Absorb the shock
Embrace risk and you’ll get good in a crisis
I am not worthy. Yes, I know, dear editor, you asked me to review this brick called Antifragile, and you laughed when I mistook the “New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swan” on the jacket cover for a reference to that ohso-dark ballet movie Natalie Portman got an Oscar for.
You laughed, and asked me to review it anyway.
At best, I feel that (to borrow from the subtitle) I am a sentient thing that gains from the disorder of author Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s rambling prose. At worst, I’m just one of those literary tourists he hates, too much of a dilettante to appreciate his high-concept ideas.
Taleb is a guru of randomness and serendipity, a free spirit who believes we’d all benefit from embracing the sheer unpredictability of life — by embracing risk, essentially. That’s what he means by “anti-fragile,” the opposite of fragile: the quality of not only resisting the shock of change, but of getting better because of it.
Too much of modern life, he argues, is over-managed by “rationalists” (doctors, bankers, social planners, policy-makers, soldiers) who by regulating our existence actually make us more prone to being engulfed by crisis, not being able to rise above it. Indeed, humans need the “titillation” of randomness — a succession of small shocks — to make their lives pleasurable.
“I myself, while writing these lines, try to avoid the tyranny of a precise and explicit plan, drawing from an opaque source inside me that gives me surprises,” he says early on in Antifragile.
I’m imagining Taleb the Great Philosopher staring down at me with disdainful eyes. I am not worthy. Hide this review from him.
But let me first say that anyone who can also write this brief sentence — “The next paragraph is a bit technical and can be skipped” — is my kind of intellectual. Sure, Taleb is verbose, but he knows when to put a sock in it. For a futurist (not a label he likes, but it fits to an extent), he’s also delightfully retrograde, admitting to writing longhand using a fountain pen.
He can be helpful, too, offering a seven-page glossary of his neologisms. “Fragilista” is there: “Someone who causes fragility because he thinks he understands what’s going on. Also usually lacks sense of humour.” So is “Touristification: The attempt to suck randomness out of life. Applies to soccer moms, Washington civil servants, strategic planners, social engineers, ‘nudge’ manipulators, etc.
I only glanced at the book’s 44 pages of appendices and notes, the 23-page bibliography and the 12page index.
Mostly, I must defiantly state that I don’t have a clue what Antifragile is really all about. I don’t. And so I guess that makes me an “anti-fragilista” — worthy of something, perhaps, after all.