short as possible. In this sequence there is no “now”. As long as the caller warns, the proof is missing. Once the proof is there, the time is missing.

Added to this is a paradox that strikes every warner who succeeds. If he is heard and the disaster does not happen, people say afterwards that he exaggerated. At the turn of the millennium billions were spent worldwide to prepare computers for the year 2000. When hardly anything happened on New Year’s Eve, the warning soon counted as scaremongering. The successful warner refutes himself. In “The Market Will Sort It Out – or Maybe Not!” we described this with the example of the fire brigade: in the years when nothing burns, it seems superfluous. On the empty gas storage, a board member of the utility EWE said in January 2026: “The instruments don’t work. We pointed that out last year.”

V. Why People Do Not Listen

The first reason is rank. Semmelweis was a Hungarian assistant physician in Vienna, Wegener a meteorologist meddling in geology, Markopolos an analyst at a small competitor. People examined not what they said, but who they were. In “The Ignorance and Inefficiency of the German Caste System” we described how a system that sorts by credentials does not see ability. The same applies to warnings. Whoever holds the wrong credentials is not heard, even when he is right.

The second reason is the calculation. The warning costs something today, and its benefit is invisible because it consists in damage that does not occur. No politician wins an election with a catastrophe that did not happen.

The third reason strikes the callers on the inside. Whoever warns within the system disturbs those who were right until now, and loses his access. Whoever wants to rise learns early that agreement gets one further than contradiction. In “The Long March through the Party” we described how this selection works. In the end those at the top are the ones who never disturbed anyone, and they do not listen to those who disturb.

The fourth reason is the most uncomfortable: the warning often contains a reproach. Semmelweis told the doctors that they were killing. Markopolos told the regulator that it was failing. Whoever listens must admit that he was wrong until now. It is easier not to hear the messenger.

VI. It Can Be Done Differently

Some countries have institutionalised listening instead of leaving it to good will. Finland has for decades maintained its own agency for security of supply, which builds up stocks in quiet times, from grain to protective equipment, precisely because in quiet times no one thinks of it. After the storm flood of 1953 the Netherlands built the Delta Works and has since had its dikes regularly tested against future floods. That too began with a catastrophe. But afterwards precaution became an institution that no longer has to be fought for anew in every budget.

The idea is simple. If a warning is only heard when the disaster strikes, then the warning must be detached from the person and turned into a rule. Then it no longer depends on whether the caller has the right rank, but on whether the rule is met.

VII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The strongest objection is obvious: we remember only the callers who turned out to be right. For every Semmelweis there were many who proclaimed nonsense with the same conviction, and it was right not to listen to them. A society that followed every warner would do nothing but take precautions.

That is true. So the real question is not why the callers go unheard, but whether one can tell in advance which of them are right. Never with certainty. But there are criteria one can examine instead of examining rank: does the caller present evidence that can be checked, as Markopolos did? Does he say what would refute him? Does he himself profit from the warning? Semmelweis had mortality figures, Markopolos calculations, the risk analysis a scenario played through. In none of these cases was the substance examined. What was examined was whether the messenger fitted the picture.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that societies which seriously examine warnings suffer more damage from false alarms than they avoid by acting in time.

VIII. The Horse Outside the City

Troy did not fall because no one had warned. It fell because the woman who warned did not fit the picture and the gift was so beautiful. Cassandra’s curse was not that she saw the future. Her curse was that the others did not want to see it.

How many horses stand outside our gates today, and who has already called out?