SOMETHING YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ME BEFORE WE GO ANY further together is that I really don’t enjoy flying.

This might seem like an unfortunate condition for somebody who has to travel for a living, and indeed it has taken the edge off my pleasure in what would otherwise be the best job in the world. I’ve tried everything from hypnotherapy to alcohol—I don’t much like alcohol either, so a small dose will incapacitate me quite effectively—from tranquilizers to meditation, and from nervous-flyer courses to just dealing with it.

So when I was invited by the government of President Michelle Bachelet to visit Chile in 2008, I confess my heart sank as much as it rose, which is not a comfortable feeling. Here was (a) a country that had fascinated me since childhood, (b) a president I very much wanted to meet, (c) the birthplace of two Nobel Prize–winning poets whose work I love, and (d) a flight that appeared to take fourteen and a half hours across the dark stormy Atlantic before it struggled over the dizzying crags of the Andes, where I was pretty certain the survivors of one particularly horrific air disaster had ended up eating each other. And if the assignment followed the pattern that my advice to governments was beginning to take, I’d have to make the journey five or six times.

Getting to Santiago on a fourteen-hour flight feels as daunting to me as if it still took fourteen weeks in a four-masted schooner. Even though it’s only one day of my life and as soon forgotten as a day at a boring conference, it feels like an immense undertaking, wedged between me and the future.

Part of the problem with airplanes is that it’s so transparently obvious the whole performance is a physical impossibility, and the only plausible scientific explanation for why this vast metal can full of people manages to stay suspended in thin air is that everybody expects it to. So as I’m shuffling forward in some hateful queue to have some part of me or some piece of paper scrutinized by angry people in military uniforms, I sometimes wonder if I actually shouldn’t be allowed to fly, because my private doubts might be sufficient to bring the thing down—especially if all the true believers are asleep.

Which of course they always are, blissfully and like tiny contented well-fed children, from the moment the thing leaves the ground, in whatever position they happen to find themselves. I, on the other hand, am incapable of sleeping on airplanes: I can be weeping with exhaustion after twenty-four hours of flying and still be completely unable to lose consciousness, even on one of those fully flat beds (bad idea to be strapped down in a supine position, in pajamas, when your time comes). I must keep looking out of the window, just to make sure that the engines aren’t on fire and there are no guided missiles heading toward us from an angle that the pilots can’t see, assuming (and it’s a big assumption) that they’re both alive and conscious.

Miraculously, on my first trip to Santiago I was blessed with a smooth, entirely missile-free flight all the way, and although I was half demented with boredom, I got there without feeling particularly frightened. The Cordillera of the Andes, and especially the final descent toward Santiago and the coast, was breathtakingly beautiful, and we didn’t stop to take a closer look.

And I still remember the beautiful air, the beautiful blue calm, the sense of blissful stability and repose when I finally reached my hotel bedroom high up in a modern block in the lovely sunny Santiago afternoon and slept off my anxious exhaustion between clean white sheets and the reassuring murmur of the traffic far below.

Well, despite Chile’s manifold attractions, President Bachelet’s government had concluded that its problem was a low international profile, which was limiting its trade and tourism prospects. This seemed a reasonable hypothesis: although most people in other parts of the world don’t have anything bad to say about Chile when asked, they don’t really have anything good to say either.

And that’s hardly surprising: Chile isn’t a major power in any traditional sense of the word. It isn’t associated with any widely recognized landmarks (apart from the statues on Easter Island, a distant territory which is not widely known to belong to Chile). It doesn’t interfere with other countries too much or get itself into trouble. It has always ranked between thirty-fifth and thirty-ninth place in the NBI, just clear of the ten or so countries which are always at the bottom of the list because people know they don’t like them, but well below the twenty or so countries at the top that people know they like. It’s a country that they just don’t know much about, or think much about.

And the consequence of that is that Chile ends up being saddled with a generic Latin American image. This is what happens to countries that aren’t themselves well known but inhabit a region with a particular image: they have to shoulder the burden of that region’s image, good or bad, appropriate or not. This is a huge problem for less well known countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, and a huge advantage for less well known countries in Scandinavia and Western Europe and, to a lesser extent, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia.

For Chileans—who with some justice like to think of themselves as rather calm, highly civilized, efficient, and well organized (their nickname is los ingleses de Sudamérica, the English of South America)—it is distressing to be branded as chaotic, violent, corrupt brigands, whose veins are pullulating with boiling tropical blood. Yes, they will protest vigorously when their sense of justice is offended, but—say the Chileans—this is the exception that proves the rule. A recent survey reported that the average US citizen’s primary association with Chile was “coffee”: a commodity which is hardly grown there, except for a few boutique organic plantations. In fact Chileans are themselves among the few Latin American populations who prefer to drink tea.

But whenever a government tells me its country has an image problem, my immediate suspicion is that it is referred pain. There’s usually only one reason why a country thinks it has, or actually has, an image problem, and that’s because it has a reality problem: It hasn’t found its wider role or task or purpose in the world. It doesn’t really know why it exists for people outside its own population, and that’s why nobody else knows. It wants to be seen as something other than it is, and when it doesn’t like its own reflection, it blames the mirror.

Public opinion may well seem cruel, but at heart it usually only consists of reality with a certain amount of distortion and inertia. The people of the world don’t attend secret meetings to which carefully chosen countries aren’t invited and then decide how they are going to deliberately misunderstand those countries. They hear and see what all countries do—and more often what they fail to do—and reach their own conclusions.

After meeting several hundred people around the country and digesting quantities of books, films, poems, plays, and research about Chile’s people, its history, landscape, economy, politics, and society, I began to form the conclusion that their real problem was that they had the wrong profile, one that didn’t suit their current national psyche at all.

The Chilean government believed that Chile was widely but ignorantly perceived as a poor country in a troubled region, failing to achieve the standards of peace, prosperity, and stability that Anglo-American capitalism and democracy recognize as the hallmarks of success, but in reality, they were judging themselves, and allowing themselves to be judged, by the standards of a system they had already started to supersede without fully realizing it. They were, in fact, moving rapidly into a post–Washington Consensus world where they were already in advance of many other countries, including in some respects the United States, whose good opinion they valued more than any other’s.

It’s hardly radical to challenge the idea that happiness and economic wealth are synonymous. In fact, Adam Smith, the father of economics and arguably of capitalism, challenged it himself. In one of his less cited works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he ascribes great importance to the role played in society by justice and other moral virtues that run counter to the spirit of pure self-interest.²

The irony in all this is that many of the virtues and assets which Chile, like many other “developing” countries, is rushing to discard because they seem irrelevant to the struggle for modernization and growth, are precisely those virtues and assets which the “first world” is finally learning to value most as it begins to understand Adam Smith’s point: its respect for and closeness to traditional culture and values; its respect for and closeness to nature; strong family and societal cohesion; a real sense of the poetic in daily life; a respect for and closeness to the indigenous population; a sense of history; and a respect for culture and learning and particularly for those values that Chileans so often identify as distinctively Chilean: civility, courtesy, calm, high standards in public and private life, prudence, wisdom.

What’s interesting about this list is that some of its elements are classically regarded as “left-wing” values, and others as “right-wing” values, and yet to me it all seems to hang together perfectly harmoniously without any obvious contradictions. In my work, I’ve always found it helpful to keep a wide margin between domestic party politics, with its arbitrary, confusing, and contradictory ideological hostilities, and the work that countries need to do in order to build a just and prosperous society that also contributes to the community of nations. Insofar as it is possible to deal with politicians on matters of public policy without bringing party politics into the equation, this is what I have always tried to do.

One of the great benefits of globalization, and the rapid transformation of the world from global battleground to global marketplace, is that it enables smaller countries to find a profitable niche and compete on the basis of their cultural, environmental, imaginative, and human qualities rather than on their ability to harm others. We live in an age which, for the first time in history, provides real opportunities for countries like Chile if those countries can play by a different set of rules than those laid down by the great powers of the past.

This, I began to feel, is the central dilemma of modernity. Can a smaller or poorer country enjoy the benefits of economic growth without losing its identity?

The loss of identity isn’t merely an unfortunate side effect of growth. For smaller countries, identity is the indispensable means by which they will achieve growth. Countries that aren’t powerful need to be interesting—they need to exercise attraction if they cannot exercise compulsion, and the source of that attraction can only be their unique, individual identity, their culture, their history, their land, their traditions, their genius, and their imagination. And luckily, all countries are interesting: that’s in the nature of human communities and human culture.

This is what Professor Joseph Nye, a political scientist at Harvard University, refers to as soft power, as distinct from the hard (military or economic) power that enables traditionally powerful countries to force their will on others.³

None of these challenges, of course, is unique to Chile. At this point in history, they will be familiar and relevant to many countries, particularly to those in urgent need of economic growth. So it was clear that if Chile could demonstrate that it was willing and able to navigate these complex issues with courage and imagination, it would be doing important and valuable pioneering work on behalf of its peers around the world. That felt like a natural leadership role and—incidentally—the kind of behavior that, over time, tends to result in a higher profile and a positive international reputation.

StartUp Chile is a good example of the way this can work. This program offers government-backed seed funding and other incentives for young entrepreneurs. The twist is that foreign nationals can also apply, and in the years since its founding in 2010, many North American and other non-Chilean entrepreneurs have moved to Santiago. Domestically, the program has encouraged more start-ups and thus provided economic stimulus and extra vibrancy in certain key sectors—but it has also provided a benefit to talent in other countries and raised Chile’s international profile.

The StartUp Chile model has since been replicated in numerous other countries, which is really the ideal consequence of such a project: it spreads the benefit beyond the project’s home country, while spreading an awareness of that country’s energy and imagination.

This isn’t rocket science. At heart, StartUp Chile is a pretty standard state incubator model of the sort that can be found almost anywhere in the world these days: the little twist of creativity was to make it a talent-recruitment project at the same time by offering the same incentives to foreigners. A more conventional mindset would perhaps have balked at the idea of making state funds available to nonnationals, and such an attitude would likely have condemned the project to obscurity. The consequence is a highly effective project that acts as a positive ambassador for Chile’s business and innovation sector around the world.

Thanks to this and other examples of “strategy, substance, and symbolic actions” in Chile and elsewhere, I’d started to learn and to teach that creativity and imaginative thinking are crucial to the art of policy making. Perhaps my diet of preparatory reading in Latin American magical realism had started to influence my approach. I began to appreciate that recognizing an original idea is a skill that’s almost as rare and valuable as creating it: the ability to spot an original idea from a great distance, like a bright-blue ear of corn among the gold and grey, spotted from the opposite side of a twenty-acre field.

As I said earlier, creative is simply the opposite of boring, and it’s crucial for governments to understand this. They often make the mistake of thinking that just because everything they do is so serious and affects the lives and livelihoods of so many people, the safest thing for them to be is boring. There’s a fatal convention in public service that everyone should leave their hearts and souls in the fridge before they leave home in the morning. In fact this is disastrous, not only because it so drastically limits the quantity and quality of policy solutions that governments are able to produce, but also because it makes work so dull and unrewarding.

During my second trip to Chile, I visited a state housing project in the northern city of La Serena to meet some of its inhabitants and hear about the various neighborhood initiatives they had set up. Such meetings are important because there’s always a risk that government officials, with the best possible intentions, may assume that the only worthwhile conversations for me to have are with people who hold national power and responsibility. Thus, the entire country outside the capital city, and the whole population outside the “decision makers” and the experts, can easily be overlooked.

After our first meeting in the housing project, a particularly powerful-looking woman, who had given a passionate presentation about representing the views of indigenous people, asked whether I was working for President Bachelet. On hearing that I was, she strode purposefully toward me with a rather grim expression. For a moment I wondered if she was preparing to attack me, but almost at the point of impact she threw her short muscular arms very wide and hugged me until I felt my rib cage bend the wrong way, making me promise I’d “pass it on” to la presidenta.

Back in Santiago I kept my promise, just a trifle awkwardly, the next time I met with President Bachelet in a heavily gilded salon in the presidential palace; a guard in nineteenth-century dress uniform grasped the tasseled hilt of his polished saber and stepped anxiously forward as I closed in on la presidenta to give her the hug.

I wondered a great deal why Michelle Bachelet seemed to be so unaffectedly loved by many of the Chileans I met. When I asked, they would often tell me that it was because she was “a real person.”

The question of authenticity and how we perceive it is a critical one when looking at politicians and other people in power. President Bachelet provided an interesting contrast to the British prime minister Tony Blair, whose speaking voice changed from one that was startlingly ordinary—just like a real human being—at the beginning of his time in power, to the familiar false cadences of the professional politician, in a very brief space of time.

Those false cadences reminded me of an episode in Oliver Sacks’s book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.⁴ Sacks described a visit to his hospital’s aphasia ward (patients with global aphasia lose the ability to understand the meaning of words, but remain acutely sensitive to tone of voice and body language), where he came across a group of patients roaring with laughter as they watched President Reagan addressing the nation on television. Sacks wrote of “the feeling I sometimes have—which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have—that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words. . . . Thus, it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of [Reagan’s] voice, which rang false for these wordless but immensely sensitive patients.”

If only we could revive this hidden but preternatural skill in voters all over the world, how much better we would all be governed!

I was struck by the essential modesty of the Chileans, and their so-called chaquetero (or “jacket puller”) syndrome, according to which anybody who achieves success or prominence can expect to be pulled down (by the coattails, presumably) by everyone else. The Chileans were convinced this characteristic was unique to them, and yet I’ve found it—or versions of it—in almost every country I’ve worked in, with the notable exceptions of the United States, Sweden, and Kazakhstan (now that would make an interesting thesis). Most of these countries even have, like Chile, their own often untranslatable expression for it: the Japanese say that “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down,” whereas in Australia it’s the tall poppies that get cut down; in Scandinavia it’s the “law of Jante,” named after a fictional Danish town in which nobody ever stands out from the crowd. In fact, this tendency for societies to value modesty and conformity over exceptional achievement appears to be the norm rather than the exception.

Another common fixation relates to hospitality: in almost every country I’ve visited, my hosts tell me that hospitality is what they’re uniquely famous for, and with the slightest encouragement, will even produce medieval accounts to prove that it has been so for centuries. And indeed I’ve found it to be the case almost everywhere I’ve been that people are remarkably welcoming to strangers. This has become an in-joke in my family when I come back from a trip and they ask me how it went. My invariable answer, apparently, is “the people were lovely.” The only possible conclusion I can make from this and the previous observation is that most societies value modesty and kindness the world over.

In 2010 Santiago suffered a devastating earthquake, a month after Haiti’s even more terrible one. A Chilean official called to ask me what he should say about it when he was due to appear on US television that evening. I suggested that his message to the American people should simply be, “For God’s sake, don’t forget Haiti.” The idea that a country could be Gandhi-like in its humility (while discreetly communicating that it was by no means a helpless victim) was to become a recurring theme in my work.

Years later, long after I’d last visited Chile, and many other countries had occupied my time and attention in the interval, I was at home on a rare break between trips. One quiet spring morning, I was standing in the kitchen, and my eye was caught by the weak English sunshine glinting through a pebble of blue glass set in a picture frame hanging at the window. It was a souvenir I’d bought in the house of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in the lovely coastal town of Valparaíso. In the frame was his tiny poem: Hoy es hoy y ayer se fue, no hay duda.*

I felt a sudden pain in my chest. Was it heartburn? Was I having a heart attack? No, it was just an emotion, but strong enough to feel physical: I missed Valparaíso.

*Today is today and yesterday has gone, without a doubt.