Monday Morning Greetings 2025 #40 – The Black Swan (Not the Movie)

The Black Swan (Not the Movie) [1]

I bought a book in the airport: 50 Philosophy Classics from the 50 Classic Series by Tom Butler-Bowdon. My idea was to skim through the summaries of the fifty classics to see if I could recognize a truth that was conceptualized and expressed in an especially inspiring way.

I liked that each classic had an “in a nutshell” summary that enabled me to judge which ones I thought worth reading, sometimes to affirm their conceptions and sometimes to critique them.

For example, “Nicomachean Ethics” by Aristotle seemed interesting: “Happiness comes from what we have rationally decided is good for us over the longer term. Happiness is not pleasure, but a by-product of a meaningful life.”

I found the idea of materialism expressed in “The Ego Trick” by Julian Baggini quite unappealing and not worth reading: “The brain and body provide us with a strong and continuous sense of self, which gives us freedom to create who we are.”

What I did gain while briefly going through the book was more faith in my own tradition. The Vedas teach that knowledge of this world is manifest simultaneously with its creation. It is then channeled and preserved through various lineages of wisdom teachers. To be connected in this way gives one a basic standard to gauge the validity of any philosophical treatise or school. I will try to demonstrate that by analyzing just one of the classics in the book, The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The title of the book and Taleb’s philosophical message come from a particular historical phenomenon that he read about. Until a black swan was sighted by early explorers in Western Australia, people not only assumed that swans were white, but they were, in fact, even defined in that way. From this event Taleb developed an entire theory of events and causality. He postulated that things that happen against all expectations, which he named “black swans”, had an extreme and important impact on history and one’s life. These include anything from the unexpected spread of great ideas and powerful religions to dynamic historical events that no one foresaw, such as the rise of Hitler or the spread of the Internet. Accepting this fact of randomness as it applies to the world and one’s life rather than a strictly causal or linear perspective, he concluded, is the first step in succeeding in the world. Here is how 50 Classics sums up “in a nutshell” the import of The Black Swan:

“We want to make the world an orderly place, but the frequency of truly unexpected events should tell us that we really don’t know what causes things.”

Taleb therefore concludes, “black swan logic ‘makes what you don’t know far more relevant that what you do know’, because it is the unexpected that shapes our lives.”

Now a brief analysis of The Black Swan from the perspective of Vedic teachings, starting with the part of Taleb’s teaching that I found reasonably congruent with what you would find in the Vedas — the obvious weakness we can recognize in conditioned human psychology.

Taleb saw that we desire to impose order and control in the world beyond our capacity to do so. Living in that way makes one fearful and frustrated. In other words, to hope to see the world as linear and predictable, and in accord with the way we want it to be, is a recipe for disaster. I think Taleb got this right. Unless we temper our hope for a world that conforms to our desires, we will always live in uncertainty and disappointment. And we will be sorely unprepared for the unpredictable.

While I think Taleb’s insight is important, Vedic perspective gives much more depth. While the world is certainly beyond our control, he is wrong when he says that the world moves haphazardly and without meaning. The Vedic perspective teaches us that unexpected events, while far beyond our control, do not happen randomly. They are the result of the law of karma. They come to teach us important lessons essential to elevating us to a higher level of realization. I like how Rumi put it:

“When God is digging a ditch to throw us in, he is actually making a well to quench our thirst.”

And that was my takeaway from flipping through 50 Philosophy Classics from the 50 Classic Series by Tom Butler-Bowdon. Connection to traditions of true wisdom, and certainly the Bhagavat philosophy, gives us the tool of understanding to put into context all philosophical speculations, and certainly The Black Swan (not the movie).

[1] When I review Monday Morning Greetings from many years ago, I can see how much my writing has improved as has the quality of the editing. Occasionally I will rewrite and edit old Monday Morning Greetings in a way that even those who have read them before will find them almost new. This one is from March 2, 2020.