The Bed of Procrustes

Exactly! Same as it ever was. There is no heaven on earth.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, my Black Swan guru, observes that the Enlightenment gave us a trap. Rational is not empirical. We can reason all kinds of ideas, idealism (Plato here), but it collides with empirical reality (Aristotle here).

This is the great frustration of our time. We have people peddling ideas galore, fixes, social engineering schema, and in the end, they are simply ideas – often without bases in empirical reality. Facts and thoughts are not one and the same.

The Enlightenment has trapped us. Taleb makes this point in his latest book of “saying,” published in 2010, The Bed of Procrustes.

Procrustes is a bad guy out of Greek mythology. He had a sick hobby – capturing travelers and then tying them to his bed.

If the victims were longer than the bed, he hacked them down to fit the size of his bed. If they were shorter than the bed, he stretched them to match the size of his bed.

The bed Taleb says represents our ideological preconceptions. We chop, cut or stretch the facts to fit our preconceived ideological biases, the bed in the story.

We do violence to the facts in pursuit of fixation on ideas – the bane of the Enlightenment. Of course, the bed is just a part of reality, one variable in it.

The Greeks saw things so clearly. Then came the Muddle Ages in which we now live.