Liberating Trump’s Good Instincts From the Rest

April 21, 2025 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Last week, I promised to write about what thoughtful and concerned citizens can do to confront the chaos and damage our president’s actions have caused in only three short months.

The first thing is to acknowledge that Trump is, in fact, our president. More than half of the Americans who voted last November chose him over Harris. Whether you like that result or not, you can’t buy into our system of government and also say: “He’s not my president.” A loyal opposition works with the reality that it’s got, while trying its best to turn today’s misadventures into tomorrow’s possibilities.

That better future continues by admitting that through either choice or neglect, all Americans own—in the sense of “having responsibility for”—the messes that we’re in today. However much the child in us wishes otherwise, it’s not for some other mommy or daddy to clean up.

That’s because anyone who has been paying attention, even once in awhile, could have seen much of this coming and done more to stop it before it got this far. After all, Trump has never stopped talking about his priorities, not even once! And if we needed it in writing, Project 2025 turned his wish-list into a widely-disseminated plan. It was just easier to say to ourselves: “that can never happen here,” while ignoring the millions of Americans who were hoping that it would, and the millions more who just wanted some alternative (any alternative) to a grandiose version of senility.

Marching further along, we can keep deploring how Trump is trying to secure the future but not (I think) some of the necessary changes that he also wants to make, indeed that millions of our neighbors feel are necessary too

Yes, it’s offensive watching a Family Strongman joyfully bully weaker parties (states like Canada, leaders like Zelensky, universities like Columbia) while extorting “whatever I can get” (as he’s said) in order to become richer and more indispensable himself. But, at the very same time, is he (along with the millions who voted for him) wrong about the drift of our universities towards “one correct point of view,” the need for America to fortify its soft power abroad “by also putting a fist in its velvet glove,” or how too many other nations have taken unfair advantage of our so-called “free trade” policies?

In other words, if we truly want to turn today’s lemon of a regime into tomorrow’s lemonade, we’ll be more likely to succeed by OWNING mistakes that continue to give Trump credibility with his non-MAGA base (like all those farmers on the brink of insolvency who still want to give his trade policies a chance), while SHOWING that we’re big enough to admit “where we got it wrong” before proposing better ways (than Trump’s vindictiveness, extortion and chaos) to fix some long, festering problems.

In other words, if Biden is the thesis and Trump the antithesis in an over-simplified hypothetical, the future will belong to those who admit the errors and find the truths in both administrations as we pursue a new way forward—or kind of synthesis.

I explored a variation on this theme in a pandemic post called “Higher Winds Are Coming,” at a time that’s (unfortunately) not that dissimilar to the one we’re in today. Confronting contagion, Trump and my trepidation about both, I recounted how I was trying to foster a mindset that was more like the one outlined in “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder,” a book from 10 years before by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Instead of merely being defensive when confronting what feels like danger or chaos, Taleb urged us to play offense by using our agency to gain strength from what’s threatening us or our world view.

This is how Taleb introduces that proposal.

Some things [actually] benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile [which fears, to the point of paralysis, both risk and uncertainty]. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

Acknowledging “the truth” in the position of someone you oppose, and then incorporating “the strength” of some of those insights into your own position, is (I think) much of what Taleb is talking about.

Doing so also robs, say the Family Strongman, of his ability to claim that only he sees “what’s really been going on” because none of his adversaries can admit, let alone agree with him about it.

The following graphic illustrates how the antifragile perspective incorporates some of the strength (or neutralizes some of the harm) of the surrounding chaos in one’s actions going forward.

What follows are 3 instances where some of the observers I admire most are trying to incorporate the strength in certain of Trump’s positions into their own, antifragile perspectives.

1. Trump’s Savaging of American Foreign Policy

My eyes don’t well up when I look at social media clips of compassionate pets, but it’s easy for me to get there when watching a short video of something like this [Ukrainians kneeling at roadsides to honor the passing of their war dead.] So I began the current Trump administration hanging onto every word he tossed around about Ukraine because I feared that America was about to abandon a brave nation on the frontline of a war (that’s also our war) against barbarity.

Unfortunately, my turmoil about this would have found a better outlet than worry if I’d spent more time examining what’s accurate in Trump’s views about this war and the role the U.S. has been playing in it.

Trump is right about Europe’s free-loading since the Cold War ended, and that we should have insisted from the start that every European country (except maybe Moldova and Georgia) play bigger military and financial roles in the defense of their own territory. Trump is also right that Biden’s foreign policy was embarrassingly weak-kneed–almost to the point of encouraging Russia–since Putin quickly learned we were never there to help the Ukrainians win, only to maintain a dehumanizing form of stalemate. So Trump’s saying “Too many lives have been lost [that didn’t have to be lost because of the last administration’s weakness]” also happens to be true.

Of course, none of Trump’s “truths” justify our abandoning Ukraine to Russian domination now, nor our wider retreat from projecting “soft” and “hard” power elsewhere, as the leader of a world-order the U.S. itself was instrumental in shaping. But admitting them alters (for the better) our foreign policies going forward: as in, building partnerships where the burdens of war are shared more equally and never entering a conflict like this in the first place if you’re not prepared to win because of the annihilating consequences for those who are doing the actual fighting.

Bret Stephens, a conservative, former-Republican columnist interviewed in the Times on Thursday indicated that his final “turning point” against Trump was the humiliation of President Zelensky in the Oval Office (“the most incredible kind of discourtesy”), a display that further emboldened Putin “to press the war harder” while revealing “a combination of malice and idiocy almost unique in American history.” Notwithstanding these damnations, Stephens went on to admit that:

those of us who are critics of Trump, who find him at some level vomitous, are better critics when we concede from time to time that he has accomplished something. That not everything is dreadful or idiotic. You have to keep your brain on. And I think that [turning it off]’s the danger for a lot of Trump critics….

Walter Russell Mead, an historian and a columnist at the Wall street Journal has also been more rigorous than most at seeing the valid points Trump has been making (instead of just those he’s been missing), something he did again on Tuesday:

Many critics of Team Trump’s approach bemoan what they see as the collapse of American soft power {like USAID, Voice of America radio, calling out dictators]. Our core advantage against powers like China and Russia, they argue, is our network of alliances, and these alliances depend on America’s reputation for rules-based, pro-democracy and free-trade policies. To lose that reputation through shortsighted, rash actions is to throw away vital assets that took decades of diplomacy to acquire.

They have a point, but so does Mr. Trump. Iron fists work better when sheathed in velvet gloves, but nothing is more useless than a velvet glove without an iron fist. America’s failure to match the growth in Chinese and Russian hard power under President Barack Obama eroded the foundations of world peace even as Mr. Obama electrified European audiences with inspiring speeches. The comforting illusion that soft power is an effective substitute for hard power contributed materially to the generational failures in Western security policy that left the world system so dangerously and so unnecessarily exposed to the ambitions of the revisionists.

Stephens and Mead both recognize that however alarming (or brain extinguishing) Trump’s statecraft might be sometimes, it is even more wrong-headed to offer perspectives on the future that deny what Trump gets right, “truths” that just might keep fewer supporters in his camp once they’re embraced by more of those who are outside of it.

2. Trump’s Vendetta Against Universities

Bret Stephens also challenged this vendetta in the course of his interview, noting how Trump “latched onto the issue of antisemitism on campus, which is real and which I think the left was in denial about to a great extent,” before vehemently objecting to how the president has:

turned a legitimate grievance — and specifically Jewish grievance — into a tool to undermine and potentially destroy a value, which I think is [also] a core Jewish value, which is the value of debate, dissent, reason, inquiry, criticism and so on….

[S]o there is a side of the Jewish population that’s sort of cheering Trump because he seems to have the same enemies, or many of the same enemies, that we do [Stephens is Jewish]. But the methods he’s using to oppose those enemies, we ought to fear.

Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president who also happens to be Jewish, said the following in a Times op-ed on April 3, before Harvard opposed Trump’s threat to block billions of dollars in research funds if the university failed to yield to his demands on “oversight.” Summers is unwavering in opposing Trump’s extortionist attack, but not before acknowledging some uncomfortable truths that the president also believes.

As in most confrontations, the merits in this one are far from one-sided. Critics of elite universities, including Harvard, where I am a professor, are right that they continue to tolerate antisemitism in their midst in a way that would be inconceivable with any other form of prejudice, that they have elevated identity over excellence in the selection of students and faculty, that they lack diversity of perspective, and that they have repeatedly failed to impose discipline and maintain order.

And universities’ insistence that they be entirely left alone by their federal funders rings hollow in light of the enthusiasm with which they greeted micromanagement when they approved of the outcome, such as threats from Washington to withhold funds unless men’s and women’s athletic budgets were equalized.

But the Trump administration is not acting in good faith in its purported antisemitism concerns, nor is it following the law in its approach to universities.

President Trump offered praise to a white-supremacist rally that included chants of ‘Jews will not replace us,’ publicly dined with Holocaust deniers, made common cause with Germany’s Nazi-descendant AfD party and invoked tropes about wealthy Jews. The true motivation behind his attack on universities is suggested by Vice President JD Vance’s declaration that the ‘universities are the enemy.’ Shakedown is the administration’s strategy as it has gone after law firms, federal judges, legislators who disagree with its edicts and traditionally independent arms of the government. [internal links disabled]

So of course, it’s shameful that the Family Strongman is using antisemitism as a pretext to stifle unwelcome dissent from the young and the restless before it even rises (like a tide) against him. But that doesn’t mean our greatest universities should get a “pass” when it comes to the selective intolerances they have fostered against anyone who deviates from “acceptable doctrine”—about Gaza or otherwise. An antifragile perspective about our universities needs to insist that they give themselves a full, internal housecleaning while Trump’s destabalizing assault is still fresh in their minds.

3. Two Things About Tariffs

The real “goods” and “bads” regarding Trump’s tariff barrage have gotten lost in the shuffle of the chaos of their announcement, their “on-again/off-again” nature, and the conflicting voices in the White House that have been “explaining” them to us. The speakers and the listeners all seem confused.

This story should have begun with an explanation about why tariffs are needed in the first place, and why this is a critical objective of the Trump’administration, particularly because of the risks of higher costs and damaged savings that nearly everyone has been either expecting or already experiencing. Moreover, this global tariff initiative was launched at a time when many Americans’ daily experience of their economy finally seemed to be improving in the three months following the election.

I believe that in light of our country’s need to re-shore certain essential manufacturing (the soup-to-nuts processing of rare earth metals comes to mind), some level of across-the-board tariffs and a re-calibrating with China are, in fact, necessary. (You might check out this excellent discussion [via a paywall-free link] between economist Oren Cass—a regular voice on this page—and Ross Duothat of the New York Times for Cass’s explanation). So once again, Trump has managed to conflate a policy move that’s sound at its core with horrible execution and even worse statements about his motivations.

Some of the worst damage may have been caused by how our Family Strongman managed to make a predatory China look good by comparison to nearly every other nation that has been impacted. Here’s Yaroslav Trofimov writing in the Journal last weekend:

Beijing’s message amid this crisis is that China represents the best hope for ‘win-win cooperation’ and global prosperity, in contrast with what the Chinese foreign ministry calls America’s ‘unilateral bullying practice.’ Countries around the world are skeptical of the Chinese Communist Party’s intentions, but the language of respectful cooperation is far more appealing than Washington’s demands to pay tribute—as when Trump said this week that ‘countries are calling us up, kissing my ass’ to make a deal on tariffs.

Once again, he’s been sabotaging a perfectly good instinct with Godfather-inspired messaging. Among other things, an inherently more robust trade initiative would involve implementing more tailored protectionism in a far more respectful and collaborative way.

The bottom-line in this discussion is this. If the president’s critics want to succeed (and I thing we do), they can’t aim to throw the entire Trump-baby out with his fetid bathwater. He gets it right sometimes, and a legion of his supporters and “persuadables” instinctively sense the accuracy of his judgments when it comes to matters like foreign policy, universities and tariffs. As a result, his judgments, when valid, need to be built into any opposition’s plan for America.

A failure to do so will likely cause even the best among them to fail.

+ + +

What I’d call “A Gate to the Future” (as seen up top) is care of @miguelmarquezoutside. I’ll see you next week.

This post was adapted from my April 20, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The 2024 Super Bowl Ads Totally Missed America

February 27, 2024 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

One of the conclusions that might be drawn from last week’s post is that Americans aren’t nearly as generous as they used to be. Why? Because we’re no longer able to muster “a celebrity soup” of sponsors behind well-meaning causes like “famine relief in the horn of Africa.”

These days, if the recent Super-Bowl ads are any indication, we’d rather deploy the likes of Beyonce and Jennifer Lopez to sell stuff like Verizon plans, Dunkin’ Donuts (and themselves, of course)—while we’re presumably basking in the stun-guns of their celebrity. I suppose the theory is that we’ll feel better about ourselves eating a donut because a goddess like J-Lo eats them too. (Yeah, right) But since a minority of viewers are susceptible to delusions like this, they keep serving them up to the rest of us.

“Viewer identification” with products like these should be making the Super Bowl the most powerful sales vehicles of the year. But beyond the faux “feel like a celebrity too” experience, shouldn’t marketing success depend on how many of us are actually buying more donuts or wireless plans because of them? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this year’s Super-Bowl ads totally failed to boost consumption if “more” was actually their mission.

But it might have been otherwise if advertisers had plugged into the far deeper currents that are running through Americans these days.

In this country I remember when there were social institutions (other than the National Football League) competing for our allegiance and attention.

But we already know that fewer of us are going to churches and other houses of worship every weekend. And beyond the social justice warriors and conspiracy theorists, the vast political middle no longer affiliates very strongly with either political party, whatever the draw of a marquee huckster and his supposed foil. Local organizations formed around shared work, heritage or region are struggling for members when they’re surviving at all. On the other hand, American sports—which always appealed to some—have gained near-monopoly status when it comes to belonging to something bigger and (so we’re told) more important than ourselves. That means an event like the Super Bowl becomes a kind of national ritual with its own priests, altars and a stadium full of true believers that get trotted out for us to share in on an annual basis.

These days when considering the faces that we use in public, it looks like a lot of Americans might be fans before we’re anything else. And if your team happens to melt-down after early signs of greatness (like my team in Philly did this year) well, then our fandom easily shifts to, say, the incumbent Super Bowl champions or this game’s underdogs, as well as to the famous faces that dot the stands, the half-time spectacle, and the ads that hold us captive in our seats for 3+ hours.

With 120 million pairs of eyes glued to their Super Bowl screens on February 11, it’s fairly easy to make the case that National League football (and its Big Game in particular) provides the town square or national house of worship where the greatest share of Americans gather during the fall and winter months, culminating in a kind of High Holy Day when February finally rolls around.

So for the marketers—convincing their clients to pay $7m for every half-minute of product promotion—the ads themselves provide a kind of “read” or “diagnosis” about Who (exactly) the ad creators Think We Are these days, and therefore, How Best to Reach Into Our Hearts as well as Our Wallets before we’re on to the next riviting visual.

Sadly this year, neither the viewer diagnosis nor the sad parade of ads that it spawned hit their intended mark.

_{Ben Affleck crashes Jennifer Lopez’s party, but only Matt Damon seems embarrassed by the ridiculousness in what, we’ve been told, was one of the Super Bowl’s most beloved ads.}

In an op-ed she wrote around 2023’s Super Bowl, WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan described her view of its advertisements this way.

I have been watching these ads closely for 40 years, for fun but also to hear the inner dialogue, the sound of a nation talking to itself as it sells things to itself, which, in America, has always been about as intimate an act as there is. [emphasis mine]

Indeed, even more so than sex.

Noonan knows this because she’s been a kind of marketer herself, first deploying her skill with words and their particular heartstrings to build affiliation with her former boss (the already kindly-sounding Ronald Reagan) when he was president and she was one of his speech-writers.

What the marketer in Noonan saw last year was a Super Bowl audience made up mostly of Americans still suffering a pandemic hang-over, experiencing new assaults from inflation at the grocery store and gas pump, and increasingly worried about the arc of their day-to-day lives. So why, she wondered, were the ads she’d just seen “jittery, rather cruel and cynical—Super Bowl ads for a nation of losers.” She thought “the ad makers must have asked themselves: What does America want? And answered: dumb, loud, depthless and broken.”

It wasn’t at all the audience she was seeing last year, and certainly not what she thought any of us needed as a sales pitch. Noonan began, rather grandly, with how she knows that the stupid and cynical approach “for an intimate act” like an ad pitch doesn’t work:

I’m here to say I’ve met America and that’s not what they want. What they want is ‘Help me live, help my kids live, help me feel something true.’

To those who made the commercials and pay for them: Advertising is a great and honorable craft, at its best even an art. But you can’t do it well if you have no regard for and barely even know your audience, which is your country. Why don’t you go into another line of work? Why not go to a nonprofit and dislike America from there? Or go into politics. [again, the italics are mine]

That’s not to say that some percentage of Super Bowl viewers aren’t dumb, loud, depthless” and maybe even “broken;” they surely are. But Noonan’s sympathies were going towards that “silent majority” that no one ever seems to be listening to or trying to meet where they live—the folks that Reagan (and even Bill Clinton after him) kept zeroing in on with their political-animal instincts.

We were worried last year, in need of assurance and a genuine sense of solidarity with our fellow Americans instead of some juvenile, celebrity-driven kind.

So did this year’s Super Bowl ad creators similarly miss the audience mark?

Yes they did: and even more spectacularly than they did last year.

_{Beyonce, trying to be inoffensive as Bar-bey, in her self-promoting ad for Verizon.}

According to a quick post-mortem I saw called “Super Bowl Ads Launch Celebrity Blitz with Goal of Playing It Safe”:

The Super Bowl ads on Sunday variously appealed to America’s sweet tooth, pleaded for tolerance and sought redemption for Bud Light [after its transgender promoter led to a customer boycott]. But most shared one thing: marketers’ even deeper-than-usual desire to avoid offending anyone.

It certainly seemed true given “the safety” of the humor in last weekend’s ads. According to a marketing prof at the Kellogg School of Management, nobody was “pushing the edge of these jokes” or “hinting at anything remotely controversial.”

A related story about the Uber Eats’ ad we eventually saw demonstrated how thin-skinned (as well as simple-minded) the advertising industry thinks we’ve become. This food delivery service was apparently:

chastised for a joke in its commercial, which it [had] released online before the game, that showed a man asking, ‘There’s peanuts in peanut butter?’ while breaking out in an allergic reaction. [Well] food allergy advocacy group FARE criticized the ad, saying it featured ‘inappropriate use of humor depicting food allergies.’ FARE said Uber Easts had told the group that the commercial would run without the allergy reference [and] by Sunday, Uber Easts had posted a version of its ad on YouTube with the joke removed.

What Uber Eats attempted wasn’t even that funny. But all of the ad humor in the game was reduced to the kindergarten level, where everyone who is at least 4 years old can get the jokes and nobody would go home crying to mom or dad over what they’d just heard or seen.

The same pablum and hyper-sensitivity also seemed evident in the mild suggestions of the “He Gets Us” campaign, making its second Super-Bowl appearance this year. Over pictures of individuals “who looked different than us(?)” it encouraged viewers to love their neighbors as they say that Jesus once did. Asking “Why can’t we all be friends?” a couple of times between J-Lo and Beyonce certainly wasn’t worth their million dollar price tags when the aforementioned extremists are regularly at one another’s throats and the vast Middle-of-America is afraid of where all the gnashing of teeth, automatic weapons, and purported saviors on both ends of the political spectrum are leading them.

The 2024 Super Bowl ads treated us like we’re over-protected children who can’t handle any more dissonance or discomfort. So have Americans really exchanged “want-to-get-smarter” for “just-plain-stupid,” “resilient (in the face of challenges)” for “fragile (at the suggestion of anything unsettling”)?

Again, for that vast middle of America, I don’t think so. The Americans I know—and I’ve met some too—want to be approached like adults and to become stronger instead of weaker “in the face of it all.” By refusing to treat us the way that most of us want to be treated, the Super Bowl advertisers have (once again) failed to hear the TRUE sound of our nation “talking to itself” while “it sells things to itself,” which for those of us who’ve grown accustomed to it, “has always been about as intimate an act as there is” around here.

_{These days, we’re far more “rooted” than the advertisers ever imagined.}

Why aren’t today’s Super Bowl ads speaking to:

our spirit of enterprise (or our MacGiverish ability to be practical problem-solvers)?
our commitment to fairness on every playing field (instead of wanting to treat every player like they’re equal or the same or that we’d ever want them to be)?
our desire to win (as opposed to giving everyone who shows up to play a trophy)?
our capability for wonder and awe (not only before the jaw-dropping beauty of our country, but also given the brightness—instead of darkness—of the unknowable future that we’re building, even now)?

Instead these ads have become one stupid dog trick after another, although substituting our favorite celebrities for the dogs of yore, because anything more demanding than this might offend somebody’s sensibilities.

I’m reminded of a post I wrote in April of 2021 when the pandemic was already somewhat “long in the tooth” called Higher Winds Are Coming. It spoke to the kinds of reserves we’d be needing because the buffeting we’d been experiencing still wasn’t over. Today, almost 3 years later, we need some of the wisdom that I tried to summon there even more.

For example, I cited Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2012 book, tellingly called Antifragile, which he nearly summarized in 3 of his book’s best lines:

Trial and error is freedom.

Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.

I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.

I quoted Barry Lopez, a particular hero of mine, who asked us to remember the people that we used to be:

How much natural resilience and willingness to rely upon one another has our freedom, wealth and belief in progress allowed us to forget, but that we’ll need to remember if we’re to adapt and survive in this increasingly ‘throttled’ world?

And finally, I recalled Buddhist teacher Pima Chodron’s urging us to be more curious about the fears that make us so fragile—to bring these secret worries into the sun’s bright glare so we’re no longer as frightened by their shadowy unknowns. As I went on to explain:

With true hope, she says, there is always fear that whatever you long for won’t come to pass. Accepting that your hope is always bound up with your fear—so that you are as curious about your fear as you are about your hope—can liberate you from your own constraints.

These observations actually add-up to a pretty short list of things that are great and laudable and TRUE about most of us today:

Our spirit of enterprise, or how difficulty “wakes up” our genius.

Our commitment to a level playing field where every player has a fair chance to win.

Our capacity for wonder and even awe.

Remembering our natural resilience and our willingness to rely upon one another, maybe by consulting our personal and collective histories.

Being curious about our fears so they can never inhibit our hopes.

In a national event that claims to champion our competitive drive towards excellence, it seems natural and even necessary to further elevate The Big Game with marketing that appeals to each and every one of these capabilities, commitments and emotions.

And because they would speak not only to “who we are” but also to “the people that we want to be,” marketing to an audience that’s framed like that would sell a hell-of-a-lot more (of whatever it is that we’re selling) than the fragile and stupid ads that were on parade last weekend.

This post was adapted from my February 18, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Higher Winds Are Coming

May 12, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The near future is like a 10-day weather report. It follows the trend lines and makes predictions, which will come true except for all of those times when the unexpected happens.

I’m in the process of re-building the backyard after loosing 1½ big trees in the middle of it and experiencing the damage to boxwoods and other valued neighbors that came with that. The rebuilding includes a brand new linden tree that will need a four-by-three foot hole to inhabit (after I finish this) and various plugs for the hedgerows. So these days, I’m regularly hoping to minimize any more damage as the yard recovers its good appearance.

But it’s also a fool’s errand of plans and defenses because gale-force winds regularly whipping down from Philadelphia’s high points in the northwest felled those earlier trees, while countervailing wind-blasts sweep up from the Carolina coast whenever there’s a Nor’easter. The latter can sound like a freight train just outside the bedroom window as they funnel between the house and our 200-year old tulip poplar.

More trees will surely be lost.

While my inclination is to be defensive (and plant replacements, like the linden, in strategic places), I’m aspiring to a more dynamic point of view that recognizes not only the deaths of the living things that shape this place but also its broader evolution as the climate changes and more that’s unplanned starts to happen. I’m aiming for a healthier and saner recognition that this is a landscape in motion, that less shade and more sun might mean more vegetables, that some former residents (like the rabbits) might return with the carrots, and that I can change and grow with the confusion.

Coincidentally, while I’ve been trying to live my short term forecasts outside, I’ve also been reading one: Fareed Zakaria’s Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, which came out last October, barely six months into our tribulations with Covid-19.

You might know Zakaria as a charismatic CNN host and columnist for the Washington Post, who also happens to have a PhD in government from Harvard. In other words, he’s one of those “experts” who have attracted a great deal of skepticism over the past decade–particularly when they’re telling us what’s coming next. But hold on, while nine of his ten lessons toe a fairly predictable Center-Left path into tomorrowland, they are introduced by a rule-of-thumb that effectively qualifies all of the lessons that follow. Zakaria’s First Lesson is for all of us to “Buckle Up,” because what’s coming for certain is much more chaos and unpredictability (just like the novel coronovirus), and we can’t simply fortify or plan our ways out of it. We’ll have to learn how to go with, and even take advantage of the future’s chaotic flows.

Great, you say, more Confusion, Incompetence and Internal Divisions. More Infections, Killer Storms, Droughts and Wildfires. More Mass Shootings, Desperate Migrations and Habitat Destruction. More Genocides, Famines, Despots and Mindless Consumption. Altogether, a seemingly unhappy picture. And just like the weather reports I’m watching, More Unpredictability for the green half acre that I’m trying to care for. But in both spheres, there’s a way to keep our heads above water, and maybe, even to thrive.

That doesn’t mean that Zakaria’s other Lessons are unsatisfying—in fact, they’re often excellent—particularly Lesson Two (“What Matters Is Not the Quantity of Government But the Quality”) and Lesson Ten (“Sometimes the Greatest Realists Are the Idealists”). But, without question, his most valuable advice is to “Buckle Up” for the chaos coming our way.

Zakaria frames this pivotal lesson by way of analogy from the tech world. Some years ago, technologist Jared Cohen observed that all computer networks suffer from a “trilemma.” They can have two of the following qualities but never all three. Those qualities are openness, speed and security. For example, if they are “open” and “fast” they are, by their very nature, “insecure.”

Zakaria describes the analogous “trilemma” that confronts our post-pandemic future. We live in a world where:

Everyone is connected, but no one is in control. In other words, the world we live in is open, fast—and thus, almost by definition, unstable.
It would be hard to bring stability to anything so dynamic and open… [On the other hand,] a fast and stable one will tend to be closed, like China. If the system is open and stable [his third permutation], it will likely be sluggish rather than dynamic. Think of the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires: vast, open, diverse—and decaying.

Like the digital tech platforms that impact so much of our lives in the West today, living and working are inherently unstable because we have not made the kinds of investments or prepared ourselves adequately for the kind of future that is the necessary consequence of our “fast” and “open” societies.

Zakaria provides several examples that speak to our hoping for the best when we should be preparing ourselves for the worst. He starts, of course, with the current pandemic that epidemiologists and others (like Bill Gates) have been warning us about since SARS, MERS, and Ebola a decade or so ago and Zika more recently. What follows are three more alarm bells that are going off today but we’re largely ignoring, and there are many more instances where we’re neither investing nor preparing to live in an increasingly chaotic future.

MEAT. As a meatlover, this is a calamity that I actively try not to think about, but Zakaria skirts the better-known concerns (like animal cruelty, an unsustainable carbon footprint) to continue his focus on epidemiology. He describes the role that factory livestock farms will almost certainly be playing in global health because we want to get meat to our tables quickly (as “fast”) and with as little government monitoring of safety (or interference with “fast” and “open”) as possible. In light of the research that’s been done, Zakaria argues that not one but two frightening realities loom over our mass production of cattle, chickens and pigs:

These massive [livestock] operations serve as petri dishes for powerful viruses. ‘Selection for specific genes in farmed animals (for desirable traits like large chicken breasts) has made these animals almost genetically identical.’ Vox’s Sigal Samuel explains. ‘That means that a virus can easily spread from animal to animal without encountering any genetic variants that might stop it in its tracks. As it rips through a flock or herd, the virus can grow even more virulent.’ The lack of genetic diversity removes the ‘immunological firebreaks,’ Samuel quotes the biologist Rob Wallace: ‘Factory farms are the best way to select for the most dangerous pathogens possible.’
[And as if that’s not enough]… Factory farms are also ground zero for new, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as animals are bombarded with antibiotics that kill most bacteria but leave those that survive highly potent. Johns Hopkins professor Robert Lawrence calls antibiotic-resistant bacteria ‘the biggest human risk of factory farms.’

We’re now aware of the virulence of Covid-19, can easily imagine worse viruses being “selected” in factory livestock farms, as well as the mistakes and “human errors” that could lead to widespread public exposure. We’ve also read stories about bacteria in hospitals that are demonstrating their resilience to our stock of antibiotics. Despite the horrific cost in lives that seems likely, few people even know about the time bomb that’s ticking in these production facilities. While we’re all interested “in getting back to normal” after Covid-19, an even less healthy and increasingly unstable future seems far more likely.

BIO-WEAPONS. We all know something about the groundbreaking research into messenger RNA that’s behind some of the coronavirus vaccines and the selective editing of human DNA using CRISPR technology that portends the “editing out” of genetic diseases before a child is born or the fabication of “designer babies,” but the likelihood of bioweapons has largely been confined to the sphere of science fiction in our imaginations. Given the widespread use of these innovations in global laboratories today, that’s an irresponsible mistake. And, as Zakaria notes, he’s been worried about this one for awhile:

I have always considered bioterror to be the most important under-discussed danger facing us….And yet…the main international forum for preventing it, the Biological Weapon Convention, is an afterthought. As [scholar Toby] Ord notes [in his book called The Precipice,], ‘this global convention to protect humanity has just four employees, and a smaller budget than the average McDonald’s.’

Zakaria is not an alarmist. Instead, he wants to show us some of the rarely discussed problems (he discusses several others too) so we can either address them before it’s too late or get ourselves more ready than we are today for the even more unstable world we’re sure to be living in when we fail to do so. I’ll break down the last quotation fromTen Lessons into three sentences because each one of them has its own implications for our post-pandemic future.

The costs of prevention and preparation are minuscule compared to the economic losses caused by an ineffective response to a crisis.
More fundamentally, building in resilience creates stability of the most important kind, emotional stability.
Human beings will not embrace openness and change for long if they constantly fear that they will be wiped out in the next calamity.

In his “Buckle Up” Lesson, Zakaria refers to a ground-breaking idea from another scholar: Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of becoming “antifragile,” which he outlined in his highly influential 2012 book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. The “emotional stability” in an unstable world that Zakaria is talking about will likely require more from us than greater resilience. We’ll need to foster a mindset like Taleb’s that sees instability not as an insurmountable threat to our current “fragility” or merely something to fortify ourselves against. Instead, to be “antifragile” is to learn how to play offense instead of defense. It’s having the agency to be creative and gain strength from the chaos and crises that are sure to come.

In Antifragile, Taleb describes the objective like this:

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile [which fears, to the point of paralysis, both risks and uncertainty]. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

Taleb also captures his concept’s beauty when he writes later in the book:

Trial and error is freedom.
Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.
I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.

As in the diagram above, to be antifragile is to be enabled (instead of disabled or merely hunkered down) as we face an increasingly unstable world: to incorporate the chaos, turning it into a creative force.

Even before antifragile became a concept, I found the sense of swashbuckling opportunism that’s embedded in such an outlook easier to admire in others than to live by myself. It’s hard to be constantly alive to the unexpected while also taking advantage of it. It seemed to be for pickpockets, pirates, Robin Hood’s merry band: people living on the edge of civilization, surviving by making the most out of whatever opportunity presented itself. But I’ve started to learn that an outsider’s perspective like this may be exactly what’s required in the increasingly unstable world that lies ahead. It’s time to step up my game.

Perhaps as a result, during the first and second waves of the pandemic last summer, I found some sobering consolation in two very wise people, each of whom had a helpful slant on the perspective we’ll need moving forward. It seems today that they complement both Zakaria and Taleb quite nicely.

In a July post I quoted the heroic Barry Lopez, wondering out loud:

How much natural resilience and willingness to rely upon one another has our freedom, wealth and belief in progress [that is, have our “fast” and “open” societies] allowed us to forget, but that we’ll need to remember if we’re to adapt and survive in this increasingly ‘throttled’ world?

He reminds us that we all have what’s necessary within us, only having to remember what we’ve managed to forget.

In an earlier post last May, as the early pandemic chaos compounded and I’d begun to lose perspective, I looked to Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron. With true hope, she says, there is always fear that whatever you long for won’t come to pass. Accepting that your hope is always bound up with your fear—so that you’re as curious about your fear as you are about your hope—can liberate you from your own constraints. What I needed was to face my worst fears more directly, to temper them against that present reality, and then bind them up with my hopes again.

Once again, it’s time to be more curious about our fears and not hide from them.

It’s time to “remember” our natural resilience and willingness to rely upon one another as the challenges compound.

It’s time to realize that things will not be “getting back to normal,” indeed that they can’t get back to normal in a world that’s as “fast” and as “open” as ours is today.

For the chaos and crisis that surely lies ahead, it’s time to prepare ourselves so that we’re enabled instead of disabled, so we become more resourceful instead of more depleted in the face of what’s sure to come.

This post was adapted from my April 4, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.