Category: Complacency

“When we finished he shook our hands and said, ‘Endeavor to persevere!’” – The Outlaw Josey Wales

I guess there are a lot of rivers in France, which makes sense.  Water follows the path of least resistance.

In our lives we have choices in how we react to the world, just like you have a choice of computer passwords.  I tried to choose “hi-hat” but the computer responded that “Sorry, password cannot contain symbols.”

While models always come with limitations, I was struck by an analysis that Vox Day (LINK) posted the other day.  In this, the original author that Vox discusses, Samuel Zilincik, refers to three types of opponents – Fragile, Resilient, and Anti-Fragile.  The author discusses these qualities in terms of how certain nations fought through the history of time.

When I was reading, I thought that’s one way of looking at people as well as civilizations engaged in conflict, so, why not?  Bear with me a little bit as I use World War II as an example that relates three nations to three states of being.

As an example, France was Fragile during World War II.  Yes, I know that World War II France wasn’t a person since if France 1939 was a person they’d have been Inspector Clouseau, but stick with me.  After the German invasion, everything about the French and British response was fragile.  Horrible communication, absolute battlefield collapse of poorly disciplined and trained soldiers, failure of leadership to create even the most rudimentary strategy against mobile warfare, and a general collapse of all French public will after the Germans showed up on the doorstep of Paris.

And the food wasn’t great, either.

We know the jokes about French military performance.  But France was fragile.

How are people fragile?

Bakeries in Denmark don’t add too much sugar to pastry – they don’t want to be sweetish.

I’ve been in tough situations with people, and seen some give up.  In extreme cases, it took very little for them to break down – relatively minor incidents led to implosions.  It was like an Antifa® member losing their cellphone with all their Starbucks™ points.  A complete catastrophe!

But I’ve seen normal people lose it, too.  More than once.  Ever see someone break down because of a bad test score?  Ever seen someone break down because they couldn’t get over a break up?

Fragility comes from having to defend things that aren’t your principles.  The French couldn’t stand to see Paris become a war zone.  My friend couldn’t stand to see a girl that he wasn’t suited for go away.  I wasn’t there to give the French emotional support, but I was there for my friend.  And he was there for me when I got divorced.  The core of fragility is holding on to things that aren’t principles.

Once you understand that everything that you own can be taken from you, but that you still own your attitude and the way you feel about things, you are less fragile.  In fact, you move toward the next stage:  Resilient.

In World War II, the one country that screams resilience more than any other was The Soviet Union.  Yes, Stalin was perhaps the most horrible man to have ever lived and communism is the worst system ever devised, unless your goal is human suffering and misery.  But the Soviet people fought.  And fought.  And fought.  Whenever a Russian dropped, he was replaced by another Russian and a Mongolian and two Uzbeks for good measure.  The Soviet Union had redundancy.  Even though they were generally inferior in many ways, the Soviets didn’t give up.  And, when the German supply lines were overextended?

I hear the bread was great in the Soviet Union.  People would wait in line 8 hours for a single piece.

The resilience worked.  The gradual wearing down of the technical superiority by numerical superiority and a willingness to not surrender.  If you have to choose to fight an enemy, a resilient one is far worse than a fragile one.

What makes a person resilient?  That’s the focus on values.  Sure, the Soviet Union had some really lousy values, but they were willing to fight in what they called The Great Patriotic War for the idea of Russia, even though sometimes the troops advanced with guns pointed at their backs, that was more the exception than the rule.

When you live for values and refuse to give up, you become resilient.

The last way a person can live is to become Anti-Fragile.  Anti-fragile is a term that I saw for the first time from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the econo-philosopher.  It means that if you drop a vase, it doesn’t shatter, it doesn’t persist, it becomes stronger.  Vases don’t do that.  But systems do.

Well, maybe not drop it, but attack it with several carrier air groups?

The United States in World War II is an example of an anti-fragile system.  When attacked at Pearl Harbor, it became stronger.  Even though Battleship Row at Pearl was in flames, that attack mobilized the American people.  Pa Wilder signed up on December 8, 1941, as did millions of other men.  But those that didn’t sign up formed a pool of men and women that filled empty factories, constructed new ones, pumped oil, farmed, and built ships and planes and truck and tanks on a level never seen before in history.

Although it’s certain that the majority effort that it took to win World War II in Europe was done by the Soviets, it’s arguable that the Soviets would have folded in 1942 or 1943 without the food, trucks, planes, and ammunition that were provided by the United States.

The United States won the War of the Pacific nearly singlehandedly, although it’s early efforts in North Africa left the British shaking their heads and wondering if the United States could even field an army capable of fighting.  The United States emerged after World War II as an industrial, economic and military behemoth.  No one would argue that the United States of 1945 was weaker than the United States of 1941.  The United States in 1941 is a great example of anti-fragility.

Oh, yeah, don’t forget the atomic bombs.

The prettiest atoms become atomic models.

How do people become anti-fragile?  Well, start by being resilient.  Then?  Add learning.  If you can recognize your mistakes and learn from them?  That’s a good start.  Capacity?  Oddly enough, a person operating at peak capacity has less anti-fragility – they have little capacity to improve and a great deal of capacity for failure.  Efficient systems are prone to failure.  The two-income household was, even before this economic downturn, more prone to bankruptcy, rather than less.

Why?

Because the system is too efficient – most couples tend to use every dime they earn.  When one income goes away?  They system fails.  Unused money (savings) is redundancy.  It’s inefficient, but it’s capacity that you have for the unexpected.

And if you’re not focused on keeping everything, you can take risks.  Lots of them – just so long as the risks aren’t so big that they crater you.  This blog is one of mine.  And the younger you are, the bigger risk you can take without cratering your life – you have time to make it up even if you lose everything at age 25.

I wouldn’t let my kids sleep in the bed with me when they were little.  I told them I couldn’t risk the monster following them into my room.

A vision of Truth is required.  One time a friend of mine and I were discussing this, and he noted that I might be trying to write what people want to read, rather than what I believe.  Nope.  My soul is in this.  Do I agree with everything I’ve written?  Of course not.  I’ve written over 535 posts over the course of 3.5 years.  I’ve learned.  Some of my views have changed as I have changed.  I’d be foolish to not change my views as I learn and understand more.  But as I experiment, my soul has to be involved – I have to be a seeker of Truth, even in my experiments.

I’ve had a few moments of being Fragile in my life – mainly when I was trying to hold on to things and situations that I should have left behind me.  I’ve had the majority of my life lived in a Resilient mode, putting one foot in front of the other and moving onward.

I can see that the best and most productive times in my life are when I’ve lived it in the Anti-Fragile mode.  It may seem odd, but in many ways the Resilient mode is the enemy of the Anti-Fragile mode.  Resiliency is about persevering.  It’s not bad.  There’s rarely any traffic on the second mile and working harder is, in some ways, the easy way out.

But when you achieve an Anti-Fragile life?  Sometimes you achieve something amazing enough to even surprise yourself.

And always remember that when Germany and France go to war, you know 100% who will lose.

Belgium.