Much like the curmudgeon Chuang Tzu (400 BC) before him, the curmudgeon Taleb (2018) provides an illustrative sequence of pre-COVID/pre-Ukraine observations on the consequences of people (“interventionistas”) acting way too overconfidently and heedlessly using infantile, cheaply made, poor models of reality:
As I am writing these lines, a few thousand years later, Libya, the putative land of Antaeus, now has slave markets, as a result of a failed attempt at what is called “regime change” in order to “remove a dictator.” Yes, in 2017, improvised slave markets in parking lots, where captured sub-Saharan Africans are sold to the highest bidders.
A collection of people classified as interventionistas (to name names of people operating at the time of writing: Bill Kristol, Thomas Friedman, and others) who promoted the Iraq invasion of 2003, as well as the removal of the Libyan leader in 2011, are advocating the imposition of additional such regime change on another batch of countries, which includes Syria, because it has a “dictator.”
These interventionistas and their friends in the U.S. State Department helped create, train, and support Islamist rebels, then “moderates,” but who eventually evolved to become part of al-Qaeda, the same, very same al-Qaeda that blew up the New York City towers during the events of September 11, 2001. They mysteriously failed to remember that al-Qaeda itself was composed of “moderate rebels” created (or reared) by the U.S. to help fight Soviet Russia because, as we will see, these educated people’s reasoning doesn’t entail such recursions.
So we tried that thing called regime change in Iraq, and failed miserably. We tried that thing again in Libya, and there are now active slave markets in the place. But we satisfied the objective of “removing a dictator.” By the exact same reasoning, a doctor would inject a patient with “moderate” cancer cells to improve his cholesterol numbers, and proudly claim victory after the patient is dead, particularly if the postmortem shows remarkable cholesterol readings. But we know that doctors don’t inflict fatal “cures” upon patients, or don’t do it in such a crude way, and there is a clear reason for that. Doctors usually have some modicum of skin in the game, a vague understanding of complex systems, and more than a couple of millennia of incremental ethics determining their conduct.
And don’t give up on logic, intellect, and education, because tight but higher order logical reasoning would show that, unless one finds some way to reject all empirical evidence, advocating regime changes implies also advocating slavery or some similar degradation of the country (since these have been typical outcomes). So these interventionistas not only lack practical sense, and never learn from history, but they even fail at pure reasoning, which they drown in elaborate semiabstract buzzword-laden discourse.
Their three flaws: 1) they think in statics not dynamics, 2) they think in low, not high, dimensions, 3) they think in terms of actions, never interactions. We will see in more depth throughout the book this defect of mental reasoning by educated (or, rather, semi-educated) fools. I can flesh out the three defects for now.
The first flaw is that they are incapable of thinking in second steps and unaware of the need for them — and [just] about every peasant in Mongolia, every waiter in Madrid, and every car-service operator in San Francisco knows that real life happens to have second, third, fourth, nth steps. The second flaw is that they are also incapable of distinguishing between multidimensional problems and their single-dimensional representations — like multidimensional health and its stripped, cholesterol-reading reduction. They can’t get the idea that, empirically, complex systems do not have obvious one-dimensional cause-and-effect mechanisms, and that under opacity, you do not mess with such a system. [Emphasis added.] An extension of this defect: they compare the actions of the “dictator” to those of the prime minister of Norway or Sweden, not to those of the local alternative. The third flaw is that they can’t forecast the evolution of those one helps by attacking, or the magnification one gets from feedback.
And when a blowup happens, they invoke uncertainty, something called a Black Swan (a high-impact unexpected event), after a book by a (very) stubborn fellow, not realizing that one should not mess with a system if the results are fraught with uncertainty, or, more generally, should avoid engaging in an action with a big downside if one has no idea of the outcomes. What is crucial here is that the downside doesn’t affect the interventionist. He continues his practice from the comfort of his thermally regulated suburban house with a two-car garage, a dog, and a small play area with pesticide-free grass for his overprotected 2.2 children.
Imagine people with similar mental handicaps, people who don’t understand asymmetry, piloting planes. Incompetent pilots, those who cannot learn from experience, or don’t mind taking risks they don’t understand, may kill many. But they will themselves end up at the bottom of, say, the Bermuda Triangle, and cease to represent a threat to others and mankind. Not here.
So we end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional, literally mentally deranged, simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating modernist slogans stripped of all depth (for instance, they keep using the term “democracy” while encouraging headcutters; democracy is something they read about in graduate studies). In general, when you hear someone invoking abstract modernistic notions, you can assume that they got some education (but not enough, or in the wrong discipline) and have too little accountability. Now some innocent people — Ezidis, Christian minorities in the Near (and Middle) East, Mandeans, Syrians, Iraqis, and Libyans — had to pay a price for the mistakes of these interventionistas currently sitting in comfortable air-conditioned offices. This, we will see, violates the very notion of justice from its prebiblical, Babylonian inception — as well as the ethical structure, that underlying matrix thanks to which humanity has survived.
The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do no harm (primum non nocere); even more, we will argue, those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions. Further,
We have always been crazy but weren’t skilled enough to destroy the world. Now we can.
So, Taleb suggests that the problems being caused by the intervention of the delusional intelligentsia into other peoples’ lives ultimately stem from the insular nature of the lives of these ‘intelligentisa’ — they are not constantly ground-truthed throughout their sheltered lives, and so they just tiptoe through imaginary tulips, causing difficulty upon difficulty for those surrounding innocents with actual skin in the game.
Desmet, in turn, hypothesizes that such wacko, harmful behavior takes place because the poor, modern interventionistas are deeply anxious, go about spiritually unsatisfied because their way of living is empty and directionless, and therefore they naturally get attracted to the damndest ways of thinking and acting just to fill the awful, awful vacuum of their lives with something.
Both are talking in the same generally correct direction, I think, but Logan (2019) describes the basic developmental mechanism missing from the lives of the problem-causers much more clearly and helpfully than either Taleb or Desmet do:
The work in which head and heart and hand participate, at once, yields the only objective knowledge. It employs the ratiocinative capacity, the ability to discriminate and choose. It is driven by the wish to know. It is corrected, tempered and given form by work with the resistant materials of this world.
I saw José Ramón Juaregui make an axe. He talked about what he was doing. The sound of the metal in the forge gave him clues. The changing color of the metal did too. The number and kind and quality of the sparks that rose were important. When he took out the blank—the unworked metal — to hammer it, he set it at angles that took advantage of the deep pocket of wear in the center of his old black anvil. He had certainly measured the metal blank carefully before he put it in the forge, but the shape it took was made not by calculation and measurement, but by experienced perception. The size and shape of the tongs and the bits helped him eyeball the curve and volume of the head. He tried to explain how hard you had to hit the metal and just where, but words — even Basque words — failed him. The whole man had acquired this knowledge.
This I would say is knowledge of objective truth. It is not thinking. It is not feeling. It is the training of perception in the face of resistant materials. It is need and thought adjusting to the real. It is a new participation in the world of relationship, one through which a strange kind of flexible precision emerges unbidden.