Free Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Page A

of this table.
     
     
    But alas, unlike Adam Smith, Plato did not quite get it. Promoting the well-known metaphor of the
ship of state,
he likens a state to a naval vessel, which, of course, requires the monitoring of a captain. He ultimately argues that the only men fit to be captain of this ship are philosopher kings, benevolent men with absolute power who have access to the Form of the Good. And once in a while one hears shouts of “who is governing us?” as if the world needs someone to govern it.
Equilibrium, Not Again
     
    Social scientists use the term “equilibrium” to describe balance between opposing forces, say, supply and demand, so small disturbances or deviations in one direction, like those of a pendulum, would be countered with an adjustment in the opposite direction that would bring things back to stability. In short, this is thought to be the goal for an economy.
    Looking deeper into what these social scientists want us to get into, such a goal can be death. For the complexity theorist Stuart Kaufman uses the idea of equilibrium to separate the two different worlds of Table 2 .
For the nonorganic, noncomplex, say, an object on the table, equilibrium
(as traditionally defined)
happens in a state of inertia. So for something organic, equilibrium
(in that sense)
only happens with death.
Consider an example used by Kaufman: in your bathtub, a vortex starts forming and will keep going after that. Such type of situation is permanently “far from equilibrium”—and it looks like organisms and dynamic systems exist in such a state. 2 For them, a state of normalcy requires a certain degree of volatility, randomness, the continuous swapping of information, and stress, which explains the harm they may be subjected to when deprived of volatility.

CRIMES AGAINST CHILDREN
     
    Not only are we averse to stressors, and don’t understand them, but we are committing crimes against life, the living, science, and wisdom, for the sake of eliminating volatility and variation.
    I feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now have to justify why you
are not
on some medication. There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence—perhaps even the first source. I get mellow and lose physical energy when it rains, become more meditative, and tend to write more and more slowly then, with the raindrops hitting the window, what Verlaine called autumnal “sobs” (
sanglots
). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call
saudade
or the Turks
hüzün
(from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy—and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile?
    Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire’s “spleen,” Edgar Allan Poe’s moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced.…
    If large pharmaceutical companies were able to eliminate the seasons, they would probably do so—for a profit, of course.
    There is another danger: in addition to harming children, we are harming society and our future. Measures that aim at reducing variability and swings in the lives of children are also reducing variability and differences within our said to be Great Culturally Globalized Society.
Punished by Translation
     
    Another forgotten property of stressors is in language acquisition—I don’t know anyone who ever learned to speak his mother tongue in a textbook, starting with grammar and, checked by biquarterly exams, systematically fitting words to the acquired rules. You pick up a language best thanks to