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David Kelley’s Three Greatest Hits – Article by Edward Hudgins

David Kelley’s Three Greatest Hits – Article by Edward Hudgins

 The New Renaissance Hat
Edward Hudgins
October 28, 2017
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David Kelley is retiring from The Atlas Society, which he founded in 1990 under the name of The Institute for Objectivist Studies. But I can’t imagine David with an “emeritus” moniker retiring from the world of ideas that he has helped to shape.

I was at the founding event in New York City that February nearly three decades ago. I spoke at Summer Seminars and attended one-day New York events in the 1990s, and I had the privilege of working for many years with David at the Atlas Society. Knowing The Atlas Society and David as I do, I offer my own picks for his three greatest intellectual hits.

First, in The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand, he explained that Objectivism is an open philosophy—indeed, that to be “open” is what separates a philosophy from a dogma. Objectivism originated with Ayn Rand, is defined by certain principles, but has its own logic and implications that might even be at odds with some of Rand’s own thoughts. The philosophy is open to revision and new discoveries. One implication of David’s understanding—and of the virtue of independence—is that individuals must come to the truth through their own minds and their own paths. David, therefore, rejected the practice of too many Objectivists of labeling those who disagreed with some or much of the philosophy as “evil.” In many cases they are simply mistaken. He rejected the practice of refusing even to speak with individuals who called themselves “libertarians,” arguing that the only way to change someone’s mind is to address that mind. David saved Objectivism from becoming a marginalized cult.

Second, David advanced Objectivism by showing that “benevolence” is one of the cardinal virtues of the philosophy. He argued that the logic of the ideas that constitute the philosophy leads to the conclusion that it should take its place among other virtues like rationality, productivity, pride, integrity, honesty, independence, and justice. His book Unrugged Individualism: The Selfish Basis of Benevolence is an intellectual gem that has yet to be fully mined for the value it can offer to those who want to create a world as it can be and should be, a world in which humans can flourish.

Third, David identified three world views in conflict in today’s culture. The Enlightenment ushered in modernity, which values reason, with its products of science and technology; individuals, with their rights to pursue their own happiness; liberty, with governments limited to its protection; and dynamic free markets, with their opportunities for all to prosper. Opposing modernity, David sees premodernists, who emphasize the values of faith, tradition, social stability, and hierarchy. He also sees postmodernists, whom he describes as “vociferous foes of reason, attempting to undermine and expunge the very concepts of truth, objectivity, logic, and fact.” They see these and all values as “social constructs”—all except their own left-wing dogmas and their desire to use force to bend all to their soul-destroying whims. Those wanting to understand the values battle in our culture in order to win it for civilization must have David’s essay “The Party of Modernity” in their hands and its ideas in their minds.

David Kelley created The Atlas Society to further develop and promote Objectivism, the philosophy he loves. As he steps back from the day-to-day responsibilities of his position, I know he’ll devote more time to pursuing the ideas that give him so much joy and the rest of us so much enlightenment.

Dr. Edward Hudgins is the research director for The Heartland Institute. He can be contacted here.

In conjunction with other department directors, Hudgins sets the organization’s research agenda and priorities; works with in-house and outside scholars to produce policy studies, policy briefs, and books; contributes his own research; and works with Heartland staff to promote Heartland’s work.

Before joining Heartland, Hudgins was the director of advocacy and a senior scholar at The Atlas Society, which promotes the philosophy of reason, freedom, and individualism developed by Ayn Rand in works like Atlas Shrugged.  His latest Atlas Society book was The Republican Party’s Civil War: Will Freedom Win?

While at The Atlas Society, Hudgins developed a “Human Achievement” project to promote the synergy between the values and optimism of entrepreneurial achievers working on exponential technologies and the values of friends of freedom.

Prior to this, Hudgins was the director of regulatory studies and editor of Regulation magazine at the Cato Institute. There, he produced two books on Postal Service privatization, a book titled Freedom to Trade: Refuting the New Protectionism, and a book titled Space: The Free-Market Frontier.

The Orlando Bloodbath and the Illiberal Mind – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

The Orlando Bloodbath and the Illiberal Mind – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

The New Renaissance HatJeffrey A. Tucker
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Society is forever threatened by individuals with corrupt hearts

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The horrifying events at the Pulse bar in Orlando, Florida, the worst mass shooting in American history, illustrate what is meant by the term terrorism. It is violence designed to shake our sense of security and safety, to instill fear, to remind us how fragile is the very existence of what we call civilization. One moment, people are dancing and enjoying the music. The next they are covered with blood amidst unspeakable carnage, and wondering when the bullets are going to tear through their own flesh.

A nightclub—a conspicuous symbol of commercial ebullience and progressive cultural creativity—becomes a war zone in the blink of an eye, and why? There is no final answer to such a gigantic question, but there are strong suggestions based on the identity of the killer and recent experiences with Islamic extremism. It stems from intolerance, leading to seething hatred, resulting in violence, leaving only devastation and fear in its wake. One corrupt heart, driven to action through profound malice, turns a dance club into a killing field.

No Political Solution

It is political season, so of course the tragedy will have implications for the direction of politics. Islamophobia gets a boost, which helps the cause of religious intolerance and nativism, even though the killer was an American citizen and in no way represents the views of a billion and a half peaceful and faithful Muslims struggling for a better life.

Two nights earlier, beloved YouTube star Christina Grimmie was shot dead by a man having no motivations related to Islam. Fear drives people to seek political solutions, so the details of the case in question are not likely to matter. Political control over our lives and property will undoubtedly follow this catastrophe just as they did after 9-11.

And yet there are no political solutions, at least none readily at hand. Yes, the radicalization of some sectors of Islam might never have taken their present course had the U.S. not made egregious foreign-policy blunders that incited the drive for vengeance among millions. Looking back over the decades, back to the 1980s when the most extreme ideologies received U.S. encouragement from the U.S. as a Cold War measure, all the way to the destabilization of Iraq, Syria, and Libya, one sees how the violence of war has fed the violence of terrorism in repeating cycles.

Still, no one can say for sure that absent such blunders, someone like the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, would not come into existence. Society is always threatened by individuals with corrupt hearts and the malicious intent to purify the world of sin. We try to protect ourselves. Security systems respond by becoming ever better at what they are supposed to do. The horror has already re-started the debate between gun rights and gun control (however: by law, that bar was a gun-free zone, meaning that people could not protect themselves or stop others who are intent on killing). And yet, in the end, there is no system of politics and no system of security capable of ending all such threats to human well being.

Toleration as a Virtue

The answer lies with the conversion of the human heart.

Where does this begin?

Given that the driving force here is related to religion, we can turn to the very origins of liberalism itself. It was once believed that society, in order to function properly, required full agreement on matters of faith. But after centuries of warfare amounting to nothing, a new norm emerged, some half a millennium ago, which can best be summarized in the term toleration.

You can’t kill capitalism without killing people. The insight was that it is not necessary for people to agree in order that they find value in each other and get along. A society can cohere even in the presence of profound religious disagreement. We all have a greater stake in peace with each other than any of us do in winning some religious struggle. As 19th century liberal cleric John Henry Newman put it, “Learn to do thy part and leave the rest to Heaven.”

This was the profound insight, and it led to a new enlightenment on a range of issues beyond religion: free speech, free press, free trade, freedom of association. The insight concerning toleration planted a seed that led to a new realization of how humanity can enjoy progress. Voltaire’s Treatise on Toleration, which summed up the case, appeared a mere twenty-one years before Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Their core idea was the same: we have more to gain from toleration, exchange, and freedom than we have from vanquishing the foe from the earth.

So it should be no surprise that the attempt to revert that progress and bring back a new age of tribal warfare would begin by questioning the core insight of religious liberty. Instead it seeks to purify the world of heresy and save souls through violence, if not by centralized authority, then by individual action. It is a premodern manner of thinking, one that seeks to end the lives of those who use freedom in ways that contradicts its own views of what is right and proper.

And notice too how the rise of intolerance has targeted such a conspicuous sign of capitalist consumerism: the dance clubs, and, particular, one that caters toward the gay community. Capitalism is the economic realization of the idea of human freedom, one in which people choose their partners, their music, their mode of expression. No one harms anyone; everyone is free to enjoy, to stay out late, to drink liquor, to move and sing as an expression of individuality.

The illiberal mind loathes such freedom and wants it destroyed. This is why, in the end, it is always capitalism itself that is in the crosshairs. And you can’t kill capitalism without killing people.

Resist Fear

What are we left to think and do when faced with such a bloody tragedy? Remember the foundations of what made us who we are, the philosophical underpinnings of what made the modern world great. Seek peace. Tolerate, even celebrate, differences among us. Find value in each other through trade. Defend human rights and freedom against all who seek to stamp them out.

Resist fear. Reject hate. Defend institutions that help all of us realize our dreams. Turn away from revenge fantasies and recommit ourselves again to living peacefully with others, treating even our enemies as if someday they might be our friends. Building a world free of violence and terror takes place in the conversion of one human heart at a time, beginning with our own.

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.  Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook. 

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

This TRA feature has been edited in accordance with TRA’s Statement of Policy.

The Imperative of Technological Progress: Why Stagnation Will Necessarily Lead to Disaster and How Techno-Optimism Can Overcome It – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The Imperative of Technological Progress: Why Stagnation Will Necessarily Lead to Disaster and How Techno-Optimism Can Overcome It – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The New Renaissance HatG. Stolyarov II
August 14, 2015
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“He who moves not forward, goes backward.”
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is both practically desirable and morally imperative for individuals and institutions in the so-called “developed” world to strive for a major acceleration of technological progress within the proximate future. Such technological progress can produce radical abundance and unparalleled improvements in both length and quality of life – whose possibilities Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler outlined in their 2012 book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think. Moreover, major technological progress is the only way to overcome a devastating step backward in human civilization, which will occur if the protectionist tendencies and pressures of existing elites are allowed to freeze the status quo in place.

If the approximate technological and economic status quo persists, massive societal disintegration looms on the horizon. A Greece-style crisis of national-government expenditures may occur as some have predicted, but would only be a symptom of a greater problem. The fundamental driver of crisis since at least September 11, 2001, and more acutely since the Great Recession and the national-government bailouts of legacy financial and manufacturing institutions, is an increasing disconnect between the powerful and everybody else. The powerful – i.e., the politically connected, including the special interests of the “private sector” – seek to protect their positions through political barriers, at the expense of individual rights, upward social mobility, and economic/technological progress. Individuals from a relatively tiny politically connected elite caused the 2008 financial crisis, lobbied for and received unprecedented bailouts and lifelines for the firms whose misbehavior exacerbated the crisis, and then have attempted to rig the political “rules of the game” to prevent themselves from being unseated from positions of wealth and influence by the dynamics of market competition. The system created by these elites has been characterized by various observers as crony capitalism, corporatism, corporate fascism, neo-mercantilism, and a neo-Medieval guild system.

The deleterious influence of the politically connected today is reflected in the still-massive rates of unemployment and underemployment for the millennial generation, while many established industries fail to make openings for young people to ascend and fail to accommodate the emerging technologies with which young people thrive. While the millennial generation had nothing to do with the Great Recession, it has suffered its greatest fallout. Many millennials now encounter tremendous diminution in economic opportunity and living standards (think of young people in New York City paying several thousand dollars a month to share a tiny, century-old apartment among three people – or the emerging trend of shipping containers being converted into the only type of affordable housing for young people in San Francisco). The “Occupy” movement was a reflection of the resulting discontentment – a reflexive and indiscriminate backlash by young people who knew that their circumstances were unjustly bad, but did not understand the root causes or the culprits.

The only way for a crisis to be averted is for the current elites to stop blocking people from the millennial generation from opportunities to achieve upward mobility. The elite must also stop bailing out obsolete and poorly managed legacy institutions, and cease erecting protectionist barriers to the existence of innovative businesses that young people can and have tried to start. If the millennial generation continues to be shut out of the kinds of opportunities available to the preceding generation, however, I can envision two crisis scenarios. Each of these characterizations is not a prediction (but rather a nightmare which I hope can be avoided), is somewhat broad and, of course, is tentative. However, these scenarios are rough outlines of how the West could falter in the absence of significant technological progress.

Crisis Scenario 1: “Occupy” Times Ten: Millions of unemployed thirty-somethings (millennials in five to ten years) riot in the streets, indiscriminately destroying storefronts and setting cars alight. Economic activity and sophisticated production are ground to a halt because of the turmoil. The continuity of knowledge transfer and intergenerational symbiosis involved in human civilization are completely interrupted. Clashes with police create martyrs who are then invoked by opportunistic thugs as an excuse to loot and burn. Without the opportunity for peaceful economic cooperation, society degenerates into armed gangs, some left-wing (e.g., “Black Bloc” violent anarchists), others right-wing (e.g., survivalist militia groups). Thoughtful and intellectual people, who want the violence to end and see an imperfect peace as better than a war of all against all, are universally despised by the new tribes and cannot find a safe environment in which to work and innovate. The infrastructure of everyday life is critically damaged, and nobody maintains or repairs it. Roads, bridges, pipes, and electrical grids are either destroyed or become unusable after years of decay. The West becomes Ukraine writ large, eventually regressing into premodernity.

Crisis Scenario 2: The Reaction: Current political and crony-capitalist elites crack down with extreme force, either in response to actual riots or, more likely, to the threat thereof. Civil liberties are obliterated and an economic underclass enforced through deliberate restrictions on entry into any remunerative occupations – much like the 17th-century mercantilists advocated for maximum wages and prohibitions on perceived luxuries for the working classes. Those who do get jobs are required to work 60 or more hours per week and so have no time for anything else in life. All established industries are maintained in their current form through legal protections and bailouts, and there is an official policy that the structure of the economy must not be allowed to change for any reason. (Think of Directive 10-289 from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.) Licensing requirements for professions become ubiquitous and burdensome, laden with Catch-22 provisions so that few or no new entrants can make it into the system. Only an elite cadre of Baby Boomers enjoys wealth and uses the force of legal entry barriers to prevent anyone else from having the opportunity to earn their own. They have ground technological progress to a halt, seeking to keep established business models in place and thwart all competition. The national government develops a massive spying capability and enforces social order through the ability to detect behaviors that might even be algorithmically correlated with dissent. All ordinary citizens are routinely humiliated in public under the pretense of thwarting crime or terrorism. TSA body searches have expanded beyond airports to highway checkpoints, shopping centers, and random stops by police on city streets. People’s homes are routinely raided by SWAT teams at the mildest pretext. This is done to make people meek and subservient to the established order. To keep young people from rioting (and get rid of the “excess” unemployed youths), the elites concoct jingoistic justifications to inflame endless foreign wars, and young people are conscripted and sent to die abroad. If any of these wars aggravate the regimes of either Russia or China, this scenario has the added risk of putting the world back on the verge of nuclear conflict. The fast-senescing crony-capitalist elites have cut off future biomedical progress and so will die eventually, but only the children of the elite will inherit any wealth. A neo-feudal oligarchy is established and becomes gradually ossified throughout the generations, while the industrial and technological base built over the past 200 years, as a legacy of the Enlightenment and individual rights, will deteriorate, eventually bringing the West back into premodernity.

I see an ossification of the status quo as leading to one or both of the above crisis scenarios. A return of premodernity is the logical conclusion of the dynamics of a fundamentally unaltered status quo. If humankind does not move technologically forward, it will go backward in a spiral of destruction and repression.

The only way for either crisis scenario to be averted is for technological progress to occur at no slower than the rates experienced during the twentieth century. Overt political revolution, even if it begins peacefully, is dangerous. To understand why this is so, one needs look no further than the recent Arab Spring uprisings – initially motivated by liberally minded dissidents and ordinary people who could no longer tolerate corrupt dictatorships, but ultimately hijacked by Islamist militants, military juntas, or both. A case even closer to the contemporary Western world is the recent Maidan revolution in Ukraine, which, while initially motivated by peaceful and well-intentioned pro-European activists, replaced a corrupt regime that occasionally persecuted dissidents with a fiercely militant, nationalistic regime that tolerates no dissent, engages in coercive historical revisionism, prohibits criticism of Nazi and neo-Nazi thugs, conscripts some of its citizens to die in civil war, and indiscriminately shells others of its citizens in the East. Revolutions always have the potential of replacing a lethargically bad regime with an aggressively destructive one.

This is why it is better for any societal transformation to be driven primarily by technological and economic development, rather than by political turmoil. The least turbulent transformations should be somewhat gradual and at least grudgingly accepted by the existing elites, who need to be willing to alter their own composition and accept bright minds from any background – not just their own progeny. A sufficient rate of technological advancement – especially due to the growth in 3D printing, robotics, nanotechnology, biotechnology, genetic engineering, vertical farming, and renewable energy – can ensure near-universal abundance within a generation, untethered from permission-granting institutions to which most people today owe a living. Such prosperity would enable most people to experience what are today upper-middle-class living standards, therefore having no motivation to riot. Technological progress can also preserve individual liberty by continually creating new spheres where politicians and lobbyists are incapable of control and individuals can outmaneuver most political restrictions.

Technological progress, particularly radical extension of the human lifespan through periodic rejuvenation that can restore the body to a more youthful condition, is also the only hope for remedying unsustainable expenditures of national governments, which are presently primarily intended to support people’s income and healthcare needs in old age. Rejuvenation biotechnology of the sort championed by Dr. Aubrey de Grey’s SENS Research Foundation could be developed with sufficient investment into the research, and could become disseminated by biotechnology entrepreneurs, ensuring that older people do not become decrepit or incapable of productive work as they age. The only way to sustainably extend average lifespans past about 85 years would be to turn back the clock of biological aging. It is not possible for most people (who do not have some degree of genetic luck) to live much longer beyond that without also becoming more youthful.

Many people who receive rejuvenation treatments will not want to retire – at least not from all work – if they still feel the vitality of youth. They will seek out activities to support human well-being and high living standards, even if they have saved enough money to consider it unnecessary to take a regular 8-to-5 job. With the vitality of youth combined with the experience of age, these people will be able to make sophisticated, persistent contributions to human civilization and will tend to plan for the longer term, as compared to most people today. If automation takes care of basic human needs, then human labor will be freed for more creative and fulfilling tasks.

Effective rejuvenation will not arrive right away, but immigration can keep the demographic disparity between the young and the old from being a severe problem in the meantime. This is another reason to reject protectionist policies and instead pursue approaches that allow more people to contribute to and benefit from the material prosperity of the “developed” world. Birth rates tend to fall anywhere there are major rises in standards of living after an industrial revolution, as children stop becoming productive helpers in an agricultural economy and instead become expensive to raise and educate so that they can participate in a knowledge-based economy. However, birth rates are still higher in many less-developed parts of the world, and people from those areas will readily seek opportunities for economic advancement in more developed countries, if given the option.

Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope that the path of gradual embrace of ever-accelerating progress will be the one taken in the early-21st-century Western world. The best outcome would be for an existing elite to facilitate mechanisms for its own evolution by offering people of merit but from humble backgrounds a place in real decision-making.

Some of that evolution can occur through market competition – new, upstart businesses displacing incumbents and gradually amassing significant resources themselves. The best instantiation of this in the United States today is the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture – which, incidentally, tends to finance the majority of longevity research. The most massive infusion of funds into longevity-related research has been from an offshoot of Google – Calico – founded in 2013 and currently partnering with a large pharmaceutical company, AbbVie. Calico has been somewhat secretive as to the details of its research, but there are other large businesses that are beginning to invest in similar endeavors – e.g., Craig Venter’s Human Longevity, Inc. Moreover, the famous libertarian venture capitalist Peter Thiel has given millions of dollars to Dr. Aubrey de Grey’s SENS Research Foundation – a smaller-scale organization but perhaps the most ambitious in its goals to bring about a reversal of human senescence through advances in rejuvenation treatments within the next quarter-century.

These developments are evidence that the United States today is characterized not by one elite, but by several – and the old “Paper Belt” elite is clearly in conflict with the new Silicon Valley elite. Politicians tend, surprisingly, not to be the most decisive players in this conflict, since they typically depend on harnessing pre-existing cultural currents in order to get elected and stay in office. Thus, they will tend to side with whatever issues and special interests they consider to be gaining ground at a given time. For this reason, many thinkers have characterized politics as a lagging indicator, responding to rather than triggering the defining events of an era. The politicians ride the currents to power, but something else creates those currents.

Differences in the breadth of vision among elites also matter. For instance, breakthroughs in human longevity could actually be a great boon for medical providers and the first pharmaceutical companies that offer effective products/treatments. Even the most ambitious proponents of life extension do not think it possible to develop a magic immortality pill. Rather, the treatments involved (which will be quite expensive at first) would require periodic regeneration of the cells and tissues within a person’s body – essentially resetting the biological clock every decade or so, while further innovation uncovers ways to reverse the damage more cheaply, safely, and effectively. This is a field ripe with opportunities for enterprising doctors, researchers, and engineers (while, at the same time, certainly endangering many extant business models). Some government officials, if they are sufficiently perceptive, could also be persuaded to support these changes – if only because they could prevent a catastrophic collapse of Social Security and Medicare. Approximately 30% of Medicare expenditures occur during the last year of patients’ lives, when the body is often fighting back multiple ailments in a losing battle. If this situation were simply prevented in the first place, and if most people became biologically young again and fully capable of working for a living or financing their own retirements, the expenses of both Social Security and Medicare could plummet until these programs became wholly unnecessary in the eyes of most voters.

The key to achieving a freer, more prosperous, and longer-lived future is to educate both elites and the general public to accurately weigh the opportunities and risks of emerging technologies. Too many individuals today, both elites and ordinary people, view technological progress with suspicion, conjuring in their minds every possible dystopian scenario and every possible malfunction, inconvenience, lost opportunity, moral reservation, or esthetic dislike they can muster against breakthroughs in life extension, artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and many other areas of advancement that could vastly benefit us all. This techno-skeptical mindset is the biggest obstacle for proponents of progress and a better future to overcome. Fortunately, we do not need to be elites to play important roles in overcoming it. By simply arguing the techno-optimist case and educating people from all walks of life about the tremendous beneficial potential of emerging technologies, we can each do our part to ensure that the 21st century will become known as an era of humankind’s great liberation from its age-old limitations, and not a lurch back into the bog of premodern barbarism.

If we have a modicum of technological progress, the West might be able to muddle through the next several decades. If we have an acceleration of technological progress, the West will leave its current problems in the dust. The outcome will be a question of whether people (both elites and ordinary citizens) are, on balance, held hostage to the fear of the new or, rather, willing to try out technological alternatives to the status quo in the hopes of achieving improvement in their lives.

This essay may be freely reproduced using the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike International 4.0 License, which requires that credit be given to the author, G. Stolyarov II. Find out about Mr. Stolyarov here.
Fragile Reasoning in Nassim Taleb’s “Antifragile”: An Enlightenment Transhumanist Critique – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Fragile Reasoning in Nassim Taleb’s “Antifragile”: An Enlightenment Transhumanist Critique – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
January 10, 2013
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Never before have I set out to read a book with such high expectations, only to encounter such severe disappointment. As an admirer of Nassim Taleb’s earlier books, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, I expected to find insight and wisdom along similar lines in Antifragile. While Taleb’s latest book does contain some valid observations and a few intriguing general strategies for living, the overwhelming thrust of the book is one of bitter distaste for modernity (and, to a significant extent, technological progress), as well as an abundance of insults for anyone who would disagree with not just with Taleb’s ideas, but with his personal esthetic preferences. While sensible in the realms of finance and (mostly) economics, Taleb’s prescriptions in other fields venture outside of his realms of mastery and, if embraced, would result in a relapse of the barbarisms of premodernity. Perhaps as the outcome of his own phenomenal success, Taleb has become set in his ways and has transitioned from offering some controversial, revolutionary, and genuinely insightful ideas to constructing a static, intolerant, totalistic worldview that rejects deviations in any field of life – and the persons who so deviate.

I am saddened to write this, but I am convinced that Nassim Taleb would find me to be personally repulsive. Not only am I a technology-embracing transhumanist ( a “neomaniac” per Taleb’s vocabulary), and a person who embraces the “nerdification” of society – but I am also an explicit representative and promoter of the legacies of the 18th-century Enlightenment – and a proud suit-and-tie wearer besides. Taleb seethes with contempt for the very trappings of modernity – even for modern formal wear – and repeatedly asserts that nothing valuable can be gleaned from those who wear neckties. As in many other areas, his conclusion-jumping pronouncements exclude the possibility of the world not fitting into his invented categories (with their associated normative spin). On the necktie question, he seems to rule out the very existence of persons like me, who wear neckties not out of any compulsion (my office dress code does not require them), but rather as an esthetic statement arising from sheer personal choice – including, not infrequently, on weekends.

After reading Antifragile, and finding so much of the content in need of a thorough refutation, I have vacillated between writing a book review and a more comprehensive treatise. A short review, I realized, would not do this book justice – but I also did not wish to run the risk of writing a refutation as long as the book itself. The result is this – one of my longest book reviews to date, but written as concisely as the subject matter allows. Here, I seek to comment on many of Taleb’s areas of focus in Antifragile, highlighting both the book’s strengths and its egregious errors.

Antifragile was one of the very few books I ever pre-ordered, as Taleb, until about a month ago, held a place among my most admired contemporary thinkers – along with such luminaries as Steven Pinker, Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, Max More, and Ron Paul. Taleb’s writings on the fragility of the contemporary financial system were simply brilliant and highlighted the systemic weaknesses of a “house of cards” built upon highly sophisticated but over-optimized models that relied on the unrealistic stability of the status quo and the absence of extremely disruptive “black swan” events. I expected that Antifragile would discuss ways to survive and prosper in a black-swan-dominated world – a question that has been at the forefront of my mind since at least 2006, when I personally observed some “six-sigma” events on the stock market and – after reducing my losses to manageable levels – have refused to participate in that particular economy-wide casino since.  While Antifragile does provide skeletal discussions of some valuable approaches (such as the “barbell” strategy, on which I will comment more below), the majority of the book’s focus is negative: a harsh criticism of the institutions, ideas, and people whom Taleb considers insufficiently antifragile or “fragilizing”. One of Taleb’s favorite terms throughout the book is “fragilista” – used to describe financial modelers, politicians, and intellectuals of a rationalist frame of mind. The term – aside from creating vague and completely irrelevant associations with left-wing Nicaraguan terrorists – also poisons the metaphorical well with regard to the people and approaches criticized by Taleb.

More generally, the book is pervaded by an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism, mocking those who use structured, explicit knowledge to interpret the world. This is rather odd, because Taleb himself is clearly an intellectual and a “nerd” of the sort he derides; his philosophical and historical allusions – and his expertise in mathematical finance (despite his criticisms thereof) – give away that fact. Fat Tony of Brooklyn, Taleb’s fictional representative of the non-intellectual person who relies on “empirical” heuristics and is able to become rich by occasionally betting against “suckers,” would not have kept the company of people like Taleb. No matter how much rhetorical contempt Taleb shows for those who engage in abstract reasoning, he cannot escape being one of them – and no amount of insults directed at his own kind will get him an iota of respect from those whose character traits he glorifies.

An antifragile system or entity, per Taleb’s definition, is one that benefits from volatility instead of succumbing to it. Beyond mere robustness, which withstands volatility intact, antifragility is the derivation of advantage from volatility. The concept itself is an intriguing one, but Taleb makes a crucial error in assuming that most antifragility is normatively preferable. He does make an exception for “antifragility at others’ expense” – but only in a limited context. For instance, he is outraged at career intellectuals who do not have “skin in the game” and do not suffer for making wrong predictions or recommendations (more on this later) – but he explicitly praises the antifragility of biological evolution, a process that has resulted in the brutal deaths of most organisms and the extinction of about 99.9% of all species in history. Even within his premise that modernity contains “fragilizing” elements, Taleb presupposes that fragility is necessarily undesirable. Yet a beautiful vase is fragile – as is, for that matter, an individual organism. Fragility is no justification for dismissing or opposing an area of existence that has other intrinsic merits. Perhaps the proper response to certain kinds of fragility is extra care in the preservation of the fragile – as shown, for example, in the raising of children and small animals.

When Taleb argues that post-Enlightenment civilization is fragile, he may be partly right – at least in the sense that such civilization requires the steady, conscious application of human intellect to maintain. Every generation must master the scientific, technological, and ethical accomplishments of the generations before it and amplify these accomplishments; this is the essence of progress. This mastery of civilization entails precisely the “nerdification” (i.e., sophisticated, refined, self-aware intellectualism) that Taleb scorns in favor of “empirical” heuristics that may have arisen out of premodern superstition in as great (or greater) a proportion as out of practical wisdom passed down throughout the ages. Steven Pinker, whose magnum opus The Better Angels of Our Nature I would glowingly recommend (and whose work Taleb has unfairly maligned, though Pinker’s response to Taleb is worth reading), illustrates convincingly that not only peacefulness but virtually every other characteristic of civilized human beings has improved dramatically over the past several centuries – and most remarkably over the past several decades. Nothing suggests that this improvement is an inexorable law of history, however; it is possible for anti-civilizing influences to take hold and for humanity to degenerate into the barbarism that characterized much of its past. In that sense, civilization may be considered fragile – but so eminently worth preserving and expanding, for it makes possible the good life for good individuals.

Unfortunately, Taleb has included himself among the influences that would undo many of the essential gains that humanity has achieved since the 18th-century Enlightenment. Taleb repeatedly references the “wisdom of the ancients” (the stoic Seneca is his favorite) and conflates the “natural” (a term from which he excludes human design and technology) with the desirable. Taleb praises the heuristics he sees in traditional religious systems (e.g., elaborate Greek Orthodox fasting rituals) while completely overlooking the massive horrors many traditional (i.e., premodern) religious systems perpetrated when persecuting dissenters, inspiring bloody wars of conquest, and establishing totalitarian regimes when combined with secular authority. The Enlightenment brought about a conscious questioning of religious (and all authority-based) traditions and commandments and resulted in the adoption of rigorous scientific inquiry in the pursuit of discovery and innovation. Taleb is wary of modern medicine because of possible “iatrogenic” effects (where the treatment itself causes most of the harm), and he even questions the genuineness and desirability of massive rises in life expectancy during the 20th and early 21st centuries. While there is some merit to balancing the anticipated benefits and possible side effects of medical treatments – and while Taleb may be right that certain fields may take treatment too far, especially as regards overprescription of psychotropic drugs to children – Taleb’s discussion of “iatrogenics” is mostly anecdotal and reliant on studies from much earlier periods in medicine (e.g., the death of George Washington in 1799 and a study on children in 1930).  The virtual eradication of smallpox, polio, tuberculosis, cholera, and the bubonic plague from the Western world by scientific medicine are utterly ignored by Taleb – as are the substantial declines in cancer death rates over the past 50 years, and the accomplishments of the Green Agricultural Revolution in averting the starvation of billions, which would have occurred if only “natural” agricultural techniques (i.e., techniques employed before some arbitrary historical cutoff date) had been utilized.

There may be some merit to Taleb’s advice of avoiding medical treatment for minor conditions (where the iatrogenic effects of treatment allegedly predominate) and letting the body heal itself, while being willing to undertake radical treatments for extreme, life-threatening conditions. However, context in medical care matters too greatly to make sweeping generalizations. A fairly small skin lesion, which does not interfere with day-to-day functioning, may, after all, be the beginning of a deadly cancer, for which no self-healing mechanism exists. In medicine especially, the “empirical” heuristics championed by Taleb must give way to careful and systematic scientific study. After all, most premodern cultures relied on “traditional” heuristics for millennia, with disastrous results; such reliance can be called folk medicine. One only needs to consider the “traditional” Eastern “remedies” based on the superstition that one will become like the creature one eats – or “traditional” Western Medieval bleeding and surgical practices – to realize how much progress modern scientific medicine has actually made.

While a reader of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan might have inferred libertarian and individualist tendencies in Taleb’s writing, Antifragile, unfortunately, sets the record straight: Taleb opposes “too much” individual flourishing and freedom. He reserves his bitterest venom for transhumanism, which is the logical outcome of a libertarian society in which technological progress is given free rein. Taleb’s reverence for “nature” and “the ancients” trumps his skepticism of centralized regimentation – as his ideas on life extension and freedom of speech illustrate. He writes, “I felt some deep disgust – as would any ancient – at the efforts of ‘singularity’ thinkers (such as Ray Kurzweil) who believe in humans’ potential to live forever. Note that if I had to find the anti-me, the person with diametrically opposite ideas and lifestyle on the planet, it would be that Ray Kurzweil fellow. It is not just neomania. While I propose removing offensive elements from people’s diets (and lives), he works by adding, popping close to two hundred pills daily. Beyond that, these attempts at immortality leave me with deep moral revulsion.” Taleb says little of substance to support this “deep moral revulsion” – beyond repeating the same tired, hackneyed old arguments about “making room for others” by dying – as if the life of the individual had no inherent value and could be justifiably expended for an alleged greater good. Taleb does not address Kurzweil’s arguments about the exponential progress of computing and other technologies, and the logical extrapolation of such progress within the coming decades. In short, he says nothing about why he would consider Kurzweil to be mistaken, or what about Kurzweil’s lifestyle and ambitions he considers destructive. Taleb’s rudely expressed opposition to transhumanism seems to be primarily driven by emotional revulsion or, to be more charitable, a conflict of values. Additionally, Taleb does not seem to understand the movement that he criticizes. He assumes that extended longevity would be accompanied by extended frailty and senescence, whereas true radical life extension would only be possible if biological youth could be prolonged through periodic rejuvenation of the organism. Moreover, Taleb is, at heart, a collectivist who embraces the sacrifice of the individual to the tribe. He writes, “I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components – and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books – my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me.”

The biggest disappointment I experienced when reading Antifragile was the realization I came to upon reading the above-quoted passage. This book was never about helping make the individual antifragile. The preservation of a human being in a volatile and uncertain world – and the attempt to equip a human being to flourish in the face of such volatility and uncertainty – were never Taleb’s key aims. Taleb’s views on antifragility are, indeed, not particularly helpful to me in my goal to discover strategies that would preserve, fortify, and enrich the individual in an often hostile, and, in many ways, fundamentally unpredictable world which lacks any manner of built-in justice outside of what humans, through their ingenuity and will, can implement. Taleb would have both of us (and everyone else) be sacrificed for the sake of an unspecified “collective” – as if some abstraction, be it “nature”, evolution, or “the whole”, has value in and of itself, apart from its constituent individuals. Yet it is precisely this sort of collectivism that enables inhuman atrocities, from mass executions of “the other” to suicide bombings for a “greater cause”. Taleb does not intend to advocate armed violence, but his rhetoric on heroism, “dying heroically”, and self-sacrifice eerily resembles the pronouncements of many a totalitarian regime, inquisitorial sect, or band of nationalistic or religious terrorists. The good life – the comfortable life of peace, productive work, and self-fulfillment – does not seem to be his objective.

In several sections devoted to having “doxastic commitment” or “soul in the game”, Taleb glorifies the idea of leaving no way out in the event of one’s failure – forgetting that much true learning is iterative and often occurs through a trial-and-error process. If one is not allowed to recover from failure and change one’s approach (without crippling personal cost), then this learning will be preempted, and the individual will be destroyed instead. Taleb glorifies, for instance, the poet Almutanabbi, who died senselessly in the attempt to realize the ideals about which he wrote. But it is far more impressive to live in furtherance of one’s ideals than to die for them – particularly since living requires one to reevaluate one’s views in light of emerging evidence and continual reflection.

Taleb is no more a friend of individual liberty than of technological progress. As a consequence of his view that intellectuals should have “skin in the game”, he insists that they should personally suffer the adverse consequences of their recommendations. Indeed, he would implement his scheme of penalties to the detriment of legal protections for freedom of speech. While criticizing the financial rating agencies’ misclassification of toxic assets as “AAA” securities, he remarks that “they benefit from the protection of free speech – the ‘First Amendment’ so ingrained in American habits. My humble proposal: one should say whatever he wants, but one’s portfolio needs to line up with it.” Elsewhere, Taleb proposes that individuals be held legally liable for the damage that their predictions and recommendations result in if followed by others. He ignores that not all individuals have the assets to even invest in a portfolio. Are the poor and middle class to be deprived of the ability to express their opinions or speculate about the economic future (even if such speculation is without much basis), simply because they do not have much “skin” to put into the “game”? Furthermore, establishing any legal liability for expression of opinion would have a chilling effect on legitimate and valuable ideas – since the very threat or prospect of a lawsuit may serve as a deterrent to publishing or even verbal expression in front of someone who disagrees. For someone so insistent on individual moral responsibility, Taleb ignores the responsibility of the recipient of ideas to actively judge and interpret them. Just as there exist sleazy marketers, so there exist peddlers of philosophical falsehoods, and sometimes those falsehoods result in personal gains for their advocates. Yet the responsibility of the sensible, rational individual is to filter out truth from falsehood using his own mind. No prohibition, no regime of penalties, no prior restraint can protect people from themselves. Such restrictions can only prevent people from cultivating the habits of autonomous thought which are the surest safeguards against charlatans and demagogues of every stripe. Taleb is too concerned about punishing the false prophets, and insufficiently concerned about elevating the general level of reasoning and discourse by means of positive persuasion, dissemination of true information, and technological innovation that alters people’s incentives and the balance of power.

Taleb even departs from the libertarian advocacy of free trade and (genuine) globalization. While he acknowledges the theoretical validity of some specialization and the law of comparative advantage, he sees the global division of labor as vulnerable to volatility in the system. He argues that a change in conditions in one part of the world now has a far greater ability to adversely impact all other parts of the world – because the division of labor is so finely tuned. This is a fair argument for redundancy in economic systems – e.g., having “backup” institutions which could supply a good or service if the original supplier is unavailable due to an unexpected disruption. However, Taleb errs when assuming that businesses pursuing their rational self-interests under a truly free arrangement of global commerce would not already attempt to implement such redundancies. Supply-chain risk, for instance, is commonly discussed by representatives of multinational businesses and their insurers, who have a stake in preventing supply disruptions. Overreliance on any one economic partnership may indeed be imprudent – but does Taleb believe that businessmen with true “skin in the game” – billions of their own dollars – would be oblivious to the need for redundancy? Taleb makes no case for why free trade – in essence, the voluntary exchange of goods and services among individuals without regard for national origins or boundaries – would create a systemic lack of redundancy. A stronger argument could be made for how the current politicized environment of trade – a mixture of freedom and elaborate controls achieved by means of treaties and retaliatory protectionism – would produce insufficient redundancy and overdependence on those precious channels of international trade that remain permitted. But the solution to this problem would be more options – more channels for foreign trade – not fewer. Autarky certainly will not do, as it brings about its own massive vulnerabilities. One only need consider the consequences of a famine in a region which is not allowed to import food from abroad. Trade creates redundancy by allowing access to goods and services from all over the world, instead of just one minor segment thereof.

The nonlinear responses to volatility described in Antifragile are valid in principle. A system responds in a concave fashion if the harm to the system from a change in conditions is more than linear relative to that change (i.e., an accelerating harm). A system responds in a convex fashion if it is able to reap benefits from volatility in a more-than-linear accumulation. Taleb proposes that it is possible for certain systems to be concave or convex in both directions – being harmed by or benefiting from a shift in conditions either way. It is also possible for systems to be convex over some regions of inputs, and concave over others – e.g., a human immune system or a body engaging in exercise. Taleb does not, however, provide many tools to actually determine the inflection points within any particular system. Although he praises “empirical” heuristics for doing so – especially heuristics passed down through the ages – he provides absolutely no support to conclude that those heuristics do not overshoot the desirable levels of any given characteristics. To use the example he provides of religious fasting customs, even if one can be generous and suppose some benefit to the fasting (of which I am not altogether convinced), what evidence is there that the specific schedule and duration of fasts is optimal? Could not scientific investigation uncover a better way, and explain its workings in a rational, evidence-based manner, without recourse to superstition or ancestral hand-waving?  Furthermore, Taleb does not consider that the “wisdom of the ancients” may not have developed through the careful evolutionary process he describes – but rather comes to us as a warped reflection of some very recent generation’s interpretation of ancient practices – which themselves were altered by numerous political authorities, ideological movements, and idiosyncratic historical events in order to fulfill some very context-specific (and not necessarily virtuous or life-affirming) aim. To get a sense of how this has happened to distort prevailing conceptions of the past, one needs only to consider the early history of Christianity – where doctrine was often promoted or suppressed based on the temporal interest of Roman and Byzantine emperors and their officials – or the extensive revisionism performed by the 19th-century Romantics with regard to the Middle Ages. Taleb himself romanticizes antiquity (including the ancient Middle East), overlooking the incessant wars, disease, filth, vulgarity, persecution, and ideological totalism that characterized many pre-Enlightenment societies (e.g., the totalitarianism of Ancient Sparta or Calvin’s Geneva – which made even the USSR seem like a paragon of liberty and progress by comparison).

Taleb’s contempt for wealth, and praise for attitudes that part with wealth lightly, betray the fact that he has never been in danger of losing his material comfort. Growing up in a prosperous , respected, and intellectual Lebanese family, Taleb moved to the United States and made a fortune as a trader, which he later magnified by selling his books. If he expresses contempt for the material well-being he sees around him, and a nostalgic longing for an idealized past, it is because he cannot truly envision what premodernity was actually like. Perhaps, because he greatly underrates the transformative effects of technological progress, Taleb’s image of premodernity is of a slightly rustic incarnation of our present world – except one in which people mostly avoid doctors and editors, walk on rocky landscapes in foot-shaped shoes, eat “paleo” diets, quote from Seneca’s dialogues, and occasionally engage in bloody contests over fine points of poetry, philosophy, and theology – just to show how much “skin in the game” they have with regard to their beliefs. Taleb neglects the possibility that only recently has life become remotely comfortable and quasi-meritocratic, while premodernity was a mostly uninterrupted stretch of miseries, cruelties, superstitions, prejudicial hatreds, and filth (punctuated by a few refined characters like Aristotle – whom Taleb maligns – and Seneca – people who were remarkable for their time and are remembered precisely because they stood out so far above their contemporaries). A small elite has always been super-wealthy (by the standards of their time) in every era and in every society, but it is an all-too-common mistake to imagine oneself in the position of a historical member of the elite (e.g., someone who would have read Seneca, or Seneca himself) rather than a common peasant or slave – which is the far more probable fate for a randomly chosen premodern person. The casual dismissal of wealth as not particularly important would not have been articulated by people toiling from sunrise to sunset in order to grow crops for their feudal overlords and be given a small fraction of the resulting harvest in order not to starve. Nor is this attitude particularly helpful to people who might have been interested in cultivating personal antifragility so as to prevent themselves from becoming poor.

The most useful personal advice in Antifragile concerns the so-called “barbell strategy” for minimizing the downside of volatility while benefiting from the upside. The strategy involves putting most of one’s resources into an ultra-safe, ultra-conservative course of action, while devoting the rest to a diversified speculation, but in such a manner that the entire speculative amount can be lost without significant harm. An example of this approach would be keeping 90% of one’s money as cash or gold, and investing the remaining 10% into five different startup companies; each startup firm could fail – and many do – but it is also possible for a startup company to succeed tremendously and bring orders of magnitude of profit. If all the startup firms fail, then one has had a 10% loss – but this does not have to be ruinous if one is not hyper-leveraged. Taleb is also correct about the highly fragilizing effects of debt and recommends avoidance of indebtedness where possible. This is sound advice, greatly needed in a country where everything from everyday consumption to the purchase of big-ticket items to intangible “investments” such as formal education is often purchased on credit. Debt introduces fragility by amplifying the financial pain of volatility. A marginal drop in income could be endured by a debt-free person with savings, but would result in a leveraged person losing everything. Taleb’s advice here may not always be perfectly realizable – as not every person can afford to invest any percentage of his assets with the ability to continue living well if those assets were lost. Furthermore, mortgage debt is extremely difficult to avoid for a person without sizable initial wealth; other debt, however, is generally avoidable.

While Antifragile has some virtues, Taleb should not have dismissed or derided his editors. If carefully confined to the realms of finance and economics, Antifragile might have been an illuminating and positive book on net. As matters stand, however, Taleb has managed to gratuitously insult practically everybody who might have been sympathetic to his previously articulated views – including the libertarians, transhumanists, and rationalist natural-law thinkers who would have found much to agree with in Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. Taleb even classifies Friedrich Hayek among the rationalists whom he dismisses: “We may be drawn to think that Friedrich Hayek would be in that antifragile, antirationalist category. […] But Hayek missed the notion of optionality as a substitute for the social planner. In a way, he believed in intelligence, but as a distributed or collective intelligence – not in optionality as a replacement for intelligence. […] Finally, John Gray, the contemporary political philosopher and essayist who stands against human hubris and has been fighting the prevailing ideas that the Enlightenment is a panacea – treating a certain category of thinkers as Enlightenment fundamentalists. […] Gray worked in an office next to Hayek and told me that Hayek was quite a dull fellow, lacking playfulness – hence optionality.” And there was the gratuitous insult again. Very well. We Enlightenment rationalists and technoprogressives will be happy to accept Hayek as one of us – along with Socrates, Aristotle, and Ayn Rand (for whose fan Taleb should not be mistaken, as he tells us in a footnote). Taleb can have Seneca, Almutanabbi, John Gray, and Fat Tony. We remain in good company without them.

Free Speech is Vital for Civilization – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Free Speech is Vital for Civilization – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Mr. Stolyarov explains why recent riots in the Middle East and some Western countries should not be allowed to infringe upon the absolutely vital right of free speech – including tasteless and offensive speech – for any individuals. Only by allowing unbridled criticism of political and religious ideas can a society undergo true innovation and transformative changes that raise standards of living across the board.

Mr. Stolyarov also elaborates upon the absolute distinction between the expression of ideas and physical actions that have the potential to harm other people. He explains that an idea per se can be interpreted in many ways and is not a guarantee of any given behavior. Furthermore, he criticizes the “internationalist” school of law, which would subordinate the American First Amendment to a repressive global “consensus” which would limit certain forms of unpopular expression. The pursuit of truth, not consensus, ought to determine which ideas prevail and which are abandoned.

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