Antifragility of Riots and Love

ON THE ANTIFRAGILITY OF RIOTS, LOVE, AND OTHER UNEXPECTED BENEFICIARIES OF STRESS

Once one makes an effort to overcome domain dependence, the phenomenon of overcompensation appears ubiquitous.

Those who understand bacterial resistance in the biological domain completely fail to grasp the dictum by Seneca in De clemencia about the inverse effect of punishments. He wrote: “Repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all … just as trees that have been trimmed throw out again countless branches.” For revolutions feed on repression, growing heads faster and faster as one literally cuts a few off by killing demonstrators. There is an Irish revolutionary song that encapsulates the effect:

The higher you build your barricades, the stronger we become.

The crowds, at some point, mutate, blinded by anger and a sense of outrage, fueled by the heroism of a few willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause (although they don’t quite see it as sacrifice) and hungry for the privilege to become martyrs. It is that political movements and rebellions can be highly antifragile, and the sucker game is to try to repress them using brute force rather than manipulate them, give in, or find more astute ruses, as Heracles did with Hydra.

If antifragility is what wakes up and overreacts and overcompensates to stressors and damage, then one of the most antifragile things you will find outside economic life is a certain brand of refractory love (or hate), one that seems to overreact and overcompensate for impediments such as distance, family incompatibilities, and every conscious attempt to kill it. Literature is rife with characters trapped in a form of antifragile passion, seemingly against their will. In Proust’s long novel La recherche, Swann, a socially sophisticated Jewish art dealer, falls for Odette, a demimondaine, a “kept” woman of sorts, a semi- or perhaps just a quarter-prostitute; she treats him badly. Her elusive behavior fuels his obsession, causing him to demean himself for the reward of a bit more time with her. He exhibits overt clinginess, follows her on her trysts with other men, hiding shamelessly in staircases, which of course causes her to treat him even more elusively. Supposedly, the story was a fictionalization of Proust’s own entanglement with his (male) driver. Or take Dino Buzzati’s semiautobiographical novel Un amore, the story of a middle-aged Milanese man who falls—accidentally, of course—for a dancer at the Scala who moonlights as a prostitute. She of course mistreats him, exploits him, takes advantage of him, milks him; and the more she mistreats him, the more he exposes himself to abuse to satisfy the antifragile thirst of a few moments with her. But some form of happy ending there: from his biography, Buzzati himself ended up marrying, at sixty, a twenty-five year old, Almerina, a former dancer, seemingly the character of the story; when he died shortly after that, she became a good caretaker of his literary legacy.

Even when authors such as Lucretius (the same of the high mountains earlier in this chapter) rant against the dependence, imprisonment, and alienation of love, treating it as a (preventable) disease, they end up lying to us or themselves. Legend perhaps: Lucretius the priest of anti-romance might have been himself involved in uncontrollable—antifragile—infatuation.

Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions. Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.