The Talker’s Free Option

THE TALKER’S FREE OPTION

In Book I of Antifragile, I argued that we need to put entrepreneurs and risk takers, “failed” or not, on top of the pyramid, and, unless they take personal risks when they expose others, academizing academics, talkers, and political politicians at the bottom. The problem is that society is currently doing the exact opposite, granting mere talkers a free option.

The idea that Fat Tony milked suckers when they ran to the exit door seemed at first quite inelegant to Nero. Benefiting from the misfortune of others—no matter how hideous these are and can be—is not the most graceful approach to life. But Tony had something at risk, and would have been personally harmed by an adverse outcome. Fat Tony had no agency problem. This makes it permissible. For there is an even worse problem associated with the opposite situation: people who just talk, prognosticate, theorize.

In fact, speculative risk taking is not just permissible; it is mandatory. No opinion without risk; and, of course, no risk without hope for return. If Fat Tony had an opinion, he felt he needed, for ethical reasons, to have a corresponding exposure. As they say in Bensonhurst, you got to do so if you have an opinion. Otherwise, you do not really have an opinion at all. You need to be earmarked as someone who has no downside for his opinion, with a special status in society, perhaps something below that of ordinary citizen. Commentators need to have a status below ordinary citizens. Regular citizens, at least, face the downside of their statements.

So counter to the entire idea of the intellectual and commentator as a detached and protected member of society, I am stating here that I find it profoundly unethical to talk without doing, without exposure to harm, without having one’s skin in the game, without having something at risk. You express your opinion; it can hurt others (who rely on it), yet you incur no liability. Is this fair?

But this is the information age. This effect of transferring fragility might have been present throughout history, but it is much more acute now, under modernity’s connectivity, and the newfound invisibility of causal chains. The intellectual today is vastly more powerful and dangerous than before. The “knowledge world” causes separation of knowing and doing (within the same person) and leads to the fragility of society. How?

In the old days, privilege came with obligations—except for the small class of intellectuals who served a patron or, in some cases, the state. You want to be a feudal lord—you will be first to die. You want war? First in battle. Let us not forget something embedded in the U.S. Constitution: the president is commander in chief. Caesar, Alexander, and Hannibal were on the battlefield—the last, according to Livy, was first-in, last-out of combat zones. George Washington, too, went to battle, unlike Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who played video games while threatening the lives of others. Even Napoleon was personally exposed to risks; his showing up during a battle was the equivalent of adding twenty-five thousand troops. Churchill showed an impressive amount of physical courage. They were in it; they believed in it. Status implied you took physical risks.

Note that in traditional societies even those who fail—but have taken risks—have a higher status than those who are not exposed.

Now, again, the idiocy of predictive systems, making me emotional. We may have more social justice today than before the Enlightenment, but we also have more, a lot more transfers of optionality, more than ever—a patent setback. Let me explain. This knowledge shknowledge business necessarily means shifting to talk. Talk by academics, consultants, and journalists, when it comes to predictions, can be just talk, devoid of embodiment and stripped of true evidence. As in anything with words, it is not the victory of the most correct, but that of the most charming—or the one who can produce the most academic-sounding material.

The political philosopher Raymond Aron sounded uninteresting in spite of his predictive abilities, while those who were wrong about Stalinism survived beautifully. Aron was about as colorless as they come: in spite of his prophetic insights he looked, wrote, and lived like a tax accountant while his enemy, say, Jean-Paul Sartre, who led a flamboyant lifestyle, got just about everything wrong and even put up with the occupying Germans in an extremely cowardly manner. Sartre the coward looked radiant, impressive, and, alas, his books survived (please stop calling him a Voltaire; he was no Voltaire).

I got nauseous in Davos making eye contact with the fragilista journalist Thomas Friedman who, thanks to his influential newspaper op-eds, helped cause the Iraq war. He paid no price for the mistake. The real reason for my malaise was perhaps not just that I saw someone I consider vile and harmful. I just get disturbed when I see wrong and do nothing about it; it is biological. It is guilt, for Baal’s sake, and guilt is what I do not have to put up with. There is another central element of ancient Mediterranean ethics: Factum tacendo, crimen facias acrius: For Publilius Syrus, he who does not stop a crime is an accomplice. (I’ve stated my own version of this in the prologue, which needs to be reiterated: if you see fraud and don’t say fraud, you are a fraud.)

Thomas Friedman was a bit responsible for the Iraq invasion of 2003, and not only paid no penalty for it but continues to write for the op-ed page of The New York Times, confusing innocent people. He got—and kept—the upside, others get the downside. A writer with arguments can harm more people than any serial criminal. I am singling him out here because, at the core, the problem is his promotion of the misunderstanding of iatrogenics in complex systems. He promoted the “earth is flat” idea of globalization without realizing that globalization brings fragilities, causes more extreme events as a side effect, and requires a great deal of redundancies to operate properly. And the very same error holds with the Iraq invasion: in such a complex system, the predictability of the consequences is very low, so invading was epistemologically irresponsible.

Natural and ancestral systems work by penalties: no perpetual free option given to anyone. So does society in many things with visible effects. If someone drives a school bus blindfolded, and has an accident, he either exits the gene pool the old-fashioned way, or, if for some reason he is not harmed by the accident, he will incur enough penalties to be prevented from driving other people ever again. The problem is that the journalist Thomas Friedman is still driving the bus. There is no penalty for opinion makers who harm society. And this is a very bad practice. The Obama administration was after the crisis of 2008 populated with people who drove the bus blindfolded. The iatrogenists got promoted.