THE BLACK SWAN
May 25 2019
Unexpressed emotions will never die.
They are buried alive, and will come forth later,
in uglier ways.
– Sigmund
Freud
So, what’s the connection between Sigmund Freud and THE BLACK SWAN? Let me first go to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of the Black Swan, who describes it as follows:
“The Black Swan is first of all an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its concurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”
It’s my contention that the next BLACK SWAN will be the result of plain stupid stubbornness, stemming from repressed feelings.
Human folly is all around us. Stop watching TV, the height of contaminating foolishness, and exercise extreme caution reading newspapers as well. This past week I read an article in the Guardian, where the author wrote that in 1900 life expectance was 45 years. Over the 9 decades she saw almost a doubling of lifespan, and predicted that her grandchildren, given medical progress, would live forever.
That’s the sort of nonsense we constantly read, just as economists talk about perpetual growth in a finite world, equally impossible. Yet we all eat that claptrap, forgetting that nothing is predictable, because we generally are oblivious to the randomness in history, especially now, when the world is beset with immense problems.
Of course, in its well over 400 pages, the BLACK SWAN author never mentions the Bible, which has a number of Black Swan events, such as Adam and Eve, the couple selected to start a new humanity, quite quickly encountering a Black Swan that forever changed the fate of humanity: the simple act of picking a fruit. The flood was another example. The coming of Jesus, the arrival of God in perfect human form, most certainly qualifies as a Black Swan, as will his return, which also will come totally unexpected. The rise of Christianity, the Black Plague, both qualify as Black Swans.
Unexpressed emotions will never die.
They are buried alive, and will come forth later
in uglier ways.
Unexpressed emotions mostly happen on the personal level, with disastrous results, but there also is a collective consciousness, mostly unexpressed as well, affecting us all, differing from continent to continent, from language to language. It takes its form in shared beliefs, ideas, attitudes and knowledge. They are mostly faith-based, faith in permanent progress, blindness to reality and denial of human frailty and sin.
We, the human race persistently cling to false hopes, convinced that in the end all will be well, believing that science will provide an answer, that human intelligence will find a solution, that human ingenuity will get us out of the hole.
These unexpressed emotions have a life of their own, hidden deep in the human psyche, where they are buried alive, but in the end will emerge in ugly ways. When Euripides, 2500 years ago, observed that, “Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate, incurable, in each, the wounds they make,” this also applies to thwarted desires in the wider context. Now that these unexpressed emotions are starting to surface as false and beginning to have detrimental effects on the human race at large, we see the “yellow jackets in France”, the “Trump tragedy” in the USA, and the “ultra-right movement” everywhere. Soon civic obedience may turn to mass disobedience, to hatred and violence, and in the collective may cause wars and revolutions as the future turns ugly.
Frequent Grey Swans.
In terms of Black Swans: today there are multiple predictable perils out there, which could be called “Grey Swans”.
Here are a few examples. A report from the U. N. states that air pollution may be damaging every organ and virtually every cell in the body. These pollutants cause inflammation that then floods through the body, with ultrafine particles being carried into the bloodstream, and result in all sorts of ailments, also affecting the brain cells, reducing intelligence. Air pollution now plays havoc with 90 percent of the world’s population. I call that a Grey Swan.
Then there is famine looming, as there’s a distinct possibility that the world`s food situation will worsen. Excessive rain and floods in the lower Mid-West in the USA, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, spell trouble for the farmers there, unable to work the land. In China there are invasive pests feeding mainly on corn devouring many millions of acres, mostly in the south and southwest and moving northward at an alarming pace.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that the fall armyworm native to tropical and subtropical areas of the Americas, was observed in central and western Africa in early 2016. In addition to corn, the worms feed on over 80 other crops, including rice and millet. “In the absence of natural controls or good management, it can cause significant damage to crops,” said the organization.
And then there is the African swine fever.
The spread of African swine fever (ASF) in Asia is taking a worrisome turn. First reported in northeastern China in August 2018, the highly contagious, often fatal pig disease quickly swept through the country, causing the death or culling of more than 1 million pigs. In recent weeks, it has jumped borders to Vietnam, Cambodia, Mongolia, Hong Kong, and possibly North Korea. Animal health experts agree that the disease will inevitably spread farther. And many of the newly hit countries are even less prepared to deal with ASF than China, they say, which has so far failed to end its outbreaks.
Vietnam and Cambodia “probably do not have the technical abilities to be able to control ASF,” says François Roger, an animal epidemiologist at the French Agricultural Research Center for International Development in Montpellier. He believes the virus will soon surface in Myanmar and Laos which both have an ever weaker infrastructure.
Back to THE BLACK SWAN. Its subtitle is “The impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE”.
Thanks to CLIMATE CHANGE there’s no more such a matter as the highly improbable. Ugi Bardi, an Italian Professor, in his blog, Cassandra`s Legacy, writes: “Human Extinction, an idea whose time had to come”. Hugh McPherson, and many others, all scientists closely following the developments in the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland, predict Short-term Human Extinction, see the greatest danger in the melting of the Permafrost and the consequent release of huge amounts of methane and other gases, causing a sudden spike in Global Heating, and the onset of sudden death of all that lives.
Mainstream news sources and its clients, the automakers and utilities, the politicians and the bureaucrats deny this, and people, more interested in sport scores and lottery outcomes, and struggling daily to keep their heads above water, do not give this the attention it deserves.
Yes, the collective consciousness is in denial, which means that The Black Swan on the horizon will come as a total surprise. Blame this on the media, the frivolity of entertainment, and the reassuring sounds of those in power, whose faith commitment is reaffirmed by the clergy of all faiths in that human cleverness will triumph.
Watching too much TV and reading too many newspapers, and not reading enough Bible passages, lead to mental blindness.
I know, I am a Vox clamantis in deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness, like John the Baptizer 2000 years ago. 85 years ago Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany. This country, the birthplace of Luther, Bach, Goethe, Bismarck, overnight became a nation of barbarians, of the SS, the SD, the Holocaust. I am afraid that a second term of Trump will see a similar development.
The Dirty Thirties are upon us again. The untold trillions of personal, corporate and national debt, so easily created on the computer screen, called into being out of nothing, has become real money in the form of mortgages, junk bonds, shares and stocks, and needs to be repaid. When that is not possible, and it is not possible, the BLACK SWAN of world-wide depression, worse than the 1930’s will be upon us. Taleb in his book writes, “History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.”
The universal access to computers has made us strong believers in information, with Google at our fingertips, and that combined with television has dimmed our minds to knowledge and made us wisdom deficient, so evident in how we treat creation. We set ourselves up like sheep for the slaughter, comparable to turkeys at Thanksgiving. Here’s a quote from THE BLACK SWAN.
“Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race ‘looking out for its best interest’, as a politician would say. On the afternoon before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief”.
That’s the only time Taleb in his book, the BLACK SWAN uses the word belief. It reminds me of Matthew 24 where Jesus, as recorded in verses 38 – 39 tells his followers (and us today), “For in the days before the flood people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them (the sinners) away. That’s how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.”
Peter, in 2 Peter 3, reaffirms this. Verse 10, “For the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear like a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”
So, yes, the Black Swan, the ultimate Black Swan, is approaching. All the signs are out there, becoming more pronounced by the day.
Years ago, just before Hitler came to power, in 1932-33 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, then, at the age of 26-27, and already connected to the university as a theologian with a double doctorate, gave a series of lectures on CREATION AND FALL.
Here’s how he introduced them, “The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end. “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing” (Isaiah 43: 18-19). The new is the real end of the old; the new, however, is Christ. Christ is the end of the old.”
Taleb in his book, the BLACK SWAN, writes that we need a different mentality. So true. “As we cannot push the problem under the rug, we will have to dig deeper into it. We behave as if the Black swan does not exist: human nature is not programmed for Black swans.”
That is also true for the church. Bonhoeffer is not popular there: he is too blunt.
I believe that there is a collective consciousness, mostly unexpressed, affecting us all, differing from continent to continent, from language to language.
With the back to the wall, all of us inwardly know that what we are engaged in cannot last. We repress these feelings, and these unexpressed emotions will come forth later, in uglier ways.
Again Revelation.
In Chapter 16 the bowls of God’s wrath – all human induced – are described. “Next, the fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and it was given power to scorch the people with fire. And the people were scorched by intense HEAT and they cursed the name of God who had authority over these plagues; yet they did NOT REPENT and give him glory.”
Unexpressed emotions will never die.
They are buried alive, and will come forth later,
in uglier ways: THE ULTIMATE BLACK SWAN.
But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? (Malachi 3:2)