A False Sense of Security
History is just a long story of the unthinkable happening, precedents being broken, and people reading the news with bewilderment and denial.
By Capital Thinking • Issue #1052 • View online
A couple things I’ve been thinking about in the last week:
The world breaks every decade or so.
There are so few exceptions to this it’s astounding.
Surprise, Shock, and Uncertainty
Morgan Housel | The Collaborative Fund Blog:
What Covid-19 and the Ukrainian invasion have in common is that both have happened many times before but westerners considered them relics of history that wouldn’t resurface in their own modern lives. Maybe the common lesson is that there are difficult parts of humanity that can’t be outgrown.
However crazy the world looks, it can get crazier. History is just a long story of the unthinkable happening, precedents being broken, and people reading the news with bewilderment and denial.
“History doesn’t crawl; it leaps,” says Nassim Taleb. The most important events tend to be abrupt, out of the blue, changing the world before people have time to rub their eyes and understand what’s happening.
There is a “shock cycle” for all big news events.
It goes like this:
- Assume good news is permanent.
- Oblivious to bad news.
- Ignore bad news.
- Deny bad news.
- Panic at bad news.
- Accept bad news.
- Assume bad news is permanent.
- Ignore good news.
- Deny good news.
- Accept good news.
- Assume good news is permanent.
In general people have no idea where they are in this cycle until after the fact.
Morgan Housel
What was avoided during those days is probably the most important news event in human history.
But since it’s something that didn’t happen, it’s now just a neglected footnote.
It probably left us with a false sense of security, blind to how dangerous it can be when one or two powerful and often crazy people can hold everyone else hostage.
Photo credit: Morgan Sessions on Unsplash