The Talebian and Thielian Moment
The current COVID-19 pandemics allows us to witness the end of two ideas. The end of history and the end of future have both themselves ended.
“Absent an invasion by aliens from outer space, there never can be a world state that politically unites all of humanity”
Writes Peter Thiel in his essay on 9/11 called The Straussian Moment.
He criticized the project of modernity and enlightenment that departed from the very deep and foundational questions. Such as, what is a meaningful life and a human nature? And he discusses Carl Schmitt’s call to return to politics proper, where one openly knows and acknowledges who his enemies are.
But then, Peter Thiel proposes also the opposite point of Leo Strauss, who would emphasize the need for the indirect, clandestine and esoteric in politics and philosophy. And he concludes that both these approaches of Schmitt and Strauss are inadequate to the task at hand — to beat rivalry and the mimetic violence.
This is the deep revelation of Christianity according to René Girard. That the violence is at the roots of our culture and that we root out violence with violence. We replace the violence of all against all, with the violence of all against one, which is more economic and which we call scapegoating. Christianity throughout the ages slowly revealed this scapegoating mechanism of mimetic conflict, according to Rene Girard and Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel in his essay awaits a moment when we can get away from an impasse of postmodernism and relativism without future proper, and when this deep truth about the human condition can be revealed and scapegoating can be overcome.
This time might have come with the current corona virus pandemics. We have had similar pandemics in the 1950s and 1960s and also there were the recent SARS, MERS and ebola scares. But this seems to be the first time that humanity is globally united, after 200,000 years. And not just digitally via social media, but everyone is on quarantine and a whole world took a kind of sabbatical.
The Thielian moment of getting back to the future
Last year Peter Thiel has said in an interview with Peter Robinson that the Fukuyama’s End of History ended definitely in 2018, when the Chinese president Xi Jinping became president for life. Resembling the return of Mao’s shadow.
But we can say that another idea, the end of future, ended shortly after in 2019, with the coronavirus crisis. We can view the current pandemics as global drill of things to come when we let the catastrophic and existential risks proliferate.
Peter Thiel distinguishes four types of futures. From an optimistic definite future (USA in the times of Apollo program in 1960s) to pessimistic indefinite future (Europe now). The US currently lives in the optimistic indefinite future, where transactional behaviors and relationships abound. People are consuming a lot, but investing and saving little. In the future of increasing optionality via finance and law and zero-sum transfers.
Meanwhile, China lives in the pessimistic definite future — trying to avoid another Cultural Revolution and famine and saving a lot, but not consuming much and investing in US treasuries instead of the domestic economy.
Peter Thiel says, that since the 1970s, there was only a small cone of progress in the world of bits, and not so much in the world of atoms. The current pandemic could change that. We need to radically shorten supply chains and bring production of many vital products and commodities back to the West.
We are now experiencing shortages of everything, from gloves, masks and paracetamol, to ventilators and more sophisticated therapies and technology. Meanwhile 3D printing enthusiasts in local maker spaces fill the gaps and produce spare parts for ventilators and hack Decathlon scuba gear to serve doctors and patients.
Meanwhile in my country, Slovakia, we have large marginalized communities of Roma living in generational poverty and informal settlements. One can see innovations for this market being scaled and improving health later globally. Imagine companies like our Ecocapsule or Tesla, that now create off-grid houses or EVs for the rich, scaling their products to masses and the billions in generational and extreme poverty.
Imagine a world where it costs 1 euro to launch a startup, 10 euros to buy a smartphone, 100 euros to own a laptop, 1000 euros to have a digital fabricator, and 10 000 euros to own an off-grid house with high speed internet, solar energy and water collection. I wrote that we need such innovations to connect the rest of humanity from poorer countries to our digital future.
Meanwhile the ground reality in my country is that over the last few years, according to SDG Index, actually fewer people have access to clean water than before. Presumably, due to an increase of populations in informal Roma settlements.
To generalize, getting back to the optimistic and definite future according to Peter Thiel’s idea, would be to invest in hard tech using patient venture capital. This means investing in hundreds of companies such as our Ecocapsule.
This means investing in circular economy, space industry, cellular agriculture, vertical farming and digital fabrication. This means investing in health and resilience in a very general sense. From biohacking to general resilience and healthy relationships across many contexts.
Peter Thiel writes in his essay, that the end of history for Alexandre Kojève, a Hegelian behind the foundations of the EU project and a friend of Leo Strauss, was the end of all hard questions.
Now it seems lots of people around the world have lots of hard questions.
You can watch me discussing this article on YouTube or listen to me on my new podcast project Between Ideas & Subcultures.
The Talebian moment of fractal localism and respecting old wisdom
It seems we have moved from the paradigm of economic efficiency to the paradigm of health. From a world of narrow over-optimization and specialization, into a world of general sovereignty in many domains — a world of health, antifragility and resilience.
Another big shift seems to be in the area of disinformation and the war on sensemaking. We see its global health implications. We see that some small countries and city states are more efficient and were able to act swiftly and implement sweeping tracing programs to slow down their local epidemics, while other countries can’t stop distorting statistics, hiding information and engaging in populism and verbalism, instead of honest reporting on the ground reality.
Nassim Taleb is also an old contrarian, similar to Peter Thiel. They are also both philosophical minds and public intellectuals criticizing the status quo. And they are not easy to define ideologically.
Nassim Taleb published a draft of his short book Principia Politica in December 2019, where he outlines fractal localism as an antidote to the current globalized system that stems from Kantian universalism and the lack of understanding of how important the question of scale is to good governance.
Nassim Taleb, if you allow him, will take you through a rabbit hole into a beautiful world of clarity, complexity and wisdom.
Jim Rutt, another complexity thinker, says he is allergic to anything metaphysical and he used to hate words such as wisdom. But he recently came to conclusion that wisdom for him is something like understanding exponentials and fat tails. This is exactly a Taleb’s world, and why he is so keen on stressing the wisdom of grandmas — probably they have lived through more rough times, than your average young and ambitious expert who doesn’t have an embodied experience of a Pareto world full of black swans.
In Principia Politica, Taleb stresses that good governance doesn’t scale. You cannot expect China to be as well governed as Singapore. Also, hospitality doesn’t scale. He mentions as a joke that some nomadic tribes from his region are very generous when one visitor comes and only a bit less generous when two visitors come as a couple. But if five visitors come at once, they might kill them.
Taleb also explains how relatively open-minded and tolerant neighbors easily end up creating almost perfectly segregated neighborhoods. He uses Shelling’s model and cellular automata to illustrate the point. So good people can create awful societies and vice versa. So even selfish people can create virtuous societies when local markets operate well. It is important to stress the word local, where information is more symmetric, than in global markets and supply chains, where even the biggest companies don’t have the ability to audit their suppliers past Tier 1 or maybe a sample of Tier 2 suppliers.
The central point of Taleb’s ouvre is antifragility. Dave Snowden says, why not call it just resilience? And antifragility is a kind of resilience. But Jordan Hall explains, that it has to do more with information and less with energy. So, if you are robust and someone attacks you, you stay unmoved. If you are resilient, you fight back. If you are antifragile, you invent Thai boxing on the spot.
Taleb focuses on complex relationships that arise from scale or timing differences and sudden changes. So, for example jumping 20x from one meter might make you stronger and antifragile, as it is called exercise. But jumping once from 20 meters will most probably kill you. Similarly, it is different to catch a flu and catch a disease that is 20x more deadly.
Similarly, it is very different if you have three months to liquidate a huge open position as an investor, or if you have only three days to do that. The difference can be as huge as a loss of 4.9 billion euros, as Jérôme Kerviel and Société Générale found out in 2008. And we might say that this was also a secondary effect of the huge stress that the financial meltdown of 2008 put on banks.
The point is, efficiency is not enough. Efficiency is the enemy of antifragility. Taleb says you have two kidneys for a reason. In today’s world of pandemics, it might be translated into having two generators to power your house, having two houses, one small flat in the city and one big house in the countryside, and having stockpiles of food and protective gear.
From growth and sustainability into health and regeneration
We lived in a world over-focused on efficiency. But this world has ended with the corona virus pandemic. Having only efficiency is like trying to sit on a one-legged stool. One needs at least three legs to make it stable. We need to focus also on antifragility and robustness in the equal measure.
Following the conceptual toolkit of Forrest Landry, and his three modalities, I suggest the relationship of these three dimensions is multiplicative: antifragility x robustness x efficiency. This means that if one of these dimensions is zero, then the whole product is zero. But we could look for an “efficient frontier” of these three dimensions — how to maximize their product?
We can translate them as vitality x wellbeing x wholeness. These would be distinct yet inseparable concepts.
Vitality/anti-fragility would be the bottom-up and first-person view. In the Talebian speak it would be called optionality.
Wellbeing/robustness would be the second-person view of relationships, networks and transcendence. Taleb would probably connect it with the concept of scaling. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, a colleague of René Girard, would call it self-transcendence. Others would use the term emergence, as distinct from phase-transition, because the former is irreversible.
And wholeness is the top-down, third-person view of global optimization and global optima. As in human body, everything is in constant flux with lots of complex feed loops focused on regulating the whole system as the environment changes.
So, we could unite these three terms under health and looking at health from three different views and getting this multiplicative relationship of vitality x wellbeing x wholeness.
So, the old paradigm was efficiency, endless growth and sustainability (zero-sum). The new paradigm is health, proper scale, and regeneration (over-compensation and positive-sum). In other words, we need to go beyond sustainability into regeneration.
The old paradigm meant fragility, rivalry and addiction for the people and endless optimization of business processes in pursuit of these goals.
The new paradigm is antifragility, interactivity and reciprocal opening of people, their future and world.
The moment to fix our own pipes
The complexity science is quite young and it’s having its high moment right now. Taleb has his own brand of complexity. Then there are people coming from Santa Fe Institute, some of them like Jim Rutt and Jordan Hall have created this cultural meme of Game B. An idea for an operating system that is strikingly different from the current global civilization, and all civilizations since agriculture, that they call Game A. The difference is something like a difference between a caterpillar and a butterfly.
Then there are people like Dave Snowden, Bonnitta Roy and Nora Bateson, having a more embodied techniques of weak signal detection and learning about complexity, beyond abstractions and concepts. This has a huge advantage that even kids can acquire trans-contextual knowledge, for example through techniques like Nora Bateson’s “warm data labs”.
And in these times of pandemics this embodied understanding of complexity can be accelerated through questions like: What is health in the context of economy, security, family, education, culture, community, infrastructure, innovation, fragility, resilience…?
Jordan Hall talks about four stages of Baudrillard's simulacra and manufacturing of consensus reality in the context of this pandemic. And he illustrates it with the example of a broken pipe. If we have a broken pipe, we have a choice to fix it ourselves or call a plumber.
Sometimes we cannot call the plumber directly, we need a landlord, and he often takes his time to respond. We need to grab his attention and advocate for our problem, that is just one in the myriads of other problems the house or the landlord has. The fourth stage of simulacra would be legislative, fixing regulations to make landlords more effective and responsive.
The political level of lobbying and advocacy, the fourth level of Baudrillard’s simulacra, is like King’s Landing in The Game of Thrones, full of intrigues, games of etiquette and virtue signaling. But the current pandemic is more about ground reality present in Winterfell — the pipe is leaking and it needs to be fixed. Words and political speeches are not enough.
If plumbers are missing, we need to learn new skills quickly. If we cannot buy face masks and if international organizations are sending confusing signals about them, we need to make our own masks at home, and do our own sensemaking — thinking from first principles and using various heuristics, like precautionary principle and an outside view (like many people in Asian countries use masks for long time and it seems to work).
The city and woman
Geoffrey West in his work on scale outlined a striking difference between how cities and living organisms scale. And this has to do, probably, with information processing of collective intelligence. And probably this has something to do with the problem of rivalry, envy and hedonic treadmills.
Living organisms scale in a sub-linear way, with a ¾ exponent — the bigger the mass of the body of an organism, be it a tree or an elephant, the less food and water it needs proportionally, compared to small plants and mouse. Something like the surface to volume ratios.
Compare it with cities that scale in a super-linear way. The bigger the city becomes, the more crime and CO2 emissions per capita it produces.
Tom Chi tells us that the population growth is not a problem as such. Because ants occupy similar biomass to humans and they consume 10x the amount of food as humans, compared to their body weight. So, the problem is deeper than over-population. It is located not in our needs but in our desires.
Even very tolerant people can create almost perfectly segregated city districts, as Taleb noted. We could speculate accordingly that even very peaceful people can create structural violence, and very ecologically conscious people can create massive pollution and mass extinctions.
The central theme of Thiel’s thinking is the reduction of violence and rivalry as he is deeply influenced by the mimetic theory of René Girard. Who claims, the unfolding revelation of the scapegoating mechanism by Christianity has slowly reduced violence.
Alexander Bard, a Swedish philosopher akin to Zizek 2.0 says that René Girard is probably right, but this violence reduction is rather recent, as Jews experienced pogroms even after the World War II, and we cannot limit our worldview only to Christianity.
He proposes that religion in general is supposed to tame men and tame violence. He goes as deep as Zoroastrianism to uncover some of the foundations of the later religions, that he considers too universalistic and watered-down versions of the two foundational ideas coming from Zoroastrianism — nomadology as a circular and horizontal view of the world, and eventology as the linear and vertical view of time.
This fits to the Zero to One idea of Peter Thiel. Technology for him is vertical and there is one event — emergence of something brand new that wasn’t and now is, as the first iPhone. And then there is the horizontal process of globalization and mimetic competition of copycats.
The central theme of Taleb’s work is ethics based on harm prevention through precautionary principle and via negativa (subtraction instead of addition, fasting instead of new medicines).
Taleb goes to look as far as Hammurabi’s Code to dig some deep principles as skin in the game (symmetry). In Principia Politica he deals also with continuity — understood as the rate of change — striking a right balance between being progressive and conservative in some dimensions.
Taleb’s concept of via negativa, as subtraction instead of addition, is similar to the concept of imploitation coined by Alexander Bard. He contrasts imploitation as a tantric Buddhist practice of withholding, repairing, preserving, with the opposite — exploitation and the search to exploit and add new things and experiences.
Daniel Schmachtenberger sees rivalry as one of the three generator functions of existential risk, along with exponential tech and excessive extraction/pollution.
I wrote elsewhere that we can address two of the generator functions of existential risk by borrowing two verbs from Dave Snowden and Alexander Bard — exapting (repurposing) to address the exponential tech risks and imploiting to address excessive extraction/pollution risks.
Alexander Bard talks about three utopias we should pursue — Ecotopia, Cosmopolis and Syntheos. This distinguishes him from the complexity crowd and Game B enthusiasts, as he is not afraid of the word utopia and the need for bold visions. This brings him closer to Peter Thiel and his way of thinking.
Peter Thiel said recently that he understands the predicament of Europe and the popularity of Green movements there. If our three options for the future are Chinese-style authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism of the young extremists, or an ecological lifestyle with an e-scooter, then he understands why young people here will choose the e-scooter future.
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But I feel rivalry is the deepest and the most central problem of our times. The problem that makes the cities grow and levels of pollution and crime rise. The problem that makes people and cities different from plants and forests. The problem that makes desire different from need.
Here Alexander Bard, together with his recent dialogue partner Andrew Sweeny, discuss trauma and ecstasy as two things that are able to interrupt mimesis (mimetic competition and mimicking of others). Both trauma and ecstasy are the intrusion of the Lacanian Real to our mundane reality. And this is how Bard defines religion and the divine — as a divine intrusion of the Real.
Trauma is connected with stress and stressors and so it is the area where Taleb is at home. According to him, small infrequent traumas can improve antifragility, but excessive trauma or chronic stress can kill you.
Trauma can cause overreaction in the form of scapegoating. According to the ancients and moderns alike, someone needs to be held responsible for the famine, the drought, the plague.
Ecstasy can heal the wounds of trauma and can produce life altering memories. But frequent flirting with ecstasy can create addictions and habits that are hard to shake.
Alexander Bard’s third utopia is Syntheos, or what he calls the Barred Absolute. A kind of machine-human hybrid we are creating through our interactive collaboration online, as creative mind-hives. Bard contrasts the interactive swarms of creators with inter-passive mobs of scapegoaters online. The first he calls netocrats, the latter he calls consumtarians.
So, it seems when we are engaged in the mimetic competition we produce unhealthy and fragile monocultures. When the trauma of the Real lands into our world, crushing our hopes, we leave our theater of a rivalrous deep play for a while, just to scapegoat someone who we think should be held responsible. And when the ecstasy of the Real smashes our visions of the future, for a while we enter into the infinite now of bliss. And this can lead to addiction.
So are we destined forever to be in a vicious circle of scapegoating — mimetic competition — addiction?
Maybe the way out is a patient and humble reversal of this circle into a virtuous one, just by changing direction. Instead of a reciprocal narrowing of addition and over-optimization, we enter into a reciprocal opening of the self and the world, as John Vervaeke would say, and regenerative over-compensation.
Instead of adapting we choose exapting. Instead of exploiting we choose imploiting. Instead of consuming we choose prosuming or syngesting (my word for a combination of digesting and synthesizing). Instead of decision-making we chose choice-making, not limiting ourselves to an artificially narrow list of options, as Forrest Landry would say.
But how to live up to this Taleb’s idea of fractal localism, keeping our companies and cities in just the right scale and shape, not trying to keep up with the Joneses, and abandoning rivalry? And how to have Thiel’s bold visions of the radically better future in the same time?
Universalism, addiction and efficiency are out. The new paradigm consists of thriving and unique subcultures, health and regeneration. The new paradigm is vitality x wellbeing x wholeness.
Scapegoating as a sign of false messiahs and power-hungry autocrats is out. Healing traumas through beautiful ecstatic moments of the infinite now is in.
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But I feel this is still not enough to solve rivalry. We might not find the chosen one. Or the loved one. We might not escape the oscillation between trauma and ecstasy that we call mimetic desire. We might not stop producing and consuming, prosuming and syngesting.
We might be forever stuck between ideas and subcultures. Between time and space. Always on the move. Always between zero, unique events of one, and infinite copycats and repetitions.
We might be barred from entering the absolute Syntheos of singularity on the digital cloud. And forever remain human, so human. Human is never enough. Humanism is not enough. And that’s the point. Emptiness is form.
Being thrown back into the history and the future at the same time, as our inadequacy is exposed by the pandemic. Uniting us as one humanity for the first time in 200,000 years.
But machines can assist us and scale our empathy beyond our subcultures and nations. Into a global digital empire that we call the internet. Our femme fatale is a network. A symbiotic collective intelligence. A will to wisdom. Leaving power and rivalry in the factory ruins.
Embracing our grandmas and grandpas, virtually.
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