When Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote The Black Swan, he was talking about the type of events that show up uninvited and rearrange the furniture of the world before anyone has a chance to say, “Wait, what just happened?” He was describing those moments that seem impossible until they happen, and once they do, we scramble to explain them, to tame them with hindsight, to make them fit the stories we already believe about how things work. The grand illusion of predictability is the idea that the future is just a more extended version of the past, and if we chart the line far enough, we’ll see what’s coming. But that’s not how life works, and certainly not how politics works.
I’ve come to believe we live inside a fragile arrangement of myths and assumptions about order, reason, and control, all of which feel solid right up until they collapse. We call it progress, or stability, or even democracy, but those words can become lullabies, singing us to sleep while the foundations shift beneath us.
The Day the System Shook
I still remember watching January 6 unfold — the television images of people flooding the steps of the U.S. Capitol, shouting, waving flags, climbing walls that were never meant to be climbed. It looked surreal, like a movie about another country’s collapse, except it wasn’t another country. It was ours. For years, we’d told ourselves that America was exceptional, that the system could withstand anything, that elections were sacred and transitions peaceful. Then, one afternoon, those comforting assumptions shattered.
Since then, we’ve spent years dissecting that day, writing our think pieces, forming our panels, and telling ourselves that we saw it coming. But that’s Taleb’s point. We didn’t. We can’t. We only convince ourselves we did afterward because the truth — that we are not in control — is too much to bear. The storm didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from within. The anger, the misinformation, the loss of shared reality — all of it had been gathering like static in the air, waiting for the right spark.
The Fragile Illusion of Stability
We’re still pretending our institutions are stronger than they are. We talk about checks and balances as if they’re sacred geometry, perfectly measured and eternally self-correcting. But that illusion of permanence is what keeps us from tending to what matters: the fragile trust that holds all of it together.
Truth has become negotiable. Patriotism has become a costume people wear when it suits them. Whole communities now live inside echo chambers that make them feel powerful but leave them blind to reality. The danger isn’t just the next violent outburst or authoritarian drift. It’s the quiet decay of civic imagination, the shrinking of empathy, the casual acceptance that this is just how things are now.
The Black Swan doesn’t always announce itself with a crash. Sometimes it’s a slow, steady unraveling — a frayed thread that nobody bothers to mend until the whole fabric falls apart.
My Father Taught Me to Tend
My father was an avid gardener during my boyhood in rural Arkansas. Although I never mastered what he tried to teach me, something about what he said has stayed with me. He said that if you plant something, you must care for it every day. You can’t just drop seeds in the dirt and walk away. You must watch for the weeds, water when the sun burns too hot, and protect the roots when the cold sets in.
I think about that when I look at the state of our nation. We planted democracy, but somewhere along the way, we stopped tending it. We assumed it would grow on its own, as if the soil didn’t need care. And now the weeds are everywhere — greed, cynicism, conspiracy, apathy. We still act surprised when they overtake the garden, as though the neglect wasn’t ours.
The Black Swan, in this sense, isn’t just a surprise event. It’s what happens when we ignore what’s dying right in front of us. Fragility grows in the places we refuse to see.
What We’ve Forgotten
I’ve lived long enough to know that every institution, whether it’s a church or a government, eventually forgets its reason for being if people stop telling the truth. I’ve seen it happen in sanctuaries where people prayed loudly but loved quietly, and in political halls where leaders spoke of unity while feeding division. We worship control. We love the illusion that we can predict and prevent everything. But the world keeps reminding us otherwise.
The pandemic was a Black Swan that humbled the whole planet. The attack on the Capitol was another, this time born from our own arrogance. And every time we respond with denial or defensiveness, we make ourselves weaker for the next event. Taleb says we should build systems that are “antifragile” — not merely resistant to shock but strengthened by it. That’s wisdom we could use right now. Instead, we cling to the fantasy that things will go back to normal. But “normal” is gone. It’s been gone for a long time.
What Comes Next
If there’s hope — and I believe there is — it lies not in prediction but in preparation. It’s in the small acts of honesty and compassion that make communities less brittle. It’s in the choice to see truth as sacred and not optional. It is humility, the kind that admits we don’t have all the answers but keeps asking the right questions anyway.
I am thinking about my father’s garden. I can still smell the soil, still hear the scrape of his hoe breaking the dirt clods, still feel the quiet faith that something good could grow there if we cared enough to protect it. That’s the kind of faith we need in our politics — not blind optimism, not nostalgia for some lost golden age, but the steady work of tending what’s real.
We can’t stop the next Black Swan from coming. But we can build a world that doesn’t crumble when it does. We can prepare the soil, tell the truth, and keep the faith that the improbable doesn’t have to destroy us. Sometimes, our faith is the only thing that keeps us awake when it is much simpler to just go to sleep and stay that way. But the salvaging of our Republic will depend on those of us who make a conscious decision to stay woke, (I use that word intentionally and proudly embracing its original denotation and rejecting its recent disparaging connotations) even if it means pulling some “all-nighters” on occasion.
Image: Pamela Reynoso
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