'The most intolerant person imposes virtue on others...'

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is so profound!

Thanks to Dr. Aparna Srinivas for this lovely link to Taleb, HERE.

The feature article gives us an estimated reading time of 27 minutes. So, in my enthu, I just ‘hop-stop’ped through Taleb, and found his premise highly endearing!

Got some lovable pearls on the pit-stops!

Taleb speaking…

The rule we discuss in this chapter is the minority rule.

Studying individual ants will never, never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants.

How do books get banned? Certainly not because they offend the average person – most persons are passive and don’t really care, or don’t care enough to request the banning. It looks like, from past episodes, that all it takes is a few (motivated) activists for the banning of some books, or the black-listing of some people.

Bertrand Russell lost his job at the City University of New York owing to a letter by an angry –and stubborn mother who did not wish to have her daughter in the same room as the fellow with dissolute lifestyle and unruly ideas.

It is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.

Once a moral rule is established, it would suffice to have a small intransigent minority of geographically distributed followers to dictate the norm in society.

The market is like a large movie theatre with a small door.

And the best way to detect a sucker (say the usual finance journalist) is to see if his focus is on the size of the door or on that of the theater. Stampedes happen in cinemas, say when someone shouts “fire”, because those who want to be out do not want to stay in!

Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion to an army of lions led by a sheep. Alexander (or no doubt he who produced this probably apocryphal saying) understood the value of the active, intolerant, and courageous minority. Hannibal terrorized Rome for a decade and a half with a tiny army of mercenaries, winning twenty-two battles against the Romans, battles in which he was outnumbered each time.

He was inspired by a version of this maxim!