{"id":34592,"date":"2023-12-09T17:24:51","date_gmt":"2023-12-10T01:24:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=34592"},"modified":"2023-12-09T17:24:51","modified_gmt":"2023-12-10T01:24:51","slug":"we-know-the-best-of-us-did-not-return","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/we-know-the-best-of-us-did-not-return\/","title":{"rendered":"“We Know the Best of Us Did Not Return”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Controversy<\/strong><\/p>\n

To say that Nassim Taleb\u2019s book, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder<\/em>, is highly controversial is an understatement. Some have read his book and his prior two books, The Black Swan<\/em> and Fooled by Randomness<\/em>, and found Antifragile<\/em> disappointing and sometimes contradictory to his earlier works. Then, a select group thinks he is \u201cpretentious, judgmental, self-indulgent\u201d[1]<\/a> and more. Therefore, they regard the book as exhausting. Still, others found that the book offered some insights into how we should view current systems and our personal lives and learn how to become antifragile. For the remainder of the blog, I will highlight a few lessons from his work and then apply my interpretation of the antifragile lessons to two critical and complex issues facing us today – the U.S. healthcare system and the Church.<\/p>\n

Four Lessons<\/strong><\/p>\n

I learned four lessons about Taleb\u2019s work from various sources. The first lesson is that antifragile things benefit from chaos.[2]<\/a> Chaos or unpredictable events cause those things, think of antique China, to break and hence are classified as fragile. No matter how much care and attention is given to the antique China, it will remain breakable. However, antifragile things require less care when chaos strikes. The second lesson is that antifragile activities may be unusual now, but they will be beneficial in the future.[3]<\/a> The most apparent type of example is exercise. In his article, \u2018Teaching and Learning from an Antifragile Perspective\u2019 on page 116, the author discussed his son learning judo. The judo lesson is taught by doing, and the participants learn to react and adapt to different moves while growing physically more robust. Thirdly, predictability and consistency create fragile systems.[4]<\/a> I\u2019m reminded of our educational system and its continued use of predictable educational models that demonstrate they are not working. Students are less and less prepared to tackle the world and certainly not ready for the potential chaos and upheaval we may experience in the next decade. Again, the author in \u2018Teaching and Learning\u2019 recommends that school systems adopt methods to help students prepare for emergent challenges by teaching students\u2019 personal agency, focusing on the ability to critically assess, adjust, and make wise choices over time.[5]<\/a> The fourth lesson is that a fragile system composed of many interconnected parts learns to evolve and adapt by discarding weaker parts and may even mutate.[6]<\/a> In doing so, it becomes stronger and antifragile.<\/p>\n

Fragile Healthcare<\/strong><\/p>\n

Two systems in the U.S. come to mind when I think of the antifragile lessons: the healthcare system and the Church. Both experienced a significant and unpredictable event, as we all did when COVID-19 hit in March 2020. Let\u2019s explore the healthcare system first. For years before COVID-19, there has been a shortage of healthcare workers. For example, in the preceding years leading up to the pandemic in the community college systems in North Carolina, there were thousands of people on the waiting lists to start their medical careers – particularly for LPNs and registered nurses. From the beginning of the pandemic, the healthcare system broke. There was a shortage of staff for obvious reasons. The breakage revealed a system unprepared for a pandemic of this nature for many reasons.\u00a0 Still, the most obvious was that it lacked proper equipment and could not provide specialized care.[7]<\/a> According to the article \u2018Global Challenges to Public HealthCare Systems,\u2019 there has been an influx of mobile apps to streamline and improve telehealth medicine since the pandemic.[8]<\/a> Perhaps other articles recommend more robust measures for the U.S. healthcare system because streamlining telemedicine appears to be putting a Band-Aid on a dam that will likely break again. Today, the fragile healthcare system remains fragile. What lessons did we learn from the pandemic, and how can the system get rid of the parts that did not work, such as unequal access, inability to provide specialized care, and broken medical supply chains? The healthcare system has been unable to adapt and grow stronger to deliver quality, specialized treatment based on ethnicity, and equal access to (affordable) medical care to those in need. Instead, it has adapted to grow bottom-line profits.<\/p>\n

Fragile Church<\/strong><\/p>\n

The second institutional system I\u2019m reminded of is the Church. We know that during COVID-19, there was a severe drop in church attendance. However, Pew Research and other studies demonstrate that Church attendance was declining.[9]<\/a> Many churches closed for good during the pandemic, but the closings were already happening before the pandemic.[10]<\/a> Throughout the pandemic, some churches quickly adjusted, went to online services and were able to keep their doors open. Since the pandemic, in-person church attendance has decreased compared to the pre-pandemic levels. Many churches, ours, for example, have continued providing online services in addition to in-person services. But the real challenge is for the Church to recognize what parts are no longer working and begin to adapt or mutate. Responding with lukewarm, predictable changes, such as offering hybrid services, only weaken the Church. The hybrid services have a short-term benefit – but is that option keeping leaders from treating the symptom(s)? What will it take for the Church to become antifragile? One can argue that the Church institutions are still intact. Indeed, they are, and perhaps that is the issue.\u00a0I recognize that some would say that \u201ccalling for a radical departure from institutions is analogous to large scale social engineering\u2026it calls for a knowledge we do not yet possess.\u201d[11]<\/a><\/p>\n

I will respond to this thought of social re-engineering in my closing.<\/p>\n

Closing<\/strong><\/p>\n

My final thought is this: building a bunker to escape the calamity seems to be a best practice. Once the storm has passed, people emerge to rebuild what once existed. At what point will repeated shocks break the individual or system so that rebuilding is no longer viable?[12]<\/a> As Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl noted of his time in Auschwitz: \u201cWe have come back\u2026we know the best of us did not return.\u201d[13]<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Michiko Kakutani, \u2018You Are All Soft! Embrace Chaos!,\u2019 New York Times<\/em> (December 16, 2012): 1, https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/12\/17\/books\/antifragile-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Top Seven Lessons, ANTI FRAGILE (by Nassim Nicholas Taleb) Book Summary, (August 23, 2023): 0:42, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=hYmS2gfw0TU<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid., 2:37<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Ibid., 3:22<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Bretton Polowy, \u2018Teaching and Learning from an Anti-Fragile Perspective,\u2019 Taboo<\/em> 15, no. 1 (Spring, 2016): 114, https:\/\/georgefox.idm.oclc.org\/login?url=https:\/\/www.proquest.com\/scholarly-journals\/teaching-learning-anti-fragile-perspective\/docview\/1789750096\/se-2<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Top Seven Lessons, ANTI FRAGILE (by Nassim Nicholas Taleb) Book Summary, (August 23, 2023): 1:35, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=hYmS2gfw0TU<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Roxanna Filip, Roxanna Puscaelu, Liliana Anchidin-Norocel, Mihai Dimian, \u2018Global Challenges to Public Health Care Systems during COVID-19 Pandemic: A Review of Pandemic Measures and Problems,\u2019 Journal of Personalized Medicine<\/em>, vol. 12, 8 1295. (Aug. 2022): 1, doi:10.3390\/jpm12081295.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Ibid., 1.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Justin Nortey<\/a> And Michael Rotolo<\/a>, \u2018How the Pandemic Has Affected Attendance at U.S. Religious Services,\u2019 Pew Research<\/em>, (MARCH 2023): 5, https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/religion\/2023\/03\/28\/how-the-pandemic-has-affected-attendance-at-u-s-religious-services\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Ibid., 5.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Ryan H. Murphy, \u2018The Unconstrained Vision of Nassim Taleb,\u2019 The Independent Review<\/em>: 19, 3; 19, no. 3 (Winter 2014\/2015): 433. https:\/\/georgefox.idm.oclc.org\/login?url=https:\/\/www.proquest.com\/scholarly-journals\/unconstrained-vision-nassim-taleb\/docview\/1643164506\/se-2<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Bretton Polowy, \u2018Teaching and Learning from an Anti-Fragile Perspective,\u2019 Taboo<\/em> 15, no. 1 (Spring, 2016): 113, https:\/\/georgefox.idm.oclc.org\/login?url=https:\/\/www.proquest.com\/scholarly-journals\/teaching-learning-anti-fragile-perspective\/docview\/1789750096\/se-2<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> Ibid., 113.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Controversy To say that Nassim Taleb\u2019s book, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, is highly controversial is an understatement. Some have read his book and his prior two books, The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, and found Antifragile disappointing and sometimes contradictory to his earlier works. Then, a select group thinks he is \u201cpretentious, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2309],"tags":[2347,2412,2411],"class_list":["post-34592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-doctor-of-leadership","tag-dlgp01","tag-antifragile","tag-taleb","cohort-dlgp01"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34592"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34593,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34592\/revisions\/34593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}