Sean Mathews’s The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East (Hurst) argues that Greece is best understood as a Near Eastern nation, and that its Byzantine and Ottoman past, not its classical-European self-image, is central for its survival in our modern environment .

My first mistake, when I first visited Greece as a child, was to think that I came from there. I am a Lebanese Greek Orthodox, a “Roum,” from an entirely Roum region bearing the Greek name Koura (χώρα), from a village with a possible etymology “am yawan” (“the Greek tribe” in Aramaic), and I felt strangely at home in Greece. Until the First World War, our “Roum” nationality put us in the same group, millet, of the Greek-Orthodox world. Everything resembled my Lebanese Christian surroundings, with a few minor differences: the Greeks of Athens appeared to be slightly more disciplined but less smooth in conversation between strangers. My erudite father, a medical doctor who wrote on the side a doctoral thesis in anthropology had found that the Koura region shared genetic blood diseases (such as Thalassemia) with parts of Cyprus and the Greek seaboard.

This was before the Lebanese war and before Greece joined what is now called the European Union, when suddenly a cultural and identitarian wall was erected. But the biggest “Westernization” took place with the Athens Olympics of 2004. Before that, Greeks went to “Evfropi,” and the border between “East” and “West” was somewhere in the Balkans, where people were Catholic on one side of the demarcation and Orthodox or Muslim on the other. The French Marguerite Yourcenar, writing in the middle of the Twentieth Century, sneeringly described Cavafy as looking like “un courtier levantin” with the Gibbonian stereotype of the Levantine as solely interested in lowly commerce and the soft life. That “Levant” in question has been shrinking progressively as the Greeks, then the Turks, started self-identifying as “Europeans,” whatever that meant.

I soon realized I had made a mistake of origination when I remembered that Europa was the daughter of a Phoenician king (something drilled into every Lebanese schoolchild), so it could be the other way around. Lebanese and Syrian Muslims (from Western Syria) were also indistinguishable from Greeks, down to body language, except, as I said, smoother in conversations between strangers.

This turned out to be closer to the truth, but not quite: simply, Greeks and Northern Canaanites both largely came from around Anatolia. The linguistic difference, that wedge between “Semitic” and “Indo-European,” is arbitrary and rather recent-and it is only linguistic. And for a long time (actually, even now) self-respecting scholars have believed that there were two distinct races-something convenient to isolate the Christian West from these “Semites.” During the Bronze Age, the Indo-European-speaking Hittites, in Anatolia, ran the area all the way down to what is now North Lebanon.

What is not commonly known on both sides of the European visa demarcation line is that the Levant spent about one thousand years under Hellenic and “Greco-Roman” cultural influence, from Alexander until the Arab conquest, and another four hundred years in the same ensemble, the Ottoman Empire (furthermore, Hellenism didn’t die immediately with the Arab conquest but centuries later). Also note that the Ottoman Empire, at its beginning, branded itself as a Byzantium 2.0, that is, the continuation of the Roman Empire: the Seljuks before them had called their Anatolian state the Sultanate of Rum, and Mehmed II, after taking Constantinople in 1453, styled himself Kayser-i Rum, “Caesar of (East) Rome.” This helps explain the degradation of Russo-Ottoman relations after the Muscovite princes started styling themselves tsars, that is, Caesars.

Families of Body Language

To appreciate the strangeness of identitarianism, consider that there is currently this curious ensemble of post-Ottoman people speaking not just three languages but three distinct families of languages (Indo-European, Turkic, and Semitic) though with the same looks, same food, same coffee, same traditional clothing (serval), and the same music but sung with different words. They say yes, no, maybe, give me the check, she is beautiful, what’s going on, I am fed up, with the exact same gestures: from Athens to Gaza, “no” is a backward toss of the head with raised eyebrows and a tongue click, “yes” is a short downward nod or tilt, and a side-to-side shake means “what?” rather than “no.” This code goes back to Homer’s ananeuō and kataneuō, older than any of the three language families now spoken over it. The kinesic substrate survived the linguistic changes.

And, naturally, each of the communities thinks of itself as the most sophisticated one. There is a Lebanese saying that Greek food is Lebanese cooked by children -and in turn the same is said about Lebanese food by people from Aleppo.

So we are talking of a total of at least fifteen centuries of cohabitation between the Levant and what is now Greece -though what is now mainland Greece was the backwaters before the rediscovery of Europe; Constantinople, Smyrna, and Alexandria was where the action was, even after the Greek independence and Athens was what André Malraux, almost unfairly, called “un village albanais”.

And, what is also counterintuitive, Syro-Palestine was not a colony of Greece, but a dominant part of it –it was, simply, the richest area of the Hellenistic world and proved progressively to be the most intellectually productive one. What is now under the Hellenic Republic became a poor cousin both economically and intellectually — as we will see, at least five heads of the successors of Plato’s Academy (or what was left of them) were ethnic Syrians. But we are under the illusion that these intellectual productions were done by “Greeks”.

From Heliodoros to Winston Fu

To understand the issue let me first explain diglossia or multiglossia. I just received a text message in English from someone located in my village in Lebanon. The person has never addressed me in English in the physical world, only in text messages. Why? Because the habit is to speak in Levantine Arabic, but to write in some Western language, French or English, on two separate registers. And this is not new. We live under the illusion that people spoke in the languages in which they wrote: for a long stretch of time, writing and speaking were separate, because reading and writing were limited to professionals. Aramaic became the official language of the entire Fertile Crescent after the Persian invasion -simply, it was the language in which the Persians wrote, while speaking their own separate language, because that was what their scribes knew.

Secundo, another component is the external naming. Many East Asians adopt an Anglo-Saxon name when interacting with English speakers, but retain their home one when using their own language; “James Ma” “Winston Fu”, or “Bob Hong” is something we are used to.

Now the same applies to the Levant. “Greek” Syria is not a bunch of Greeks who settled in Syria, but, mostly, Syrians using Greek in the scholarly domain just as I am now writing in English without having a single ancestor originating in the rainy island. And (Exhibit I) they had external Greco-Roman names just like Bob Hong. For instance on a 4 thC. B.C., pre-Alexander and pre-Hellenization, on a bilingual funeral stelle in Athens, the Sidonian Abd-Shemesh became Heliodoros and his son Abd-Tanit became Artemidoros. The gods carry over by equivalence (Shemesh-Helios, Tanit-Artemis), but abd, “servant of”, becomes “gift of”: a cultural adaptation, not a translation.

Consider the roster of Levantine Hellenophone authors: Zeno of Citium, Zeno of Sidon, Antiochus of Ascalon, Marinus of Neapolis, Damascius, Isidore of Gaza, Hermias and Diogenes of Phoenicia, Menippus, Philodemus, and Oenomaus of Gadara, Boethus of Sidon, Posidonius, Numenius, and Sopater of Apamea, Antipater of Tyre, Maximus of Tyre, Porphyry of Tyre, Iamblichus of Chalcis, Aeneas of Gaza, Apollonius of Citium, Dorotheus of Sidon, Nicomachus of Gerasa, Marinus of Tyre, Apollodorus of Damascus, Vindonius Anatolius of Berytus, Domninus of Larissa, Nicolaus of Damascus, Josephus, Philo of Byblos, Procopius of Caesarea, John Malalas, Evagrius Scholasticus, Antipater of Sidon, Meleager of Gadara, Archias of Antioch, Lucian of Samosata, Heliodorus of Emesa, Romanos the Melodist, Hadrian of Tyre, Libanius, Procopius of Gaza, Zacharias Scholasticus, Timotheus of Gaza, Choricius of Gaza, Papinian, Ulpian, Julius Paulus, Dorotheus and Anatolius of Berytus, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Eusebius of Caesarea, Nemesius of Emesa, John Chrysostom, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Sophronius, Andrew of Crete, and John of Damascus, and, writing in Latin, Publilius Syrus, Valerius Probus, and Ammianus Marcellinus.

Roman law, the backbone of the European legal tradition, was largely Levantine. Papinian was from Emesa and Ulpian was from Tyre, and Ulpian alone accounts for at least one third of Justinian’s Digest. The Digest was compiled with jurists from Berytus, which Justinian called legum nutrix, “the nurse of the laws.”

The New Testament was largely written in Antioch, the then-capital of Syria, in the Syro-Palestinian variety of Koiné.

Something similar, I speculate, took place in Egypt. Alexandria was formally a Greek city, but the Egyptian countryside gave us Manetho of Sebennytos, who wrote Egypt’s history in Greek, Plotinus of Lycopolis, the poets of Panopolis, Nonnus foremost, and Horapollo, who explained his ancestors’ hieroglyphs in Greek. And many Alexandrian scholars, whose ancestry is simply unknown, may well have been Egyptians or Levantine migrants partaking of the lingua franca of the day.

My Friend Mohammed Kolavakis

Let me add another dimension. I’ve noticed many Semitic and Arabic names that appear to be specifically Levantine, and tend to be more often used by Christians, while being absent or rare in the Medieval Arabian Peninsula -Atallah (Theodosios), Habib (Agapetos), Said (Makarios), Naim (Eutychios), Nour (Photios), Jamil (Kalistos), Mansour and Fawzi (Niketas), Nasri (Nikephoros), Malek (Basileios), Saliba (Stavros), Naja, Najat (Soterios, Soteria), Abd-al-Masih (Christodoulos), Anis (Philemon), Amin (Pistos), Hakim (Sophronios), Farah (Chara), Najib (between Gregorios and Eugenios), Nabil (Eugenios), Ghosn (Thales)-and hence may reflect, at least in part, the long Graeco-Roman cultural and linguistic osmosis of the Levant. Purely Arabic names sound like Sharahil, Huddan, Saddam, Shuahil, Jashm, Hashed, Amru, Zahran, Hajar, Khanjar, Kaab, Hadruj, Shammar and tend to be more descriptive, rather than reflect human qualities.

Finally, there are port towns in Lebanon that were Greek-speaking until recently, particularly Mina in North Lebanon now incorporated into Tripolis (itself a Greek name) -I was actually born there in the clinic of one Dr. Wahib Nini, whose family originates from somewhere Greek. Tripolis, along with another few villages on the North-Syrian coast, are the rare places where one could find Greek-speaking Muslims -in addition to Arabic-speaking Greek Orthodox Lebanese of Greek origin. For during the displacements of 1898, Greek-speaking Cretans of the Muslim faith were stranded. Greece and the about to become Turkey had then binarized along religious lines: although Greece considered Turkish speaking Christians as full Greeks (sort of), Turkey did not have a mirror rule so they came to Lebanon and Syria bearing such names as Ibrahim Bakrakis, Ahmad Terzlakis -so we now commonly find unusual discordances between first names such as Mohammed and Abdelrahman and family names such as Joulamakis, Kolavakis, Soufarakis, Afantakis, Kapslakis, and Mazakis.

Saint Nicholas, a New York Diner

To conclude, consider cultures that accumulate in a community as separate floors in one single museum building. Nationalism, an exclusionary identitarian idea born in the 19 thcentury, is based on a crisp narrative, and limits itself on one single floor. Given that identities are not rigid designations, the narratives can change abruptly. Greek “identity” prior to the middle of the Nineteenth Century was such that an immigrant to New York opening a diner would have named it “Saint Nicholas” or “Saint Demetrius”, confining his identity to, say, the fourth floor. But an earlier immigrant showing up in the late Twentieth Century would have picked the third floor, and named the restaurant “Acropolis” or “Hercules”. So what we now recognize as Greek revival imagery currently illustrating the coffee cups carried about by hangover-prone take-out diners is almost purely an English and German re-import (by such Third-Floor-Hellenophile figures as Lord Byron or the more recent Patrick Leigh Fermor). In a similar way, French orientalists made the Lebanese discover their “Phoenician” identity, something that was foreign to all residents -though the Francophone Lebanese poet Charles Corm refused to consider it an exclusive identity; for him one could be both Arab and Phoenician. Thanks to the Greek Orthodox Church, Greeks are reminded from holiday to holiday of the existence of other floors in the building.

I end with the following thought on some properties of nationalism. Most forms of nationalism, alas, tend to actively brainwash the subjects and blot out everything outside their designated floor and, what is worse, tend to change floors randomly through time. Hopefully, we could put people through a special orientation program to help them understand the value of staircases and elevators -as well as the notion of entropy, given that higher floors, those closer to the present time, embed elements from the lower ones. There is such a thing as an non-exclusive identity: it was actually born in the Eastern Mediterranean.

1 Alberto Moravia, 1959: In realtà, come nota più avanti la Yourcenar, Cavafis non aveva un aspetto poetico ; aveva l’aria di un signore qualsiasi, di un uomo d’affari levantino.

Originally published at https://nntaleb.substack.com on October 9, 2026.

Believing that the book is just abstract information that can be merely held on a stick is an error we will call dimension overtrucation.

Definition: Dimension overtruncation is a form of Procrustean-bed reduction in which the simplification of an object, phenomenon, or process proceeds beyond the level that can be justified without material loss. It arises when attention is confined to readily observable dimensions while latent or less visible dimensions, which may be essential, are ignored. Thus, an item may be consciously used or understood in terms of one stated purpose while its actual role, value, or reason for persistence depends substantially on other, unrecognized dimensions.

I read Victor Hugo’s Les misérables when I was thirteen. The book remained in our family library in Lebanon for years, then somehow strayed from it, as books tend to do, serially running away with each borrower. A few years ago, I found it again on the shelves of a relative. It was the Pléiade edition, printed in dense type on thin, Bible-like paper, and had survived for nearly half a century. I held it in my hands and did not need to open it to recover, in a flash, the gripping experience of reading it-particularly the passage in which Cosette suddenly felt the bucket she had been struggling to carry become light: Jean Valjean had taken hold of it and was helping her carry it.

I smelled the book: it was a period smell for printing techniques, at the time, used different materials. I won’t do a Proustian madeleine tirade here about the potency of the olfactory dimension; just note an inseparability here. I will never know whether it was holding the book or smelling it that brought the episode back.

The physicality of the book -more than its content -is what makes it real. I saw then that one cannot effectively separate the physical presence from the reading experience.

Not long afterwards, there was some excitement about the arrival of the Kindle, a hand held device for reading electronic books. It was roughly the size of a standard book hence claimed to emulate the conventional format. The main reason I heard of it was because The Black Swan was the book used by Jeff Bezos during the launch press conference as he was making annotations on the virtual pages during the demonstration. I was horrified; I like books, and by books I mean that inconvenient thing you hold in your hand, pick up from a table, and carry in your backpack. Every book must be a separate item -a single book with different contents induces a loss in differentiation.

Things got worse when I met Daniel Kahneman on the following day and he was singing the praises of the Kindle. I tried to explain to him that reading virtual formats miss a fundamental dimension. I had just read the story by the Russian scientist A.R. Luria about some kind of memory genius whose ploy consisted in associating phrases with physical objects, applying the mnemonic trick ancient Greeks call the method of the loci. Each locus has to be spacially separed. Furthermore I had discovered quite early on that things you read online are hard to remember. Kahneman wavered between the excitement of neomania and the convenience of academic research on one hand and, on the other, a compelling psychological argument coming from his discipline. He agreed half heartedly. You could carry an entire library on that device and pick what you want on your next trip to Chicago, that type of thing, was his argument.

This is the classical Procrustean bed type of reduction in dimensionality. You think you are reading abstract content but we are not abstract beings and the physical book recruits more channels than you can intellectually perceive.

I keep notes on the front page of my books, referring to the corresponding page. I often consult them while looking for references -like just now. I realized that all I have to do is find the book in my library, pull it out of the shelves, and the idea referenced in it would come to me in a flash. It is practically impossible for me to work entirely from electronic formats. As to more complicated subjects, say mathematical material, only the physical works -I could tell that complicated stuff required physical paper from seeing my students printing out the assigned reading and taking notes on them.

This inseparability of the content and its embodiment is the reason I’ve decided to keep every book I’ve read in the original format in which I have read it. This is not for any functional or pragmatic reason. This is not for any reason other than existential: once you’ve read a book, you are effectively rereading it every time you take a glance at it.

Originally published at https://nntaleb.substack.com on August 11, 2026.

Postface to Abi-Rached and El-Richani’s Lebanon: Anatomy of a Collapse

I would like to repeat an aphorism that Lebanon has twice the qualities found in the Mediterranean world, but twice the flaws. This can generalize beyond the Mediterranean: Lebanon can be a place to study both societal functioning and its maladies.

For the Lebanese crisis under discussion in this volume appears to be a rare confluence of three ailments hitting a country as if by some conspiracy of providence. And by some divine coincidence, the solution is also found in Lebanese (more generally North Levantine) history.

This author, who grew up in Lebanon (and never really left it socially and intellectually), happens to specialize (in both academic research and business activities) in these exact three major ailments -though applied to Western societies and financial markets. By a curious technology transfer, yours truly generalized from Lebanon and applied overseas.

Primo, there is what one can call the carry trade (or the active concealment of risk under the rug); secondo, there is the risk transfer between agents ( skin in the game); and, tertio, there is the fragilization of an economy by stifling the market signals and dampening its natural intellectual and business fertility. And what is the remedy? The building of a system along the lines found in Lebanese history, something called antifragility.

The “carry trade” is as follows. Start producing steady returns while hiding some tail risk in the corners. People will invest. Keep going. Then they will invest more. At some point, some will give you all their savings. Then the greediest (and risk-blind) will blow up and nobody will hear of them. Owing to the survivorship bias, their losses will be both absent from the collective consciousness and, worse, from much of the salient record. Losers don’t write books (if they did nobody would publish them) and, as every financial statistician would confirm, dead entities are not listed in phone books, dead stocks are not easily found on Bloomberg lists, and the wisdom and the experience of bankrupt people isn’t found on the shelves of your local bookstore.

There are accounting and psychological explanations for the appeal of the carry trade as well as an inordinate amount of hidden moral hazard.

First, let us start with the way investors and depositors like to fool themselves with hidden risks that blow up on the occasion. Kahneman and Tversky showed empirically (see this author’s many interpretations ) that the value function (the equivalent to the conventional utilility in their framework) is concave in the gain domain and convave in the loss domain. This means that, hedonically, making small gains repeatedly and losing the bulk (and more) suddenly brings more psychological satisfaction than the reverse, that is, losing (or underperforming) continuously and gaining abruptly. This invites the selling of tail events for pennies.

Second, the moral hazard, the “crooks of randomness” effect, or the Robert Rubin Trade, covered in Skin in the Game. Robert Rubin, when he was the vice-chairperson of Citi, made close to a hundred million dollars in bonuses over a decade for a trading strategy that sells the tails and hence benefits from absence of volatility. When Citi lost everything and more from such fragile betting on the tails, all he had to do was invoke an unexpected event nobody foresaw, a “Black Swan after a (very) stubborn Lebanese author-trader”. And he kept his 100 million dollars and his Fifth Avenue apartment while the taxpayer had to directly and indirectly bail out Citi.

Recall that U.S. money center banks (including the very same Citi) lost every penny they ever made in their history on a single event, in the summer of 1982, from emerging market loans that defaulted collectively, something that convincingly shows that the Robert Rubin Trade is going to be repeated at some point in the future. Furthermore, the entire analytical apparatus of the financial economics establishment, based on the Gaussian distribution, deemed these strategies “safe”. A couple of “Nobel” laureates in economics (that is the Medal in honor of Alfred Nobel) were fooled by it as they blew up and lost their own fortunes, particularly in 1998 with the bankruptcy of Long-Term Capital Management. Likewise another “Nobel”, Joseph Stiglitz, deemed the tail risks of FNMA (which ended up with a blowup of 600 billion) as non-existent. For the economics establishment, the tails were deemed expensive, hence irrational to not sell -a belief that mysteriously lingered without any empirical backing.

Now something similar happened in Lebanon, couleur locale. Depositors were making steady income from the carry trade and fooled by it -it is remarkable how fooled investors like to theorize to justify their strategy (Nobel or no Nobel). The central bank delivered to them the ideal Ponzi: it created fake local U.S. dollars that yielded more than the real U.S. dollar, and that at a time when U.S. rates went to literally zero (as a consequence of the generalized bailout of the system after the blow-up of the Robert Rubin Trade). The differential was, in their eyes, compelling. This attracted every carry hog in Lebanon and even among Lebanese expatriates.

The problem with the carry trade is that it came with the necessary artificial stabilization of the Lebanese Lira, in order to give the impression of a “dollarization” of the local economy. Yet nothing fragilizes more than artificial stability. People liquidated their businesses, workshops, and legit activities just to invest in a supposedly “risk-free” deposit yielding 7%. Many people retired prematurely. The Central Bank ended up sucking away all funds from the economy for that stabilization business.

This was particularly painful to this author. For my personal strategy is as follows. Find anything that produces steady returns, take the other side, and wait for the blowup. Then wait again for new suckers to enter the market -often the same suckers return for more; engaging in a certain class of trades is imprinted in some people’s genetic makup . I gave a talk sponsored by the Lebanese Central Bank at AUB in 1998 called “unsafe at any speed” (a Ralph Nader title), causing me to receive all manner of insults for the following twenty years from people who subsequently had to come ask me for a personal loan.

Now let’s look at the positive. I will leave it to a commentary by one of the great living historians:

In the revision of the seminal 1177: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Eric Cline discussed this author’s Antifragile. He wrote about the Canaanites:

“ (…) They may actually have been among the most resilient of the peoples whom we are examining” (…) for they not only apparently carried on from the initial Canaanite city-states but even flourished in the vacuum created by the Collapse.

Thus, we may well suggest that the Canaanite survivors in these cities, now identified by specific city (e.g., Sidon) or simply rechristened as generic “Phoenicians” by the Greeks as early as the time of the Homeric epics, were more than simply resilient in the face of the Collapse.

They might be better referred to as “anti-fragile” to borrow a term from Nassim Nicholas Taleb. “anti-fragile” can be used to describe a situation in which an entity exhibits more than just resiliency or robustness, and actually “thrives under the right amount of stress” — taking advantage of the situation not only to survive but to flourish. Taleb describes it specifically as “things that gain from disorder”. In the case of the Phoenicians, they seem to have actively taken advantage of the chaos and, most important, of the destruction of Ugarit in northern Syria, to take over the maritime trade routes to the west, across the Aegean to Greece and thence further to Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia.

So for those worried about the inevitable recurrence of the Bronze Age Collapse -the collapse of the large powerful states trapped by their overdependent structures -my answer is that there is a great chance that history will be kind, for a second time, to that hard-to-tame Canaanite strip.

NOTES: A more technical note on the Ponzi scheme. First it is characterized by crescendo borrowing, with debt servicing increasing in a multiplicative way. Second, governments issuing debt in their own currency (unlike Riad) are relatively shielded as they can transfer the effect to that sneaky think we call inflation thanks to the beastly printing press. Third, note that nobody in known history has been able to survive a Ponzi, meaning that it is always a matter of time and that trade is the kind of thing for suckers. Actually the unavoidability of the collapse can be easily shown mathematically. A banker engaging in a Ponzi is necessarily -as I insisted with the case of the public vilain Antoun Sehnaoui -totally incompetent.

1 See Taleb, N. N. (2004). Bleed or blowup? Why do we prefer asymmetric payoffs?. The Journal of Behavioral Finance, 5(1), 2–7, and Taleb, N. N., and G. Martin. “How to Avoid Another Crisis.” SIAS Review of International Affairs (2012).

2 See Malcom Gladwell, 2002, “Bleed or Blowup, How Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy.” The New Yorker.

Originally published at https://nntaleb.substack.com on August 7, 2026.

Friends, I have seven points. Why seven? Because I’ve been reading too much Babylonian history recently.

FROM CONNECTIVITY TO TECHNOFEUDALISM

The first one is about concentration, a distinctive feature of the modern world, often tied to what I called the Black Swan problem. We now see winner-take-all effects everywhere, owing to connectivity. Imagine an island with many species but a high density per square meter. Compare that to a continent, where opening up space leads to fewer species per meter because some will eventually dominate. This mirrors cultural and economic life today.

Take books, for instance. Everyone reads the same ones — think Harry Potter or, for music, The Beatles. In publishing, a few authors prevail. You either sell 20 million copies or you’re working at Starbucks (unless you boycott the firm, as I do personally). This concentration applies to opera singers too. In the past, they could make a living locally because there were no audiovisual recordings. Now, a few stars capture most of the income.

This concentration isn’t inherently bad — it’s just part of market mechanisms, the way things work. The problem arises when it becomes sticky at the top. The road from a college dorm to dominating through Google was once short, and search engines like AltaVista could disappear in minutes, replaced by the newly universally adopted Google. But now, replacing Google is harder because dominance is entrenched, which is unhealthy. This leads to what some like Varoufakis call technofeudalism.

Concentration also applies to viruses. COVID spread globally in about a week, dominating the planet. Compare that to the bubonic plague, which took years to travel from what was Constantinople to Northern England and never reached the Americas due to limited connectivity. Today’s hyper-connectivity amplifies concentration, which is only pathological if we cling to an archaic, early 20th-century textbook understanding of economic, social, cultural, and biological life.

In wealth, for example, only 20% of billionaire families in the U.S. remain after 20 years, but in Europe, it’s the reverse — concentration is getting stickier, and we’re heading toward the more stultified European version globally.

Comment 1
Capitalism works not just by allowing upward mobility, but by accelerating its downward equivalent.

DYNAMICS AND MISUNDERSTANDING OF HISTORICAL PROCESSES

The second point is our difficulty in grasping dynamics, particularly in geopolitics, because historians and statisticians view history differently. My specialty is in stochastic processes (sort of), so I see history as a dynamic process, not a static textbook description.

Comment 2
Both GDP and its rate of growth can fool one in projecting future states; but errors from ignoring growth differentials can be monstrous owing to their compounding. When in doubt, use the rate of growth as status quo.

When I published The Black Swan in 2007 (it became a bestseller again recently, despite warnings that my tweets on Palestine would cause my books to be sold for $1 at discount stores. Threats of cancellation keep coming, though)… In 2007, the U.S. accounted for about 20% of the world economy (using purchasing power parity, the most rational metric), Europe about the same, and China around 6%. Now, the U.S. is roughly 15% and declining, Europe is about 14% and dropping faster, while China is north of 20%. This shift happened within the lifespan of a book.

Small differences in compound growth produce massive outcome differentials over time, as Warren Buffett keeps preaching. Even if you measure GDP in real dollars, the story is similar, with the same growth but different starting bases.

Now consider military expenditures: the U.S. spends about a trillion dollars annually, while China spends roughly a third of that. But compare what they get for their money. A chair made in China might cost $1, but here, it’s far more expensive. Apply that to military production, and you see who’s becoming the real superpower. If China isn’t there yet, wait two weeks or two months — it’s happening fast. This isn’t pro- or anti-China; it’s just reality.

• China makes things cheaper in general and comparatively much cheaper in the military field. The U.S. has a $53,000 garbage can problem.
• The U.S. weapons industry, as mentioned by Col. McGregor, is not competitive; it is one of the three areas that costs “a lot in the U.S.,” along with healthcare and education — the latter can cost two orders of magnitude more here.
• China spends a third of U.S. military in nominal terms. You can figure out what is going on since they don’t have the $53,000 garbage can problem yet.
• By some mental bias, people think that status quo is GDP. No; it is GDP growth. China pulled from 6% to more than 20% of world GDP (PPP) in 15 years. So consider what the state of geopolitics would be in 2035.

Our projections often fail because we rely on primitive analyses of the past, ignoring second-order effects. In the future, discussions about war might need to happen in Beijing, not Washington, where overpaid officials may not grasp these evolutions.

THE S-CURVE AND ECONOMIC SATURATION

The third point is the S-curve, which I discussed in Antifragile. In biology and economics, entities grow in a convex way, then slow as they saturate — growth may be unbounded, but remains sub-logarithmic. Once you have a two-car garage, do you need a five-car garage? Some might, but most don’t — the incentive diminishes.

China is growing fast because many still lack basics like a car, while Europe and the U.S. have reached saturation, with little incentive for further growth. And many are discovering that lifestyle improvements, such as bicycling paths and pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly cities, may not produce economic growth.

The problem is that it is saturated economies, like the U.S. and Europe, that carry the most debt. There’s a French saying: On ne prête qu’aux riches (“One only lends to the rich”). But when you’re rich and borrow heavily, you need growth to service that debt, which is harder at the top of the S-curve.

Further, policies like tariffs, as seen under the current administration, can stifle growth by forcing resources into lower-margin activities — like asking a brain surgeon to do some gardening two days a week to avoid being “ripped off” by professional gardeners. This shift from higher added value to lower added value depresses GDP, a point orthodox economists agree on — and this, at the time when we need growth the most.

Our metastatic government and irresponsible fiscal policies exacerbate this. Soon, most U.S. expenditure will go to servicing debt, and we lack the political mechanisms to correct this. Worse, we now depend on foreigners or local retirees to buy our debt. Former President Biden’s policies, like freezing assets in U.S. dollars, discouraged investment in U.S.-denominated assets. If your assets can be frozen because you once met someone who had lunch with the brother-in-law of a banker connected to Putin, why take the risk of holding dollars (or Euros since the U.S. bullied Europe into following suit)?

Central banks are shifting to gold, which has rallied significantly, as BRICS countries move away from dollar reserves.

IV. IMMIGRATION

There has never been a society that welcomed immigration for its own sake, for reasons beyond its economic utility. The West grew wealthy, then ran out of people willing to clean bathrooms, fix roofs, babysit noisy spoiled brats, and mow lawns. It would be prohibitively costly to ask a dentist to spend two days a week gardening for balance. Nor do many youngsters in the middle class dream of growing up to be janitors. So the poor must be imported — reluctantly.

Comment 3
Immigration in small doses is socially benign; immigration in large doses threatens the museum-state perception of the locals as a discontinuity from past history and feels like an invasion, even if it is not.

The United States and Europe became structurally addicted to cheap immigrant labor, building oversized houses with expansive lawns and labor-intensive upkeep. A sharp reduction in this supply would trigger hyperinflation, owing to the nonlinear effects of such squeezes. Remember 2022.

Every Western political party that won office on an anti-immigration platform has ended its term with more immigrants than before. Giorgia Meloni is a recent example.

In that light, recent moves to deport immigrants appear largely symbolic — gestures aimed at winning elections. Some are simply vicious, driven by the urge to humiliate immigrants for its own sake.

Can the West dispense with immigrants? Not without crushing its own global GDP — an option unaffordable to economies already burdened with accumulated deficits. It may be a rational choice in theory but, in practice, almost no one is willing to pay that price.

Note again, I have nothing against closed xenophobic ethnostates per se (so long as they don’t invade others and mind their own business); but under modern conditions one cannot have both such a state and accumulated debt requiring economic growth.

We end up in the strange situation of xenophobic people importing labor for their own purposes while voting against immigration — a sort of tragedy of the commons.

Comment 4
The perception of the number of immigrants tends to be biased considerably higher than reality, perhaps because of salient differences and their visibility from their concentration in dense central areas (a saliency bias).

The proportion of Muslims in Europe tends to be under 1/20, ranging between 1/10 and 1/100 in most countries — yet casual perceptions tend to be almost one order of magnitude higher.

Note on Highly Skilled Immigration
There is a marked difference between Europe and the United States in terms of reverse brain drain — the inflow of highly skilled immigrants — which explains the growth differential between the two environments. The U.S., with its more generous (though less equalitarian) academic compensation packages and fewer restrictions on retirement, has consistently drawn Europe’s most aggressive and productive scientists.

At the Tandon School of Engineering of NYU, where I spent more than fifteen years, the near-totality of both faculty and graduate students were foreign-born.

Comment 5
Reversing the direction of brain drain (via visa restrictions) may in fact help the countries of origin by keeping talent locally.

V. THE LIBERATING EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The next point is an optimistic one: social media has transformed information flow. Historically, people traded information at the barber shop or fish market, acting as both conveyors and recipients. Big media disrupted this, turning us into passive consumers of TV lectures by the state and a bowdlerized press. Now, platforms like TikTok and X allow us to both share and receive information, returning to a natural model.

Social media is hard to control, even with censorship, and AI makes it even harder to manipulate without producing incoherent outcomes. For example, an ethnic cleansing in Gaza might have been covered up by traditional media in 1995, but in 2025, social media exposes it. The media only matters to politicians or those out of touch — anyone under 30 doesn’t care about ABC News.

So this is good; someone was talking to me about the “media cycle” in Washington and I told him the only people who care about the media are people who are either in a wheelchair or in politics. I’m here because of Facebook (initially) and X/Twitter, not traditional channels, and I’ve refused the media tour for my last couple of books.

Comment 6
One effect of the breaking of traditional, centralized media’s grip on Western citizens is the inability of the Israeli propaganda to frame their ethnic cleansing and Apartheid as a defense of Western values against fundamentalist Islam.

VI. THE GROWING ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

The sixth point is the creeping growth of government invalidating cross-temporal comparisons. In history books, we read about kings like Louis XIV and centralizers like Colbert, but today’s governments are far, far larger and more intrusive.

In Europe, governments account for 40–50% of GDP (higher in France particularly if you include education). In the U.S., it’s higher than reported when you include local government and recent interventions. A century ago, governments were under 15% of GDP, often less than 5%.

Comment 7
Government size is period dependent, invalidating cross-temporal comparisons. At no point have governments been more effectively intrusive, thanks to technology.

Even in economies driven by Adam Smith’s principles, government has grown substantially. In 1500, a dictatorial government couldn’t control much because it was a smaller share of the economy. Today’s governments have far more reach, and this is proving to be unstoppable. A limited-government conservative today is dreaming of what a centralizer was hoping for only a few decades ago.

VII. SCALE IS SIGNIFICANT

The final point is that scale matters when it comes to governance. I have an aphorism phrased by friends as follows: I’m a libertarian at the national level, a Republican at the state level, a Democrat at the municipal level, and a communist at the family level.

The point is, governance depends on scale. Country clubs have rules and enforcement — effectively a government — but nobody complains of country club dictatorships.

Historically, successful models like Venice, Dubai, or Singapore were small city-states. Scale enables effective governance, but as the U.S. economy grows in size and complexity, governance becomes harder. We need even more localism than we had 50 or 100 years ago, but our systems haven’t adapted to this reality.

Head-dress for success — Nobody told the Arabs — Ivermectin and religious conviction — Bad news for Baden Baden — Mother Anatolia — Take away the State Department

Some people believe that the Levant is the end of the East and a portal to the West; others describe it as the end of the West and a portal to the East. Those in the first group tend to belong to the main branches of the Islamic faith, while those in the second belong to various Christian Levantine churches. Now, one might think that the two descriptions are equivalent: an intersection, after all, is an intersection. However, by the same mechanism that generates the so-called ‘narcissism of small differences,’ not only are these two statements not equivalent, but they are, in practice, contradictory. It even took a civil war for the Lebanese to understand this fallacy.

Pierre Zalloua is a population geneticist. For a geneticist, there are (almost) no discrete categories, just continuous gradations. Many nationalists and racemongers thought that the new science of genetics would vindicate them and are currently hit by quite a surprise. Unlike languages that tend to be discrete, origins are necessarily mixed: West and South Eurasian and North African populations are largely combinations of a handful of base populations, though in various proportions. Modern ethnicities result largely from dynamic admixtures of these same base groups over the past few millennia (though with different weights). The incoherence of nationalism lies in the belief that such mixing must stop on its last iteration; they somehow reached their destination.

For instance, the French and the Germans live in distinct and historically antagonistic national narratives; they speak mutually unintelligible languages while being, for the most part (excluding the South of France), genetically indistinguishable. Entire historical accounts have aimed at creating a racial separation in a self-feeding way. We will further discuss how, counter to the “European” narrative, Ancient Greeks and the North Levantines are also the same population separated by language. Counterintuitively, the beauty of genetics does not establish races but destroys long-held concepts.

Accordingly, Zalloua’s book removes some of the clichés related to the Levant that have accumulated over the past couple of centuries

So the healthy way to think of the Levant is neither East nor West and, better, above such dichotomy; both its location on the Mediterranean and its proximity to both the Caucasus and Arabia (though separated by a desert) are highly deceiving.

The area has inflamed Western imagination for a long time, partially explained by the technology and cultural transfers that took place over three millennia. For Westerners, there has always been an aura of holiness and mystery, not just from its origination of Christianity but also for the various deep Gnostic creeds built there, the numerous religions still buried there with secret beliefs that require a complicated initiation, often hidden under Islam or even, as we now know from the Gnostic Gospels, Christianity.

The Superficiality of Cultural Markers

Let me first discuss how the notion of East vs West is highly constructed — and very poorly so. Let us consider the modern symbols that provoke such strong emotions. We’ll start with headscarves, indicative of a certain confession, with the French boiling over its non-republican significance. Well, the Islamic practice either originated from the Orthodox Church or was a common trait of the times across cultures — just look at old Russian babushkas. A noticeable trait in Renaissance paintings: Medieval Europe had stern sumptuary rules, with women dressed in black (and their heads covered) while men were allowed sartorial flamboyance.

But somehow, it recently spread as a cultural marker — in my own Levantine childhood, I never saw my Greek Orthodox grandmother without a head covering, while Muslim women (particularly in rural areas) were often bareheaded. Now, consider the prayer style: ditto. The Orthodox performed the μετάνοια, with the head touching (even hitting) the ground during prayer, a symbol of both physical and spiritual prostration, a practice that was prevalent at the birth of Islam. Finally, consider architecture: the dome is Byzantine, and the first Islamic places of worship were designed by Byzantine architects — it was so natural, as nobody informed the Arabs that there was supposed to be an East-West dichotomy that came with a cluster of symbols.

Further, the demarcation East-West, until the late 18th Century and the formation of the nation-state of Greece, was not along current lines. The “East” started at the border between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires –Orthodoxy thrived under the turban which it preferred to the tiara. So did the name Levant. The Levant Trading Company which brought coffee to coffee houses in London three Centuries ago was based in Smyrna, now Izmir, Türkiye. And it was not until Greece joined the European Union in 1981 that people stopped saying “I am going to Evropa”, meaning Western Europe. For ‘Levant’ is a French exonym meaning ‘East,’ referencing France, similar to how ‘Anatolia’ refers to ‘East’ from the perspective of the Attic mainland. Its Arabic name, Bilad el Sham is an exonym meaning “North”. Canaan is the only endonym of which I am aware.

Over time, with the rise of monolinguistic nation-states after the dissolution Ottoman Empire, the designation “Levant” kept shrinking until if referred to an area that is linguistically coherent, that is speaks a collection of dialects that are mutually understandable under the umbrella “Levantine Arabic”, mapping to today’s Syria, Lebanon, and the Holy Land, closest to Ancient Canaan.

Doura-Europos and the Arrow of History

Now, let us return to that identity business. About a decade ago, I was privileged to visit an exhibit from Doura-Europos, a Syro-Mesopotamian frontier city of the Roman Empire, in the area currently known for its origination and dominance of ISIS/ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/Levant). A synagogue had biblical scenes painted, proving that as late as the 4th Century, human representations were still present in some parts of Judaism. Further, the same room served as a place of worship for pagans, Christians, and Jews.

The first lesson, which was a main theme behind The Black Swan, is our endemic misunderstanding of the dynamics of history. What I call the retrospective distortion, affecting both the perception of the random character of events and the degree of differentiation of past designations: we flow back modern distinctions such as Christian or Jew to the past, in a severely deforming anachronism. We also pathologically like to categorize, and underestimate past diversity.

The second lesson is that religious differentiation, culminating in the modern polarizations, is a rather late thing in history. So is its ancillary religious intolerance.

So the direct ancestors of the most intolerant people on earth, ISIS supporters, would put to shame the modern West with their tolerance. We have numerous accounts in Syro-Palestine of families and tribes straddling different religions –some clans swapping between Christian Maronitism and Mountain Shiism (Harfoush), some between Druze and Maronites (Abillama), some between Sunni Islam and Christianity (the Shehabs). Somehow the deadline for conversion closed sometimes in the late 19th C. Even Sunni Islam (supposed to be the most Orthodox) was quite differentiated as some Sufi branches (in areas under Ottoman rule) were not aware of the interdict against the consumption of alcohol.

The rise of connectivity (in sequence, newspapers, radio, television, then the internet) had the perverse effect to make religions less regional, more centralized. For instance, Maronites used to swap religion with a Shiite neighbor in case of the realization of a wish, or neder –the practice has now stopped. My theory is that many religions stayed hidden under the cover Sufi, Shiite, Alevi, Alawi, Ezidi, and we have been losing such diversity.

So today, we tend to observe in the Levant greater polarization around religion, with separation of groups around sectarian lines, the main ones being: Sunnis, Shiites, Druzes, Maronites, Greek-Orthodox, Monophysites or “Syriac Orthodox”, Armenian Orthodox (the last two being not compatible and not in communion with the earlier ones), and Jews. But this, as we showed from Doura Europos is not intrinsic to religion: it is not necessarily a property of religion to produce polarization with clustered beliefs.

But if Levantines were in the past wise about religion, they were still polarized, but for other, generally silly things. It’ s a human trait to cluster and form networks with irrational and unexplainable side viewpoints –as one buys a collection of creeds as a single block. At the time of writing those who vote for Donald Trump believe in the therapeutic benefits of Ivermectin, an equine dewormer, while his opponents prefer to rely on vaccines; now try to see any valid, non contrived connection between therapeutic choices and political beliefs. So when Doura Europos was a bustling city, with religion a noncentral marker, Levantines weren’t textbook angels. There was almost always a severe brand of sectarian tension. The distinction was between the blues and the greens, people rooting for different teams in hippodrome races, with some political and sometimes theological correlation. Later, after the rise of Islam, a new division was formed between Qaysi and Yamani, based on imagined ancestry, which cut across religious groups: there were Muslim, and Druze, even Christian groups on both sides.

That Europe Thing

Some news for you, uncovered by Pierre Zalloua and colleagues (including yours truly). Where are you most likely to find people who are genetically closest to the ancient Greeks, those who have inflamed Western imagination and fueled theories of cultural ascendance? Well, it’s not in Athens, and even less so in the capitals of “Europe.”

The West — that is, to simplify for the purpose of this foreword, Northern Europe, the land of butter — has spent some time trying to give itself its own letters of nobility by associating with the Greeks. This includes attributing some qualities as unique to the Hellenes. By assuming that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence and that if we don’t have texts on a subject that precede the Greeks, then they must have invented it. This culminated with the great racial awakening of Europe emerging from the Middle Ages into the buildups of the category Indo-European vs. Semitic, essentially language groups that became associated with race. Later, a German could claim to be vicariously, through their ancestors, an active partaker in the origin of Western Civilization.

Our discovery will certainly irritate, perhaps infuriate, some Neonazi with a tattooed skull doing combat training in a clandestine camp near Baden Baden –or, worse, some professor of classics in a German university. For we found that the closest genetics to ancient Greeks are people from the Northern Levant. We sampled three groups from Northern Lebanon near the Syrian border: Muslims from Dinniyeh, Maronites from Zgharta/Ehden, and Greek-Orthodox from the Koura valley. They proved to be genetically closer to the Ancient Greeks than a random person in today’s mainland Hellas. Is this from gene swapping with Greek sailors and Byzantine armies? No, as we could time the admixtures: the origin is very ancient. It just happens that both Ancient Greeks and Ancient Levantines, particularly those in the North, originate from the same source population in Ancient Anatolia.

For the distinction Indo-European vs. Semitic is merely linguistic, not racial, but even scientists spent two centuries under the delusion that it was an unbrigeable genetic fissure. Languages move faster than people. As I argued in Skin in the Game, genes follow a majority rule, slow to disperse between neighboring populations, while languages (and religions) follow a minority rule, and can spread nonlinearly, like wildfire. If ten people whose mother tongue is not English sat in a company meeting with an solely English speaker, English will be the spoken language, which explains how the elite language becomes rapidly the norm. Often, as in Türkiye, Morocco, Egypt, conquered populations change language rapidly, deceiving themselves about a national origin. Even Ernest Renan, who was obsessed with the racial superiority of the West, at some point defined Semitic as merely linguistic[1]. An easy way to see that the Phoenicians and Greek were almost the same branch: the dominant paternal haplogroup for both is the Anatolian J2a (Zalloua will make the notion of haplogroup clearer in Chapter x).

The Anatolian connection doesn’t require genetics; it is actually visible to anyone with acceptable vision (or a competent optician) who has taken a road trip across the Eastern Mediterranean. 1) What is called “Arabic music” in the Levant is actually an Anatolian style shared across the entire zone from Crete to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains — the tones are the same, although the words change. 2) The dances: Lebanese and Syro-Palestinian “dabke” are similar to those found in Turkey (“halay”) and the Greek world (Καλαματιανός, Χασάπικο, and Συρτάκι). 3) The traditional Lebanese mountain garb, consisting of loose-fitting trousers with tapered ankles, resembles the Greek βράκα, the Turkish “şalvar,” and perhaps has its origins in the Persian “shalwar” (pants, often misperceived as a Western thing, actually originate from Persia and Anatolia).

That Bad Greek of Syria

Another fact that may irritate the “West vs. East” crowd: the Levant was the larger contributor to “Western Civilization” directly, that is the Graeco-Roman corpus during the Hellenistic era, that is the ten centuries extending from the arrival of Alexander in the 4th C. BC to the 7th C AD, with the Arab invasion. Just as I am now writing in English without being a Northern European and liking butter (and porridge), Levantines wrore in Greek while being diglossic (Greek and Aramaic), or even triglossic (Greek, Aramaic, and the local Canaanite dialect). [Footnote: There was even quadriglossia in Berytus, present day Beirut, as the law school taught in Latin, something that horrified the purist Libanius Antiochus (ironically I recall once insulting someone telling him“we spoke Latin before you” as, in addition, the author Ammianus Marcellinus was, as his name indicates, from Ammia, present day Amioun, my ancestral village and place of residence)]. Many historians miss the link, focusing on the East-West transfer of knowledge via the translation program of the Abbasides House of Wisdom. Let us not forget that the New Testament was written in Antioch in what Nietzsche called the “bad Greek of Syria”.

Ironically, the racemonger Charles Murray wrote a book proclaiming the superiority of Western civilization by listing its contributions, not realizing that most ancient names were Levantine.

So below is a short list of Greek language Levantine authors and thinkers:

First, six Levantine scholarchs, that is, heads of Plato’s Academy: Diogenes of Phoenicia Hermias of Phoenicia, Syrianus, Marinus of Neapolis, Isidorus of Gaza, and Iamblichus of Apameia.

Next, the sholars Lucian of Samosata, Posidonius of Apameia, Numenius of Apamea, Zeno of Citium (originator of Stoicism), Zeno of Sidon, Philostratus, Philo of Byblos, Aeneas of Gaza, Libanius Antiochus, Zacharias Scholasticus, Boethus of Sidon, Apollonius of Tyre, Procopius of Gaza, Damascius, Apollodorus of Damascus, Domninus of Larissa, Timotheus of Gaza, Nicomachus of Gerasa, Ammianus Marcellinus, Antipater of Sidon, Antipater of Tyre, Marcus Valerius Probus (Probus of Berytus), Vindonius Anatolius Berytius, Dorotheus of Sidon, Hermippus of Berytus, Sopater of Apamea, Procopius of Caesarea, Lucius Julius Gainius, Fabius Agrippa of Apamea, Antiochus of Ascalon, Apollodorus of Seleucia, Philostratus, Maximus of Tyre (Cassius Maximus Tyrius), and Sopater of Apamea.

Add the jurists Papinian (Aemilius Papinianus) and Julius Paulus Prudentissimus.

Add the aphorist Publilius Syrus.

Finally, we count the theologians Eusebiusm, John Chrysostom, John of Damascus, Ananias of Damascus, Alcibiades of Apamea, Alexander of Apamea, not counting a certain number of Catholic popes.

The Most Stable Region of the World

Another counterintuitive fact: the Levant today appears to be an unstable part of the world, filled with warfare and intractable conflicts. This may lead people to overlook the fact that, between 1860 and 1948 (or more generally 1967, and, for Lebanon, 1975), the Levant was the most stable part of the world. It attracted a large number of what the French called “Levantins” — French and Italian merchant families in search of stability who settled in the Ottoman Empire, some of whom moved further south after its dissolution. There were bankers, doctors, dentists, piano teachers, and even French grammar specialists among these fortune-seekers. Additionally, the Levant was the main destination for Anatolian Armenians following their massacre in 1915. Remember, during that period, Europe was consumed with warfare, from the Franco-Prussian Wars to the Second World War, which completely spared the Levant. The area benefited from not being on the radar of the United States State Department, an institution that wreaks havoc when trying to ‘improve’ –usually unsolicited –yet remains unaware of its track record. It is my hope that we will revert to that situation at some point in this century.

[1] La vie de Jésus

A Few Things We Don’t Quite Get About the Levant was originally published in INCERTO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On The Cluster of Charlatans, Zero Interest Rate Virgins, & Crypto Tumors

Interview with Laeticia Strauch-Bonart in L’Express (French magazine), translated.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb : "Le bitcoin est un détecteur d'imbéciles"

Last year, 2022 was not of much respite for cryptocurrencies. While bitcoin has lost more than 60% of its value, the entire sector is in crisis, punctuated by various bankruptcies such as those of Terra and FTX. The phenomenon is the consequence, according to scholar and former trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb, of the low-interest rate “Disneyland” economy in which we have been living for fifteen years. A “cluster” was formed: Pro-putin, climate and Covid deniers, carnivores, and crypto culties, that Taleb, a former crypto hopeful but a fierce opponent since 2021, has decided to attack head-on.

L’Express: As early as 2021, you warned about the inability of bitcoin to play the role of a real currency. Prophetic remarks…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: My point in the article I published in 2021 nicknamed “the bitcoin black paper” was that in its current version, despite the hype around it, bitcoin had not managed to satisfy the notion of “currency without government” and that it even turned out to be not a currency at all. It is because it can be neither a short-term nor long-term store of value, cannot function as a reliable cover against inflation and, worse than anything, it does not remotely constitute a shield against government tyranny or a vehicle to protect against catastrophic episodes.

The comparison with gold is quite poor. It cannot be expected that an entry on a register that requires active maintenance by interested and motivated people — this is how bitcoin works — will retain its physical properties, a condition for monetary value, for any period of time. In addition, we are not sure of the interests, mentalities and preferences of future generations. Technology comes and goes, gold stays, at least physically. Once neglected for a brief period, bitcoin would necessarily collapse [The “absorbing barrier”].

The fundamental defect and contradiction at the base of most cryptocurrencies is that initiators, miners and maintainers of the system were making money from the inflation of their currencies rather than the simple volume of the underlying transactions. Thus, the total failure of bitcoin to become a currency has been masked by the inflation of its value, generating profits (on paper) for a sufficiently large number of people. In reality, bitcoin has maintained extremely high volatility throughout its existence and, even worse, at higher prices, which makes its capitalization considerably more volatile.

Let’s add that Bitcoin transactions are considerably more visible than others, which makes it uninteresting for intelligent fraudsters!

Where does the craze for cryptocurrencies come from?

What we have been experiencing for fifteen years is a kind of Disneyland, with near zero, sometimes negative, interest rates and therefore without real market functioning. Lowering rates creates asset bubbles without necessarily helping the economy. Capital no longer costs anything, risk-free returns on investment become too low, even negative, pushing people into speculation. We lose our sense of what a long-term investment is. It is the end of real finance.

Investors get pushed into a Ponzi-like strategies: to invest in the assets of companies whose price was rising. Thus, the majority of technology companies do not produce cash flow but are financed through “funding” which inflates their assets on paper. Another phenomenon, in the past fifteen years, hedge funds that should not normally exist have grown like mushrooms. And then you have malignant tumors like bitcoin.

At first, when cryptos appeared, you seemed rather favorable

At the time, I was very critical of the Fed’s policy. I have always been critical of Ben Bernanke, who in my opinion did not see the structural risks of the system before the 2008 crisis, and overreacted afterwards. Instead of correcting debt and mitigating hidden risks, he covered them with a monetary policy that was only supposed to be transitory. I wrongly thought bitcoin would be a bulwark against the distortions of this monetary policy. By flooding the money market, central banks have created these tumors. Central banks have an advantage: they ultimately show a certain accountability, which is not the case with cryptos.

I think the crypto universe attracts manipulators and scammers. It also has a generational vice: it is filled with young people who have no experience, who bought bitcoin early and who got temporarily rich without knowing anything except computer programming (but it will not last). This is the difference between our world and that, for example, of the Romans, who did not have the cult of the youth, who even despised it, precisely because it had not experienced much. In fact, young bitcoiners do not understand finance: they do not get that it cannot be a reliable cover against inflation. In any case, what we need is to return to a normal economic life, with interest rates of 4 to 5%. It will clean things up, particularly in the technoparadise

You spend some time fighting on Twitter with crypto advocates…

About 36,000 “people” trolled me— which I had to block all thanks to a bot. Here, we have to do what can be called a “cluster”, which brings together crypto fans, Covid-19 skeptics, climate skeptics, Putinists, and radical carnivores. Many are delusional conspiracy theorists, but naive to the core. I’m not kidding, these people connect and share the same opinions on apparently very distant matters. Their scientific background is zero.

At the height of the disinformation about Covid-19 and the vaccine, a person I respect asked me to intervene: “The mainstream press looks like a boring and moralizing schoolteacher. You are known for being a fiery character who says what he thinks, much more reliable and interesting to listen to. So you have a moral duty to fight against misinformation. In addition, you obviously seem to be having fun so people will trust you.” I then began to attack these charlatans who pose a threat to society, and particularly to this cluster.

I occasionally share the opinions of the cluster, for example against GMOs, interventionism in Libya or Syria, and the Fed, which makes my opinion less suspicious for young people.

This cluster seems strange. What is the link between cryptos and Putin, for example?

There is as much coherence in that universe, located on the right of the right, as in the one, on the very left, who loves state economic control while advocating gender transitions. We can detect generalized lunacies: for example, the cluster is convinced that we are victims of a “great reset” conspiracy. This would be a plan orchestrated by globalized elites, starting with Bill Gates, to control the world following the Covid-19 pandemic, which would have been engineered for that purpose. If you believe in the “great reset”, then there is a chance that you will be wary of any state initiative to fight the pandemic, and that will make you seek Putin’s protection. And you may not know anything about bitcoin, but since it is part of the cluster, you adopt it with the rest! You know, by repeating nonsense, suckers end up believing it.

Isn’t this conspiracy-prone cluster likely to be stimulated by Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter?

I know Elon Musk a little bit, I met him several times and publicly discussed Tesla’s flaws with him on Twitter. But since then, he has blocked me! It was in March 2020, when he claimed that he was stupid to panic about Covid-19, to which I replied that it was stupid to say what he said. He got angry — he thought the epidemic would end by the end of March 2020. I maintained that we had to panic immediately, because it didn’t cost much then. When it is not expensive to panic, in any situation, it must be done.

Then, regarding freedom of expression, I don’t like disinformation but I think nothing purifies better than sunlight. We must let all these idiots ridicule themselves and disqualify themselves in public.

What about sensitive issues, such as health? Shouldn’t we set limits?

I agree. On these issues, you do not have the right to give an unfounded opinion. It’s dangerous. We must really be wary of quacky opinions uring medical emergencies. Today, when 100 experts think X and a dissident person thinks non-X, like this quacky Didier Raoult’s or some other false scientist, the charlatan will pass on television much more than the bearers of professional consensus.

Why is non-conformism preferred to scientific conformism?

Because of a phenomenon called salience. Consider the quote attributed to Stalin: “The death of a man is a tragedy. The death of a million men is a statistic.” The former is more prominent than the latter, despite the disproportion between the two. However, in their representations, people do not function statistically but emotionally. But science does not work through public opinion nor any opinion; it is a mechanism of evidence and demonstrations.

Note: More than a million people died of Covid after Musk‘s episode. There is something pathological about people who don’t get that without vaccines we would be in real trouble, and they divert you from these points by nitpicking. So we need safeguards.

Some interpretations see in conspiracy the conspiratists or supporters of the disinformation of narcissists. You too?

It also counts. But conspiracy theory is not necessarily bad for society. I would say that experts and mainstream media are right in 95% of cases, conspiratists in less than 5%, even if unfortunately the public is led to believe that conspiratists are 95% right and the media 5%. So we need them, but we must control them, prevent catastrophes. Will Elon Musk kill them? I don’t know. We must be very careful because when information is suppressed, people tend to believe it even more, which advocates for a very weak regulation of expression. Except, as I have just said, in specific, extreme cases: in the event of a national emergency such as a pandemic or when children are concerned, it is necessary to control false information on the networks, for example by pointing out that such a person is not qualified to express himself on the topic, particularly medicine [Note: People don’t get that nondoctors are not allowed to give specific medical advice; they don’t let truck drivers treat cancer patients, and I haven’t heard too many people complaining of lack of freedom of expression there]. YouTube has done such controls, as did Facebook. But it should not be abused: it should not be used in the case of opinion debates.

This is difficult, because the current alternative opposes radicals of freedom of expression to people who want to limit all speech for fear of offending certain categories of people.

You have to be in the middle. And when you censor, you have to treat people fairly. Either you censor everyone or no one. I don’t like the toxic and unhealthy utopianism of the wokes, and they, no one censors them. Overall, censorship remains limited to a few and unbearable trolls continue to thrive on this social network. Being on Twitter is like going to a café that brings together the entire population and you don’t know which one is a fool and who is a professor of medicine. In general, when you go to a real café, you know if you are at the truck stop or at the Deux magots. Twitter is a mess, a mix.

You find yourself at a table with Einstein on your left and a truck driver on your right who comments on IMF policy or discuss whether the people of Davos are trying to put chips in our brains…

What could happen is that Twitter becomes such chaos that people spontaneously flee to networks where trade moderation is stronger. In any case, I think things will eventually settle: you will have a Twitter for Einstein and his friends, and a Twitter for others. There is already Parler, which brings together Trump fans.

We find this dynamic in France, except that at home, the center exists, with Emmanuel Macron.

I note that the right is no longer conservative in the sense given to it by the British Edmund Burke: respect for institutions, traditions and the defense of prudence in progression. Traditionally, the two American parties were Burkians, one progressive, the other conservative: their ideal pace of progress was not the same. Now you have two clusters of fools, both on the left and on the right. Because of Trump, the real American conservatism has nearly evaporated. Moderate Democrats now have the advantage, and some people who voted Republican for years have started to vote Democrat.

In France, this right-wing shift translates into the rise of Eric Zemmour, who is completely xenophobic. It is even possible that he is anti-Semitic. The extreme right really makes me think of what some call the “ Nigerian scam” [a form of scam by which someone is promised a large sum of money in exchange for a small initial payment, supposed to have to be used to get the big amount. When the victim makes the payment, the fraudster invents a series of other fees to be paid or disappears.]

Well, the message sent by fraudsters is so primitive that most people immediately detect the fraud. But it still works because it filters a certain category of people: idiots. It’s the same with the extreme right: what they say is so stupid or weird that only fools or idiots believe in it. However, in a large population you will always have a few hundred thousand idiots. Bitcoin has had the same effect, it is now a magnet for idiots, a fool detector.

What do you think of Zemmour’s words on immigration and integration?

Christian Lebanese like me assimilate very well in the West, much better than in the East, but Zemmour makes me uncomfortable. Some appreciate it because it represents a very radical version of assimilation — we see it with its obsession with French first names. The problem is that Zemmour does not understand that in a more individualized world like ours, we cannot coerce people into specific names and identities. They rebel.

Look at the difference between Algeria and India: in Algeria, French colonizers were violent and sought to dispossess locals of their land and culture, unlike the British in India. As a result, the current relationships are very different. To the point where their current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is of Indian origin. The British even had a Sephardic prime minister, Disraeli, a century before the United States had its first Catholic president!

The British manage to integrate differences as long as they have a commercial basis. It is not the State that manages national identities, as in France, so integration is more organic, especially thanks to business. This is why immigrants are generally conservative in the United Kingdom, and especially in the United States. These people have immigrated in order to succeed and want to protect what they have acquired.

It is difficult to imagine the French right dealing with immigration in this way…

This is because the French right is not liberal in the classic sense of freedom of trade and limited state (Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan). The French right is nationalist, centralist and in favor of the big state. It’s like the opposition between Zelensky and Putin. Recall De Gaulle saying “Maintenance will follow” (l’intendance suivra). This denotes a planning-oriented vision of political and economic life. On the contrary, what is the cardinal value of the British right? Free enterprise. They are both called “right”, but they don’t have much to do with one another.

Bitcoin is the Detector of Imbeciles: was originally published in INCERTO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I met Luca Formenton, Saggiatore’s capo twenty years ago, in April 2002, in the eternal city, in a mozzarella bar-terrace near the parliament. I spoke in highly ungrammatical Italian; he addressed me in impeccable English, a practice we have sort of maintained for twenty years. That was the period when I very badly wanted to satisfy my failed childhood dream to produce literature, but everything conspired to stop me from partaking of that highly protected genus.

I was in Rome supposedly for a conference on risk but I just wanted an excuse to be in Italy (coincidentally I also made friends with Daniel Kahneman on the same day, another, more complicated story). Luca was the first literary editor who was interested in my work, thanks to an intercession by the late Marco Di Martino.

By then I had written the first volume of the Incerto, Fooled by Randomness, a book that was practically impossible to publish. It was a continental style meditative essay and the Anglo Saxon world, in spite of their infatuation with Montaigne and Umberto Eco, were about five hundred years late to the genre. The official “subject” (an essay is not supposed to have such a constraint as a subject) was a random mixture of autobiography, philosophy (of probability), mathematics, inductive logic, musings on historical events and financial markets. It included parables with fictional characters, one of whom seemed to resemble me, which appeared to be confusing since I also had explicit autobiographical episodes. “Why are you confusing the reader with both Nero Tulip and yourself”, I was often asked by those who did not find the mixture too uncanny and continued reading the text. “What’s wrong with confusing the reader?” was my usual answer. The good thing about inserting “randomness” in the title is that it allowed me to write about anything that crossed my mind, given the ubiquity of chance and, worse, the lack of awareness of it. Not unexpectedly, the reaction of publishing houses had been unanimously dismissive: why would anyone mix finance, Solon, and Proust? And why these mathematical discussions?

Now I have no problem with focus and precision: I do not want my vacuum cleaner user manual to be a stream of consciousness. I had written a specialized treatise in mathematical finance, and was embarking on a career writing scientific papers, which must be as narrow as possible. But literature should not have explicit boundaries: the confines of the subject are internal and may remain elusive and hard to express in words. Nor should literature have institutions formalizing and commoditizing things. And I wanted to do my own version of what is called literature. Literature must be idiosyncratic.

I remained undeterred by the insults in the rejection letters. Something I experienced even more acutely with The Black Swan, editors were not content in rejecting the book as a wise businessperson would reject an investment, by saying something like it may be great but I do not wish to take the gamble or politely appeal to caution. No; they went out of their way to explain with a lot of precision why it would flop, why nobody would read it. Both Fooled by Randomness and its successor The Black Swan were treated by the industry like Yevgenia Krasnova’s Story of Recursion(which few realize was about The Black Swan recursively talking about itself and its own future). All books acquire retrospective qualities after they become successful.

My belief has always been that primo, “books are not written for book editors” and secundo, almost all book editors don’t know it –it turns out that there are good editors in some elite houses (such as Will Murphy in New York, Will Goodlad in London, and those who replaced them) but these were still outside my reach then. Predictably, I refused to be edited, feeling that it disrupts the inner harmony of the text; the manuscript showed a fiercely stubborn personality, which editors easily confirmed upon meeting its author.

Finally, I miraculously managed to get temporarily published by a newly founded aggressive internet house who traded my refusal to be edited against lower royalties. The house was so patently incompetent (yet aggressive) that they rapidly became financially insolvent –the managers burned their cash on first class transatlantic seats and lavish author parties (not mine). But I had no reason to complain: only an incompetent-but-aggressive publishing house would have accepted to publish me. To cheat, Fooled by Randomness had been promoted to some as a business book (although the only business in it is its dismissal of business as both a vulgar and a random thing); to others as a philosophy of science manual though the demand for these was so limited that the last books in that category that were read beyond a narrow group of graduate students were by Karl Popper, fifty years earlier.

However, by the time I met Luca, Fooled by Randomness had been steadily circulating via word-of-mouth, thanks to the internet. Your local bookstore, in spite of the romanticism for the neighborhood business, is only interested in local turnover for what can be rigidly categorized, say the biography of an exiting president or the travelogue of a recently divorced suburban dentist’s trip to Tuscany. But a revolution happened around then. Amazon, the internet publisher, could now reach people across genres and connect authors to my kind of readers who may be locally rare but large enough across the planet. For the internet switched the focus from physical geography to thematic subjects –the shift was analog to the replacement of the Riemann integral with a Lebesgue one. This is what put me on the map and in the presence of Luca Formenton on that spring day in Rome.

It was Luca who firmed up a certain idea in my head. He said that Saggiatore, his publishing house, had for its best success the Italian translation of Triste Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss, which put a quarter million books in the hands of readers. Except that it was five thousand a year over (almost) fifty years. It evoked the joke about winning a million zlotys at the Polish lottery: you receive 1 zloty a year for one million years –but joking apart, here is the very idea of robustness: the expression chi va piano va sano –e va lontano is double edged. Lontano in Italian is both temporal and spatial.

Luca seemed to know it was my kind of book. The hidden story, of which I became aware when I started writing the Incerto, is that Triste Tropiques was written initially as a novel. What’s more, he started with the poetic, Baudelairian title (reminiscent of Tristesse de la lune), then embarked on the writing of the stuff. Anthropology, Brazil, the Amazon were some background topic. I realized that I was playing Levi-Strauss’s game: find some topic to furnish one’s autobiographically driven reflections. As I wrote earlier, genuine literature is not found in the Goncourt circles or among these salon people who go to parties and readings in New York and tag themselves with a “literary” label by deploying a certain vocabulary and mentioning Borges. No, as I said, literature was something fundamentally grounded in its creator, the individual.

But there is something more central to the story: this idea of surviving fifty years without anybody noticing is a great lesson on what came to be called in The Black Swan the Lindy effect.

How do I write? The common fallacy is that if you want people to read you in the future, you must project something related to the future, focused on the contemporary and be as different from the past as possible –say by populating your work with space machines, high technology, and revolutionary ideas. My U.S. publisher still tries to squeeze modern art on the cover when I am looking elsewhere.

No, no; it’s the exact opposite. I stood the idea on its head. If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the comtemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.

Another discovery I made then, and to which I have been adhering until the present. If you consider writing a creative endeavor, then avoid practicing it in mundane matters as it may both dull your vitality and make it feel like drudgery, work. I find it painful to write outside of my books (or mathematical papers) –and immensely pleasurable to write in book form. So I limit my emails to one or two laconic (but sometimes incomprehensible) sentences, postcard like; the same with social media posts that are not exceprts from books. There is still such a contraption called a telephone. Likewise, I don’t read letters and emails longer than a postcard. Writing must have some solemnity. Reading and writing, in the past, were the province of the sacred.

Twenty Years Later: I was passing through Milan in the summer of 2022, and Luca wanted to meet. I suspected that, principally, he wanted to show me his gravel bicycle. But he also had a gift for me: a special, about fifty year old edition of Tristi Tropici. Inside the book was a photocopy of some accounting report. He said that the Cigno nero published fifteen years earlier became his new Tristi Tropici.

How I write was originally published in INCERTO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By a mechanism dubbed the retrospective distortion, we look at history using the rear view mirror and flow values retroactively. So one would be naturally inclined to believe that the ancients, particularly the Greco-Romans, would seem like us, share the same wisdom, preferences, values, concerns, fears, hopes, and outlook, except, of course, without the iPhone, Twitter, and the Japanese automated toilet seat. But, no, no, not at all, Holland is saying. These ancients did not have the same values. In fact, Christianity did stand the entire ancient value system on its head.

The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, and the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order. While ancient gods could have their share of travails and difficulties, they remained in that special class of gods. But Jesus was the first ancient deity who suffered the punishment of the slave, the lowest ranking member of the human race. And the sect that succeeded him generalized such glorification of suffering: dying as an inferior is more magnificent than living as the mighty. The Romans were befuddled to see members of that sect use for symbol the cross –the punishment for slaves. It had to be some type of joke in their eyes.

Clearly pagans were not totally heartless –there are records of pagan cities in Asia Minor assisting other communities after a disaster but these are rare enough to confirm the rule[2].

There is also the presence of skin in the game in the new religion. Christianity, by insisting on the Trinity, managed to allow God to suffer like a human, and suffer the worst fate any human can suffer. Thanks to the complicated consubstantial relation between father and son, suffering was not a computer simulation to the Lord but the real, real thing. The argument “I am superior to you because I suffer the consequences of my actions and you don’t” applies within humans and here in the relationship between humans and God. This extends, in Orthodox theology, to the idea that God, by suffering as a human, allowed humans to be closer to Him, and to potentially merge with Him via Theosis.

Irreversibility

Once in, Christianity proved impossible to remove, and the Nazarean mindset and its structure directed its opponents, its heresies, and its replacement –starting with Julian and ending with the most recent accretions of secular humanism.

For Christianity had a sweet vindication when Julian The Apostate, falling for the retrospective distortion, decided to replace of the Church of Christianity by the Church of Paganism along similar organizational lines, with bishops and all the rest (what Chateaubriand called the “Levites”). Julian did not realize that paganism was a soup of decentralized and overlapping individual or collective club-like affiliations to gods.

What has been less obvious is that while we are inclined to believe that Christianity descends from Judaism, some of the reverse might be true. For even the mother-daughter relationship between Judaism and Christianity has been, as of late, convincingly challenged. “ If there had been no Paul, there would have been no Rabbi Akiva” claims the theologian Israel Yuval[3] as we can see in Rabbinical Judaism the unmistakable footprints of Christianity.

Further East, Shiite Islam shares many features with Christianity, e.g. the same dodecadic approach, with twelve apostles, the last of whom will be associated with Jesus Christ, plus self-flagellation rituals around the memory of all-familiar martyrdom. These can be possibly attributed to a shared Levantine origin, but the Christian influence wholly accepted by Islamic scholars since Islam is backward compatible[4]. But it is clear that the latest position of Supreme Leader has been largely inspired by the Catholic hierarchy. [Note: Shiism is the religion of the downtrodden, the underdog, and the victimized, which, more than geopolitics, explains the Lebanese Shiite obsession with the plight of the Palestinians.]

Progression

The corollary of Holland’s thesis is that many ideas that we attribute today to social progress –including secularism, etc. are direct descendants of Christianity, mostly in its Western branch. This includes, of course, as we will see, atheism. But Christianity has been slow to spread its values from text to execution, and that may be the point of this book. Yes, Christianity glorifies the poor: but it took seventeen centuries from “the eye of the needle” in Matthew 19:24 to the conception of organized communism and various theories of social equality. Likewise, sadly it took more than a millennia for the “neither slave nor free” in Galatians 3:28 to move from epistle to execution.

As to the “neither Greek nor Jew”, alas, we are still waiting for full implementation as we have witnessed with the birth of nationalism in the late 18th C., a moral degradation and a step away from universalism with the modern contraption of the nation state –the murderous nation state. I recall vividly the TV ads in the early 2000s, promoted by Democrats to attack George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq; they kept showing the tragedy that 3,800 people died in the invasion. They omitted to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis –lest the Republicans question their patriotism. These foreign casualties do not seem to count because nationalism establishes clean balance sheets: countries are only responsible for their own citizens.

The Debates

In the debates between Holland and the representatives of the second wave of self-branded enlightenmentistas such as A.C. Grayling, arguments are of the following type have been supplied: well, the ancients had some type of recommendation to care for their slaves. This is like saying: some of your neighbors treat their dogs in humane manner. This totally misses the point: the ancient’s worldview would have never accepted to put slaves as equal, let alone superior. The ancients may have been charitable; but it was not systematic.

A standard argument is that Christians destroyed the intellectual production of the classical periods while the Arabs preserved some of it, which can fool those who read too much Gibbon but not enough of other sources. Holland correctly busted that myth probably based on some true but not representative anecdote: these “Arab” preservationists were almost all Syriac speaking Syro-Mesopotamian Christians who operated mostly in Bagdad’s Beit al Hikma, The House of Wisdom (such as Ishac ben Honein and Honein ben Ishac) who translated from Greek but also from Aramaic sources. Those who were not Christian had been recently converted. Whatever he got wrong about race and ethnicity, Ernest Renan was correct in claiming that much of the Arab golden age was Greco-Sassanian. The “Greco” in it was Christian.[5]

Let us note that whatever the source of the myth of Christian obscurantism, that the story doesn’t fudge, no matter how we look at it[6]. It might be true that at the beginning, great minds tended to be pagan, such as the formidable Libanius. But later generations were integrated into Christianity. The most erudite people in history were 17th and 18th religious Christians such as the Catholic Bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet, Huguenot figures such as Pierre Bayle, or the great Scaliger (who, among his otherwise rare skills, was ironically able to translate Arabic wisdom into Latin). These put to shame their successors. My personal childhood experience is that Jesuit clergymen were your first stop for anything related to Ancient history and archeological matters, and before the spread of literacy in the Arab world, Levantine Christian priests (whose theological languages were either Aramean or Greek) were the ones to consult for the subtleties of Arabic grammar and the language of the Quran.

Let us expand the discussion to some of the points of Christianity beyond Tom Holland’s book.

The Secular

“Religion” doesn’t mean the same thing across various creeds. Christianity is the vehicle by which a separation of church and state was accomplished –another miscalculation by Julian and many others. Consider that in Semitic languages, din means law, which in Arabic translates into religion: the older and youngest Abrahamic religions were just law (one, local; the other, universal). But in Christian Aramaic, it is the word nomous from the Greek nomos that refers to law, separate from religion. For Jesus separated both domains with the “render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar”; some additional work came later by Augustine to formalize how one deals with the temporal, the other with the spiritual, the afterlife, etc. This brought a natural boundary between State and Church.[7]

European “Identity”

Europe is neither a continent, nor a language group, nor a race since more than 100 million of citizens of E.U. members are olive skinned hardly distinguishable from other Mediterraneans.

European identity means Western Christianity and its values that have been spreading Eastward, which includes the “liberal order”, with a hard stop at Islamic lands.

Europa was the daughter of a Phoenician king, which gave its name to some vague area West of the Hellespont. Then moderns started referring to “Europe” as a separate continent in the large Eurasian landmass, with the fake newly created separation “white” and “nonwhite”, replacing older natural distinctions of Mediterranean vs non-Mediterranean. But anyone looking at the map would see no continent except by gerrymandering. Unlike the Pacific Ocean, the Hellespont is like a large river. The Urals used as a sort of border might be mountains, but so are the Alps.

What we had, until the notion of nationalism that sprung two hundred years ago was three separate cultures 1) Western Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) up until the Ottoman-Habsburg borders covering roughly the former so-called Holy Roman Empire, 2) The Ottoman mixed Eastern Orthodox and Sunni Muslim area covering roughly the Eastern Roman Empire, 3) Areas that are entirely Muslim further East and South, and 4) The Russian sphere, Orthodox. The Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians and other new members of the European identity were in the second zone, and, up to today older Greek people still say “going to Europe” when they refer to travel to the first zone. In maps, the Near East started in Athens; it now starts in Syria (or Turkey, depending on Islamic orientation of its government).

So Europe became an extension of Western Christianity, with its values spreading into Orthodox areas. As Western Christianity expanded its values, so did the areas in the second zone become “European”, with in addition the progressive replacement of religion by nationality –an unfortunate Christian mutation. Until the twentieth Century, a Greek was self identifying as a rhomoi and had it not been for the creation of the nation state of Greece by Western European powers, Greek owned coffee shops would bear names like St Nicholas, St Demetrius, rather than Hercules or Acropolis.

That Western Christianity may not be entirely Christian, but a cultural mixture dominated by Northern European values is a valid hypothesis. We tend to think that religions shape people. But religions are also shaped by people. In the Levant, we can find heresies and separations along ethnic-linguistic lines: Coptic, Maronite, Nestorian, Armenian have in common the refusal to be “Greek”(rhomoi) and the East-West theological disagreements over filoque (or, worse, homoousios vs homoiousios) was more of an “us” versus “them”[8]. The Christian Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf views that as a result of social contagion: if Lebanese Christians are eager to resemble Westerners in habits and values, it is not from theology but imitation[9]. This in fact nullifies some attacks on religions based on their texts: some attribute Islamic violence to the texts, but the Old Testament is no less violent and nobody treats Lutherans as potential ISIS members. In that light, Holland’s thesis should be seen more as a cultural phenomenon integrated by Christianity.

I am writing these lines from the vantage point of my specialty of decision making under uncertainty, not that of theology, so what follows concerns the supposed conflict between religion and modern science as far as decisions under uncertainty and risk management.

Belief

In his book, Did the Greeks believe in their myths?[10] the classicist Paul Veyne explains that while reading Madame Bovary, he believes in the story and the character. This may explain how Plutarch could make fun of pagan “superstitions” and later end up his life a pious priest at Delphi.

For the notion of epistemic belief is entirely modern –and the gold standard Justified True Belief is not free of problems[11]. The term pisteuo in Greek means trust, translated into credere in Latin (linked to credit, as in a commercial transaction) and even in English, belief did not originally really mean belief, but something more related to beloved.[12] Amen (Haymen) means fidelity and trust in all Semitic languages.

The post enlightenment discourse about whether one believes in God is meant to be scientific. It’s not. It’s more like a science writer thing, such as R. Dawkins, S. Pinker and their group. The great mathematician Robert (now Israel) Aumann, who work at the Center of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, when asked how he could be both a rational scientist and a devout Orthodox Jew, answered “It is orthogonal”. N.T. Wright, the theologian and historian, usually tries to explain that “it’s the wrong question”, but I will go beyond that. It’s an ill-posed question.

The notion of scientific belief outside science is not even scientific[13]. By a mechanism called “revelation of preferences”, rational decision making is interested in what you do, not what you “believe”. What goes in your head in the formulation of such beliefs is not the business of science. We are guided in life thanks to visual distortions –and it would be technically irrational to modify them.[14]

Empiricism in the Wrong Places

Ironically, modernists fall for what I have called the opiate of the middle classes[15], that is social science and stock market speculation. They refuse religion on rational grounds, then fall for economic forecasters, stock market analysts, and psychologists. We know that economic forecasts work no better than astrology; stock market analysts are more pompous but much less elegant than the bishop, and psychology papers do not replicate meaning their results do not hold.

My co-author Rupert Read and I have argued (using evolutionary arguments) that religion, via interdicts, allows the intergenerational transmission of survival heuristics and is effective in nudging people into some classes of behavior[16]. By some irony, “nudging” theory developed by social scientists (which earned Richard Thaler a Nobel in economic sciences) has been recently shown to be nonreplicable, owing to a statistical artifact[17]. Nonreplicable is the polite scientific term to mean that it is no different from astrology. Listen to the bishop — the recipient of generations of survival wisdom — not the psychologist.

The Sinister “Scientific” Project

For a Christian, a person is someone who breathes, from the Semitic neshama; it is the indivisible unit –all of course equal in the eyes of God. But the enlightenment, coupled with the invasive growth of “science” started finding statistical differences in the abilities of people of different races. Replacing the metaphor of Adam and Eve by Darwinian ideas lead to “evolutionary” differences not just between species, but within species.

This naturally leads to notions of eugenics: we humans can improve the human race by speeding evolution. This can also justify slavery. I went against the theories of IQ on statistical grounds, showing that it was a fake construct.[18] [19] One can easily show that people like one I’ve called the “mountebank”, the writer Charles Murray, innocent of any form of statistical knowledge, decided that African Americans were inferior, then decided to find statistical methods to justify that point of view. In general most of these studies fail to show the interpersonal variance and environmental effects.

Almost as worrisome, upon Covid, some were openly calling for geronticide and letting “fat people” die. [expand]

Desacralization and Vatican II

In the apology of Christianity, Genie du christianisme, Chateaubriand asserts repeatedly that religion is essentially mystery and sacrifice (that is, skin in the game).[20] “Which religion in antiquity did not lose its moral influence by losing its priests and its sacrifices?” he wrote.

Effectively, Catholicism lost its moral authority the minute it mixed epistemic and pisteic belief –breaking the link between holy and the profane. The aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council, in the early 1960s, meant to “update” Catholicism. One of the measures was to translate prayers into the vernaculars, in place of Latin. By doing so they largely removed the element of mystery from the religion –it reminds me that, one evening in Chicago I walked out of a Verdi opera upon discovering that it was sung in English.

For once religion exits the sacred, it becomes subjected to epistemic beliefs. Atheism is the child of Protestantism, and Vatican II turned out to be a second reformation.

The fastest growing religion today is Sunni Islam, with one and a half billion followers, all praying in Arabic, a foreign language to nine tenth of them, and in an ancient version (fusha) never, never spoken in conversation by Arabs –when an Moroccan wants to converse with a Lebanese, they do so in French or English, not classical Arabic. Judaism survived with its prayers only in Hebrew (and some Aramaic as in the book of Daniel).

I conclude with something personal. I am Greek-Orthodox, a rhomoi, but having parents with an indifference to religion, was brought up via Sunday school and summer camps and boy scouts equally in Roman Catholic, Maronite, and Greek-Orthodox settings. I agree with Tom (private conversation) that much of the ideas of this book don’t apply to Orthodoxy as it had a different evolution and has not been affected by Protestantism. Literal “belief” is not something that concerns us too much. Furthermore, in addition to its theology, Orthodoxy distinguishes itself from Western Christianity in its stiff dietary laws, with veganism more than 200 days per annum. This is not a minor detail, as it shapes a certain type of commitment to the religion.

[1] Nassim Nicholas Taleb focuses on decision making under uncertainty. He is the author of the five volume Incerto.

[2] Lane Fox, Robin, 1986 Pagans and Christians, Knopf.

[3] Yuval, Israel J., 2016. The Orality of Jewish Oral Law: from Pedagogy to Ideology. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Course of History: Exchange and Conflicts (pp. 237–260). De Gruyter Oldenbourg. See also Yuval, I.J., 2015. “ Deux peuples en ton sein”: Juifs et Chrétiens au Moyen Age. Albin Michel.

[4] For a general view, see Corbin, Henri, En islam iranien, 4 vol, Nrf Gallimard 1973.

[5] Renan, Ernest, 1883, Islam et la science, Conference at the Sorbonne, 28 March.

[6] It was not not just in Gibbon. Consider popular culture then, as represented in the treatment of Julien Sorel’s familiarity with pagan classics by members of the clergy in Stendhal’s Le rouge et the noir.

[7] Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 2018. Skin in the game: Hidden asymmetries in daily life. Penguin and Random House.

[8] Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, Religion, Violence, Tolerance & Progress: Nothing to do with Theology, Medium, October 2020.

[9] Maalouf, A., 2009. Le dérèglement du monde. Grasset.

[10] Veyne, Paul. Did the Greeks believe in their myths?: An essay on the constitutive imagination. University of Chicago Press, 1988.

[11] Gettier, Edmund L., 1963, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, Analysis, 23(6): 121–123.

[12] Armstrong, Karen, 2009. The case for God. Random House.

[13] Ken Binmore, 2011, Rational Decisions (The Gorman Lectures in Economics, 3rd Edition

[14] In my field of probabilistic decision-making, to be irrational is to violate some rules of intransivity, even then –and an irrational market is one in which transactions guarantee a loss.

[15] See N N Taleb, “The Opiate of the Middle Classes”, Edge, 2010.

[16] Read, R. and Taleb, N.N., 2014. Religion, heuristics and intergenerational risk-management. Econ Journal Watch, 11(2), pp.219–226.

[17] Maier, M., Bartoš, F., Stanley, T.D., Shanks, D.R., Harris, A.J. and Wagenmakers, E.J., 2022. No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(31).

[18] Taleb, N.N., 2019. Fooled by Correlation: Common Misinterpretations in Social ‘Science’. Preprint.

[19] Taleb, N.N., 2019, IQ is a pseudoscientific swindle.

[20] “Nous avons seulement voulu faire remarquer qu’il n’y a point de religion sans mystères; ce sont eux qui, avec le sacrifice, constituent essentiellement le culte” Later : “Quelle religion dans l’antiquité n’a pas perdu son influence morale en perdant ses prêtres et ses sacrifices ?”

On Christianity was originally published in INCERTO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Clearly Covid affects the old, disproportionately. But so do practically almost all other ailments. A simple fact of life, in a population, it is the old that die disproportionally of all causes.

If you look at the force of mortality of the population, you would notice that Covid reduces life expectancy across the board in proportion to people’s mortality, an effect at starts before middle age.

Now the numbers in the graph represent the boost in mortality for all citizens over the period concerned (U.S. fatalities represents about 800K and counting, not taking into account a potential underestimation by ~200K). Now this represents the mortality boost after all mitigating measures, which includes travel restrictions, quarantines, lockdowns, vaccines, isolation, masks, etc. Nor does the graph above show the delayed effects of morbidity. Recall that only 48 million U.S. citizens have been reportedly affected so far. Should the entire population be infected (what some ignorant idiots call “herd immunity”), the effect would potentially be multiplied by >5 (or, taking into account the underestimation of cases, perhaps >3).

Now if we were to compute the effect on life expectancy, note that the effect acts across the board: a 30 year old loses more than 50 years of life, an 80 y.o. loses about a decade, etc.

Unconditional Eugenics

The inconsistency is as follows.

If Covid is an old person problem, deserving to be ignored on that account, let’s treat cardiology, oncology, urology, and most of internal medicine in the same manner.

The “old person problem” related to Covid becomes effectively an argument of unconditional eugenics, unconditional senicide/geronticide. The main trait in civilized society is to protect the weak: Ancient Mediterraneans gave a higher status to the elderly (senators). The same with almost every society that is not decaying.

The same people who advocate senicide fail to get counterfactuals right. For instance, just as one legislator one day announced that airplane checks were redundant (and costly) because there had been no recent terrorist incidents, many are arguing about mitigating measures on ground that fewer people have been dying on Covid.

Golden Rule (Dynamic) Argument

Another problem young psychopaths don’t get is that the way society is built is via dynamic not static reasoning. As I keep writing in the Incerto, a certain class of people (usually involved in technology) affected with Black Swan blindness have a mental disorder making them ignore that things move. A 30 y.o. is not going to be frozen in complete youth and (civilized) societies have been organized around intergenerational commitments: you treat the current elderly the way you would like to be treated when you grow older. For even psychopaths will be older some day.

It is not about a single event (this pandemic) but all future pandemics, including the one that will hit when you are older. Why is it so difficult to grasp that by killing seniors, you reduce your own life expectancy ?

No, Covid 19 is not an old person problem was originally published in INCERTO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Santa Marina — Karl Popper — Herman Hesse’s Sidharta — Mutua Muli — Porsche’s no substitute

Santa Marina

In my ancestral village in the Northern Levant, on top of a hill, stands a church dedicated to Santa Marina. Marina is a local saint, though, characteristically, some other traditions claim her –such as Bithynia or other Anatolian provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Marina grew up in a wealthy family, in the fifth century of our era. After the death of her mother, her father decided to turn his back to civil existence and embrace a life of monasticism. His aim was to spend the rest of his life in a cell carved in the rocks, in the Connubium (Qannubin) valley, at the base of Mount Lebanon, about eight miles from my village. Marina insisted on joining him and faked being a boy, Marinos.

About a decade later, after the death of her father, a visiting Roman soldier impregnated the daughter of a local innkeeper and instructed her to accuse the defenseless father Marinos of having committed the deed. The innkeeper’s daughter and her family complied, fearing retaliation by the Roman soldiers.

Marina took the blame –yet she did not need a tough litigator, to prove her innocence. She refrained from revealing her biological gender, to remain true to her monkhood identity and what she perceived to be the holiness of her mission. So Marina was forced to raise the child, and to make penitence for an act she never committed, she lived for a decade the life of a beggar outside the walls of the monastery.

Marina faced daily contempt by her peers and the local community. Yet she stood firm, never giving into the temptation to reveal the truth.

After she died prematurely, her gender was revealed during the purification rituals. The iniquity of the accusers was exposed posthumously, and she was venerated into Greek Orthodox sainthood.

The story of Hagia Marina shows us another variety of heroism. It is one thing to commit spontaneous grandiose acts of courage, risk one’s life for the sake of a grand cause, become a hero in battle, drink the hemlock for the sake of the philosophical death, become a martyr by standing tall while being maimed by lions in the Roman Coliseum. But it is much, much harder to persevere with no promise of vindication, while living the daily grind of humiliation by one’s peers. Acute pain goes away, dull pain is vastly harder to bear, and vastly more heroic.

Spitz

I have known Mark Spitznagel for long enough (more than two decades), enough to remember that he was once, briefly, a vegetarian, perhaps after reading Herman Hesse’s Sidharta in which the protagonist claims: “I can think, I can wait, I can fast”. My suggestion to follow the Greek Orthodox fast, where one is vegan two thirds of the year (and aggressively carnivore on the other third, mostly Sundays and holidays), failed to convince. Perhaps I should try again.

He finds ways to furtively inflict his musical tastes on his co-workers (Mahler, mainly, with performances by Von Karajan) and in the early days, as in a ritual, the conversations used to start and end with Karl Popper and central (Black Swan) asymmetries in the scientific method. There is this insistence that we are not in the business of trading, but partaking of an intellectual enterprise, that is, both applying proper inference and probability theory to the business world and, without any modesty, improving these fields according to feedback from markets. And there is all this German terminology, such as Gedankenexperiment. I suspect that there was a nonrandom geography of origin for the authors and topics that have invade the office: pre-war Vienna and its Weltanschauung.

Spitz has always been hardheaded; perhaps a good excuse is that it came with a remarkable clarity of mind. I must reveal that while I am far more diplomatic and less obstinate in person than I am in print, he is the exact reverse, though he hides it remarkably well to outsiders, say journalists and other suckers. He even managed to fool the author Malcolm Gladwell who covered us in the New Yorker into thinking that he would be one breaking up a fight at a bar while I would be one to initiate it.

The atmosphere of the office has been playfully unique. Visitors are usually confused by the sprawl of mathematical equations on the board, thinking our main edge is only mathematical. No. Both Mark and I were pit traders before doing quantitative stuff. While our work has been based on detecting mathematical flaws in existing finance models, our edge has been linked to having been in the pit and understanding the centrality of calibration, fine-tuning, execution, orderflow and transaction costs.

Remarkably, people who have skin in the game, that is, self-made successful people with their own money at risk (say a retired textile importer or a former shopping center developer), get it right away. On the other hand the neither-this-nor-that MBA in finance with year-end evaluation filed by the personnel department needs some helping hand –they can neither connect to the intuitions nor to the mathematics. At the time when I met Mark, we both were at the intersection of pit trading and novel branches of probability theory (such as Extreme Value Theory), an intersection that at the time (and still, presently) included no more than two persons.

Mutua Muli

Now what was the dominant idea to emerge?

There are activities with remote payoff and no feedback that are ignored by the common crowd.

With the associated corollary:

Never underestimate the effect of absence of feedback on the unconscious behavior and choices of people.

Mark kept using the example of someone playing piano for a long time with no improvement (that is, hardly capable of performing chopsticks) yet persevering; then, suddenly, one day, impeccably playing Chopin or Rachmaninoff.

No, it is not related to modern psychology. Psychologists discuss the notion of deferred payoff and the inability to delay one’s gratification as a hindrance. They hold that people who prefer a dollar now versus two in the future will eventually fare poorly in the course of life. But this is not at all what Spitz’s idea is about, since you do not know whether there might be a payoff at the end of the line, and, furthermore, psychologists are shoddy scientists, wrong almost all the time about almost all the things they discuss. The idea that delayed gratification confers some socio-economic advantage to those who defer was eventually debunked. The real world is a bit different. Under uncertainty, you must consider taking what you can now, since the person offering you two dollars in one year versus one today might be bankrupt then (or serving a jail sentence).

So what this idea is about isn’t delayed gratification, but the ability to operate without external gratification –or rather, with random gratification. Have the fortitude to live without promises.

Hence the second corollary:

Things that are good but don’t look good must have some edge.

The latter point allows she or he who is perseverant and mentally equipped to do the right thing with an endless reservoir of suckers.

Never underestimate people’s need to look good in the eyes of others. Scientists and artists, in order to cope with the absence of gratification, had to create such a thing as prizes and prestige journals. These are designed to satisfy the needs of the nonheroics to look good on the occasion. It does not matter if your idea is eventually proved right, there are intermediary steps in between that can be won. So “research” will be eventually gamed into some brand of nonresearch that looks cosmetically like research. You publish in a “prestige” journal and you are done, even if the full idea never materializes in the future. The game creates citation rings and clubs in fields like academic finance and economics (with no tangible feedback) where one can BS endlessly and collect accolades by peers.

For instance the theory of portfolio construction (or the associated “risk parity”) à la Markowitz requires correlations between assets to be both known and nonrandom. You remove these assumptions and you have no case for portfolio construction (not counting other, vastly more severe flaws, such as ergodicity, discussed in this book). Yet one must have no knowledge of the existence of computer screens and no access to data to avoid noticing that correlations are, if anything, not fixed, changing randomly. People’s only excuse for using these models is that other people are using these models.

And you end up with individuals who know practically nothing, but with huge resumés (a few have Nobel prizes). These citation rings or circular support groups were called mutua muli by the ancients: the association of mutually-respecting mules.

Cost-Effective Risk Mitigation

Most financial and business returns come from rare events –what happens in ordinary times is hardly relevant for the total. Financial models have done just the opposite. A fund miscalled Long Term Capital Management that blew up in 1998 was representative of such decorated mutua muli misunderstanding. The Nobel-decorated academics proved in a single month the fakeness of their models. Practically everyone in the 1980s, particularly after the crash of 1987, must have known it was quackery. However, most if not all financial analysts exhibit the clarity of mind of a New York sewer after a long weekend, which explains how the mutua muli can take hold of an entire industry.

Indeed the investment world is populated by analysts who, while using patently wrong mathematics, managed to look good and cosmetically sophisticated but eventually harm their clients in the long run. Why? because, simply, it is OPM (“other people’s money”) they are risking while the returns is theirs –again absence of skin in the game.

Steady returns (continuous ratification) comes along with hiding tail risks. Banks lost more money in two episodes, 1982 and 2008, than they made in the history of banking –but managers are still rich. They claimed that the standard models were showing low risk when they were sitting on barrels of dynamite –so we needed to destroy these models as tools of deception.

This risk transfer is visible in all business activities: corporations end up obeying the financial analyst dictum to avoid tail insurance: in their eyes, a company that can withstand storms can be inferior to one that is fragile to the next slight downturn or rise in interest rates, if the latter’s earning per share exceed the former’s by a fraction of a penny!

So the tools of modern finance helped create a “rent seeking” class of people whose interest diverged from those of their clients –and ones who get eventually bailed out by taxpayers.

While the financial rent seekers were clearly the enemies of society, we found actually worse enemies: the imitators.

For, at Universa, Spitz built a structure that tail-hedged portfolios, hence insulated him from the need for delayed random gratification. As introduced (and formulated) in Safe Haven, risk mitigation needs to be “cost-effective” (i.e., it should raise your wealth), and to do that it needs to mitigate the risks that matter, not the risks that don’t.

It was the birth of tail risk hedging as an investable asset class. Tail risk hedging removed the effect of the nasty Black Swan on portfolios; cost effective tail risk hedging obliterating all the other forms of risk mitigation. Accordingly, the idea grew on people and a new category was born. This led to a legion of imitators –those very same mutua muli persons who had previously been fooled by modern finance tools, finding a new thing to sell.

Universa proved the following: not only there is no substitute to tail risk hedging, but, when it comes to tail-risk hedging, simply –as per the boast in the Porsche advertisement — there is no substitute.

For when you go from a principle to execution, things are much more complicated: the output is simple to the outsider, the process is hard seen from the inside. Indeed, it takes years of study and practice, not counting natural edges and understanding of the payoffs and probabilistic mechanisms.

For I said earlier that Mark’s edge came from pit trading and a natural (non contrived) understanding of the mathematics of tails. Not quite. His edge has been largely behavioral and my description of hardheaded was an understatement. Perhaps the most undervalued attribute for humans is dogged, obsessive, boring, discipline: in more than two decades, I never saw him once deviate a micro-inch from a given protocol.

This is his monumental f*** you to the investment industry.

Safe Heaven was originally published in INCERTO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.