According to Nassim Nicolas Taleb, author of AntiFragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, (weighing in at a wopping 509 pages), we’ve become obsessed with predictability and the illusion of control. “Black Swans“, the title of his last book, are large, improbable and consequential events (like WW1 or the rise of the internet) which are never predictable. And as society becomes evermore complex there are likely to be more, not less, Black Swans. The only reasonable response to this is to foster an orientation toward life that he calls “antifragile”.
Say you’re sending some your grandma’s heirloom china off to your sister. You’re going to pack it carefully and plaster “Fragile” stickers all over it, because you don’t want handlers thoughtlessly tossing the package around. When it arrives at your sister’s house, she will carefully unwrap the china, and store the set in a cabinet where it will be safe. So it is with the fragile, inorganic realm. Grandma’s china is fragile, and will break with too many bumps. Rocks are robust and can survive bigger shocks to the system. But robust only gets you half-way there.
What then is “antifragile”? It’s not merely robustness or resiliency. It has to be the opposite of fragile. It would have to be a package that you would label “Toss and kick this around a bit”. It would then suffer all manner of random, accidental jarring. And that’s a good thing. That’s how evolution works, according to Taleb, professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. Things improve when they are shocked.
Every living thing and every social system benefits from unpredictability. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It is precisely randomness, accidents, and chaos that cause systems to self-correct, self-organize, and generate unexpected innovation. You might be surprised by how many of the most effective drugs, for example, were the result of random accident, and not big pharma’s design teams. They were literally stumbled upon.
But, says Taleb, the world is run by “fragilistas”, policy wonks, academics, politicians,
therapists, soccer moms and dads, clergy and scientists who feel the need to intervene and stabilize systems, relationships, children and generally control outcomes. If Taleb is right, (and at times he stretches the point), they are all control freaks who don’t trust evolution. As a result they are iatrogenic (just learned that word) ending up doing far more harm than good . The author is not short on examples, trust me, in fields ranging from medicine, urban planning, social policy, economics, education, etc. Taleb loves, and I mean loves, randomness, in the way that it exposes the hyper-rational arrogance of modernism.
I had difficulty with his neo-Darwinian assumptions about evolution. That aside, I found it a refreshing reminder of how much of life is out of our control. Life isn’t safe. Humans are the only animal with sufficient foresight to be scared to death of death, illness, and circumstances reminding us of our contingency. We’ve wrestled nature and its processes pretty much to the ground (or so we like to believe, but tell that to the Australians as their country burns). Does anybody actually feel any safer? We know the score. The terrible enactment of our illusion of control is doing more damage than death ever could to our one Earth community, our relationships, and our social systems.
Evolution isn’t predictable. It truly does thrive on randomness. And yet randomness is involved in a dance with purpose, an ecstatic dance that will always transcend the ballroom steps of our grand narratives; it will leave us feeling as often as not like we’re being ass-kicked by circumstances beyond our control. The wind, to use Bruce Cockburn’s image, will always come out of nowhere and knock us sideways.
And whatever it is we mean by G_d/G_ddess is implicate in both the sideswiping and and the patterning. So we might as well enjoy the ride. Expecting randomness and chaos to undermine our best laid plans, we learn the wisdom of surrender and deep acceptance of reality.
I can’t help but wonder what would happen if spiritual communities authentically embraced the principle of antifragility. We’d be a little more suspicious of five year plans, and maybe even learn to befriend chaos. We might be less quick to hire fragilista consultants, and more impressed by the ones who told us that the best intervention for the time being would be to do absolutely nothing in order to see how the community might self-organize around the crisis. I’m pretty sure that Jesus was an anti-fragilista. He trusted that there was a natural grace at work, which if you tried to over-manage, (as do most religious authorities), would come back and bite you in the butt.
This is the life of Spirit, random and unpredictable, and yet at the same time, a 
staggering display of patterned beauty; fragile in that nobody and nothing is getting out of here alive, and yet antifragile, in that this creativity that fashioned a universe and took form in us, is irrepressibly transcending all manner of death and destruction; full of suffering and yet through it all, revealing a Heart that is drawing a universe towards its fulfillment in love.
Hi Bruce,
Just read your post. Loved it! Not sure if I will ever get to the 500 pager so i appreciate your review and comment. The term “anti-fragile” really resonates with me. I always keep working towards and waitng for the time when I will be “fixed”. After reading what you wrote I feel much more at peace and relaxed. I will stop worrying about the problems and just enjoy the process. I have been believing in evolution for a long time and had to come to the conclusion that if I believed it existed then it must be going on right now too. However I wondered where it might be since we are so good at fixing things. Your review gave me a bit of an answer. However I do trust that Higher Power to prevail and have Its way with us despite all of our controls and planning and hooray for that. We certainly still need to evolve and I for one, will sit back and relax and try to enjoy it! Thanks again for what your do. Yvonne
Well said, Yvonne. With you, I do think it’s both a principle and a practice, this anti-fragile orientation. Liberates us to live with more risk, closer to our core, Earth, heart.
Thanks for bringing the theme of this book to our notice, Bruce!
[RAMBLE ON]
As I continue to mature, OK, evolve, I can’t but help notice how willingly we all place our trust in systems and constructs which are largely “Rube Goldberg” contraptions of flawed human construction. This includes things like “the economy” (which includes the retirement savings of most of us), and organized religion. When someone questions something in either, you are instantly deemed a heretic.
Thomas Berry said that one of the saddest things he ever heard was when a decision was made to log an area of pristine wilderness “because we need the jobs”.
The world economy is certainly not anti-fragile and that’s becoming patently obvious to many. The same could be said for dogmatic religion.
Marxists would likely buy into Taleb’s thinking as they foresee the inevitable collapse of the capitalist world economy and the elimination of the “opiate of the masses”!
What kind of Brave New World will emerge on the other side of out current smorgasbord of global crises is surely hard to foresee. I hope that it is more evolved and enlightened but are these not fragile commodities which have to be carefully packed and labelled (nurtured and taught)? Is not enlightened self-interest a more likely Darwinian anti-fragile trait for the future?
The human species needs a thousand year “timeout” from competition, war, and economic “growth” (planetary plundering) in order for our culture to absorb the evolutionary reality of what we really are and might be. Otherwise, our more basic survival instincts will likely dominate our thinking in any future crisis.
[RAMBLE OFF]
Thanks Rambling Jack, er…Don,
I agree with you. He was outraged by the bailout of corporations during the debt crisis. He predicted it. New economies are going to emerge out of this mess. I agree that enlightened self-interest is the way of the future, and it will happen the moment we collectively realize that Earth’s interests are our interests. Hopefully the smorgasbord of crises will be profound enough for us to get it.
“Things improve when they are shocked.” I’m not sure this is such a simple cause and effect equation. It maybe that a shock becomes an opportunity to improve but I’m not sure that improvement is a given. I can be shocked and reorganize into a pattern of living that is not an improvement, just a different state of bad or maybe even more bad or maybe even just more conscious of the bad but with no improvement (that one’s the worst). There seems to be a maturity, a readiness within a system/person, that is equally random but that we can contribute to, that is ready to respond positively to the shock. I think what doesn’t kill you can actually make you stronger in a very stupid way as much as it can in a positive way.
I’m pretty sure what you are saying is (but might be wrong) that things won’t change without a shock. Improvement is one possibility of three from a shock, 1. radically transformed, 2. same but looks different, 3. maybe worse. If no shock, things will be 1. probably and nearly always the same, 2, maybe fractionally better, 3. maybe slowly declining; But if there’s no shock, the possibility of radical transformation is probably zip. If it’s radical transformation you’re after, well bring on the shock. If you’re not sure you want to radically transform, then shock can really shut me down.
Thanks Jill,
In fairness to the author, he’s more nuanced than an 700 word post can convey. I like your points. I think the main thing he is getting at is the shaking up of some fundamental assumptions of a modernist mindset. We can embrace antifragile intellectually, but most of us most of the time are outcome oriented. I like this framework for the way that it invites us to fail bravely, stay open to grace in all circumstances, embrace the accidental and random as opportunity, etc.
Thanks. I am going to take some time with the concept of failing bravely. That is so radically counterintuitive to my normal way of doing things that it warrants a look at. It is liberating just to imagine it.
Take care
It’s counterintuitive for me as well Jill, but I’m slowly mastering the art.
Thank you Bruce – sounds like my sort of book. Having learnt the hard way that i am in control of nothing, taking the step of leaning into the daily (aka the arms of G-D) and living on the tight-rope finding a calm beyond fear and the rational….great stuff. Losing one’s life to find it?
That’s a hard learning, isn’t it, Hilary. But such a gift to deeply know.
Me again – thanks for the Tolle link – wonderful stuff.
Hi Hilary,
Glad you enjoyed it.
Like a spring, ever afresh, nature in celebration and in joy, explodes into infinite patterns.
I am in the middle of listening to this as an audio book, and appreciate the way he has framed anti-fragile vs robustness. The anti-fragile can grow from stress (although not too much stress or it could cease to exist). I have found this true of the human body through healing, exercise and other biological systems. On a personal level, I resonated with his concept that being in debt makes you fragile, and being out of debt and having money in the bank makes you anti-fragile. The post traumatic growth scenario is also anti-frgile and one I can appreciate it having faced cancer a few years ago. I may need to listen to this again to get it all in, but encourage others to read the book or listen to the audiobook.
Great to hear from you Peter, and you sharing insights grounded in your own journey around fragility/anti-fragility.