Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan explores the nature of what we perceive as random events, as well as the logical pitfalls that cause us to miss out on the bigger picture. He calls these seemingly random events “Black Swans,” which often have profound consequences for individuals and even for entire societies.
Taleb gives us a better understanding of our own shortcomings (biases and heuristics) when it comes to making predictions and evaluating risk. This can help us recognize when our judgment is clouded by the desire to fit information into neat, easy-to-understand narratives.
I chose the following excerpt from The Black Swan (2nd edition, 2010) because a prominent, recurring theme throughout Taleb’s work (Incerto) is the idea of developing robustness to the known and unknown effects of uncertainty, asymmetry, and complexity.
He applies this idea broadly to many areas, such as science, economics, philosophy, education, finance, politics, and even Mother Nature. Referencing Seneca and Stoicism was an added bonus!
This is my plan B. I kept looking at the position of my own grave. A Black Swan cannot easily destroy a man who has an idea of his final destination.
I felt robust.
I am carrying Seneca on all my travels, in the original, as I relearned Latin—reading him in English, that language desecrated by economists and the bureaucrats of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, did not feel right. Not on this occasion. It would be equivalent to reading Yeats in Swahili.
Seneca was a great teacher and practitioner of Stoicism, who transformed Greek-Phoenician Stoicism from metaphysical and theoretical discourse into a practical and moral program of living, a way to reach the summum bonum, an untranslatable expression depicting a life of supreme moral qualities, as perceived by the Romans.
But even apart from this unreachable aim, he has practical advice, perhaps the only advice I can see transfer from words to practice.
Seneca is the one who (with some help from Cicero) taught Montaigne that to philosophize is to learn how to die.
Seneca is the one who taught Nietzsche the amor fati, “love fate,” which prompted Nietzsche to just shrug and ignore adversity, mistreatment by his critics, and his disease, to the point of being bored by them.
For Seneca, Stoicism is about dealing with loss and finding ways to overcome our loss aversion—how to become less dependent on what you have. Recall the “prospect theory” of Danny Kahneman and his colleagues: if I gave you a nice house and a Lamborghini, put a million dollars in your bank account, and provided you with a social network, then, a few months later, took everything away, you would be much worse off than if nothing had happened in the first place.
Seneca’s credibility as a moral philosopher (to me) came from the fact that, unlike other philosophers, he did not denigrate the value of wealth, ownership, and property because he was poor. Seneca was said to be one of the wealthiest men of his day. He just made himself ready to lose everything every day. Every day.
Although his detractors claim that, in real life, he was not the Stoic sage he claimed to be, mainly on account of his habit of seducing married women (with non-Stoic husbands), he came quite close to it.
A powerful man, he just had many detractors—and if he fell short of his Stoic ideal, he came much closer to it than his contemporaries. And just as it is harder to have good qualities when one is rich than when one is poor, it is harder to be a Stoic when one is wealthy, powerful, and respected than when one is destitute, miserable, and lonely.
In Seneca’s Epistle IX, Stilbo’s country was captured by Demetrius, called the Sacker of Cities. Stilbo’s children and his wife were killed. Stilbo was asked what his losses were.
Nihil perditi, I have lost nothing, he answered. Omnia mea mecum sunt! My goods are all with me!
The man had reached Stoic self-sufficiency, the robustness to adverse events, called apatheia in Stoic jargon. In other words, nothing that might be taken from him did he consider to be a good.
Which includes one’s own life. Seneca’s readiness to lose everything extended to his own life. Suspected of partaking in a conspiracy, he was asked by the emperor Nero to commit suicide. The record says that he carried out his own suicide in an exemplary way, unperturbed, as if he had prepared for it every day.
Seneca ended his essays (written in epistolary form) with vale, often mistranslated as “farewell.” It has the same root as “value” and “valor” and means both “be strong (i.e., robust)” and “be worthy.”
Vale.
