“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.
…fighting urge to type cliché Nietzsche quote…
Great subject. Keep up the good work.
Is it the one about a priest, a rabbi and a shaolin monk walking into a bar?
D’oh! Yours is better.
(I reply in order, and forgot you had written that.)
Thank you! Was that the Nietzsche quote about the horse that walks into a bar?
On 9/11 it is stark to think how fragile we have become as a people. Probably in large part because we really aren’t a people anymore, just tax cattle and economic units who share a postal system. Can you imagine if the 9/11 attacks happened today instead of 19 years ago?
People today see every inconvenience and setback as an existential crisis. Kids bullied other kids when I was in school but the kid getting bullied didn’t kill themselves or decide they were suddenly the opposite gender. The sort of sacrifices we heard about from our grandparents during World War II? People who riot if they had to give anything up for any period of time.
Kids had sane, stable homes to go to. If your home is a battleground as well, a kid is toast. He might bot decide that the only way anyone will give him affection is if he mutilated himsekf and puts on a dress, but it’s going to be something.
We are quite fragile, and I think as a culture we’ve exhausted all of the cultural energy that keeps us together. You’re right -half of Portland and all of CNN would celebrate an attack like 9/11.
After I saw Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece movie Dunkirk, I got interested in the Battle of France. It is a fascinating tale – total military collapse of an entire nation in only 46 days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_France
The key part of the battle was when German generals Rommel and Guderian exhibited the anti-fragility you discuss by disobeying direct orders from German HQ to set up a defensive perimeter after winning the fierce battle at Sedan and instead pressing on all the way to the English Channel as rapidly as possible before the British and French could destroy the key bridge at Meuse. They lost around half their bomber force trying (unsuccessfully) to do so.
And so it came to pass…
“85,310 French military personnel were killed (including 5,400 Maghrebis); 12,000 were reported missing, 120,000 were wounded and 1,540,000 prisoners (including 67,400 Maghrebis) were taken…The BEF (British Expeditionary Force, miraculously evacuated at Dunkirk) suffered 66,426 casualties, 11,014 killed or died of wounds, 14,074 wounded and 41,338 men missing or taken prisoner. About 64,000 vehicles were destroyed or abandoned and 2,472 guns were destroyed or abandoned….RAF losses from 10 May – 22 June, amounted to 931 aircraft and 1,526 casualties. The British also lost 243 ships to Luftwaffe bombing in Dynamo, including eight destroyers and eight troopships.
Hitler had expected a million Germans to die in conquering France; instead, his goal was accomplished in just six weeks with only 27,000 Germans killed, 18,400 missing and 111,000 wounded, little more than a third of the German casualties in the Battle of Verdun during World War I. The unexpectedly swift victory resulted in a wave of euphoria among the German population and a strong upsurge in war-fever.”
I believe the French and British lost not (only) because of fragility, but rigidity – of thinking. They trusted the impregnable Maginot Line they had built along the German border – check. They trusted the 250 divisions of men, 3500 tanks and 14,000 artillery pieces in Belgium as being as being far superior to German numbers – check. The trusted the Ardennes forest in south Belgium and Luxembourg to be impenetrable to tanks and plug the gap between their Armies and The Line – oops. And they had never really understood or embraced the importance of the new concept of “air superiority” – fatal mistake.
Rigidity of thinking is when you don’t consider how the next battle is going to be different from previous ones, with new weapons and tactics.
Like smart phones and social media, in our ongoing run up to CW2.
Yup. Plus the tanks weren’t in separate units, but mixed in with the infantry. And they ignored the intelligence that should have tipped them off.
The Frogs did lose an entire generation of men in WWI which is one of the stupidest wars ever with people digging in like moles and lobbing shells and gas at each other across a wasteland.
The Maginot line was bypassed by the creative German generals. Rommel and Guderian were two of the best along with Kesselring who was a Luftwaffe officer in command of ground units in Italy.
The French Char-B tank was formidable but the tactics and leadership were subpar. The French had decent fighter planes but once again no leadership with a clue.
The Russians had women sniper brigades and taught dogs with mines around their necks to run under German tanks.
The Germans developed the anti-mine Zimmeritt paste coating for armor and shot all dogs on sight.
The Krauts were terrified by the Russian human wave attack which can only be used when you have unlimited cannon fodder for the butcher’s bill. The MG 42 machine guns came with an extra barrel and oven mitts for quick change out of a glowing red tube.
The Ivans weren’t fighting for Stalin or communism but fighting to save the Motherland.
The proper frame of mind is an overlooked but important part of WAR for without it you will lose.
Right now the FUSA doesn’t have that frame of mind and egalitarian crack pipe dreams of a globalist utopia are dangerous delusions that rot from the “elites” on down to the prole on the streets.
“The proper frame of mind is an overlooked but important part of WAR for without it you will lose.”
This is why I keep repeating the mantra of mountains of skulls and rivers of blood.
If we aren’t mentally and emotionally prepared to create them, we shall surely become them.
According to “On a Field of Red: The Communist International & the Coming of World War 2”, by Anthony Cave Brown and Charles McDonald, one reason that the French folded so quickly under the German attack is that the COMINTERN had demoralized the troops with propaganda, along the lines of “why should the French working man risk his life fighting the German working man, just to defend the wealth of the elites?” It has been in the interest of the elites to joke about their shameful performance in that task ever since. (Unfortunately, no one told the German soldier to respect the “brotherhood” of the French soldier. That’s the problem with surrender; sometimes it stops the killing, but other times it just makes it one-sided.)
Statistically, France lost about 1257 thousand troops in WW-1, but less than a sixth as many in WW-2 (217 thousand), so it seems to have been an effective survival strategy… for many.
Marx-**person**ship you gender assuming fascist 🙂
I disagree that the USofA was antifragile in WWII. You can be fragile, but but large, distant, and well-funded. At least compared to the other combatants. Hell, the only real difference between us and our Uncle Joe allies were that we were fat, dumb, and happy. They already had plenty of our technology, factories, and dollars.
Nice! Marx-person. Ha!
But that is antifragile – time, space, and money can be components that can be exploited during crisis . . .
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.
And kids led by their teachers spent hours canvassing the countryside to pick wild milkweed pods to get the fluff to make life jackets for our sailors when the Japanese cut off U.S. access to the (then) only mass-farmed life jacket fill. Two full bags = 1 life jacket.
https://www.pantagraph.com/news/kids-gathered-milkweed-pods-for-wwii-effort/article_5099b3d3-117e-52c6-8815-c6893b97ea30.html
Nice! I was unaware of that. I did read of one young lady who had never cut her hair, but donated it for the war. As I recall, it was used for the Norden bombsite.
Also… “…doesn’t like symbols”-? Groooooaaaaaan.
I have standards to maintain. 🙂