I enjoyed how this essay about Tolkien was progressing, and then it touched on Taleb and the Incerto and I fell in love:
So how is goodness preserved for Tolkien? This brings us to Tolkien’s great prayer. We are familiar with the idea of a catastrophe. Or, to use more updated terminology, we might adopt Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of a black swan. A black swan is a completely unforeseen and cataclysmic disaster, something that seems to unmake the world. But Tolkien also envisioned the opposite of such an event, in which the effect works in the other direction, in which “everything sad comes untrue,” as Samwise says near the end. This kind of event, which Tolkien called a “eucatastrophe”—the “hope unlooked for” when all seems lost—allows good to face evil even though history remains something of a long defeat.
“Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
Yes, they’ve mangled their Talebisms a bit (catastrophe and eucatasrophe can both be black swan events) but that was a beautiful formulation of an antifragile way of life.
“What weather they shall have is not ours to rule” indeed. (↬John Brady)