The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Giovanni Drogo is a man of promise. He has just graduated from the military academy with the rank of junior officer, and active life is just starting. But things do not turn out as planned: his initial four-year assignment is a remote outpost, the Bastiani fortress, protecting the nation from the Tartars likely to invade from the border desert—not too desirable a position. The fortress is located a few days by horseback from the town; there is nothing but bareness around it—none of the social buzz that a man of his age could look forward to. Drogo thinks that his assignment in the outpost is temporary, a way for him to pay his dues before more appealing positions present themselves. Later, back in town, in his impeccably ironed uniform and with his athletic figure, few ladies will be able to resist him.

What is Drogo to do in this hole? He discovers a loophole, a way to be transferred after only four months. He decides to use the loophole.

At the very last minute, however, Drogo takes a glance at the desert from the window of the medical office and decides to extend his stay. Something in the walls of the fort and the silent landscape ensnares him. The appeal of the fort and waiting for the attackers, the big battle with the ferocious Tartars, gradually become his only reason to exist. The entire atmosphere of the fort is one of anticipation. The other men spend their time looking at the horizon and awaiting the big event of the enemy attack. They are so focused that, on rare occasions, they can detect the most insignificant stray animal that appears at the edge of the desert and mistake it for an enemy attack.

Sure enough, Drogo spends the rest of his life extending his stay, delaying the beginning of his life in the city—thirty-five years of pure hope, spent in the grip of the idea that one day, from the remote hills that no human has ever crossed, the attackers will eventually emerge and help him rise to the occasion.

At the end of the novel we see Drogo dying in a roadside inn as the event for which he has waited all his life takes place. He has missed it.

The Sweet Trap of Anticipation

Yevgenia read II deserto numerous times; she even learned Italian (and perhaps married an Italian) so she could read it in the original. Yet she never had the heart to reread the painful ending.

I presented the Black Swan as the outlier, the important event that is not expected to happen. But consider the opposite: the unexpected event that you very badly want to happen. Drogo is obsessed and blinded by the possibility of an unlikely event; that rare occurrence is his raison d’être. At thirteen, when she encountered the book, little did Yevgenia know that she would spend an entire life playing Giovanni Drogo in the antechamber of hope, waiting for the big event, sacrificing for it, and refusing intermediate steps, the consolation prizes.

She did not mind the sweet trap of anticipation: to her it was a life worth living; it was worth living in the cathartic simplicity of a single purpose. Indeed, “be careful what you wish for”: she may have been happier before the Black Swan of her success than after.

One of the attributes of a Black Swan is an asymmetry in consequences—either positive or negative. For Drogo the consequences were thirty-five years spent waiting in the antechamber of hope for just a few randomly distributed hours of glory—which he ended up missing.

When You Need the Bastiani Fortress

Note that there was no brother-in-law around in Drogo’s social network. He was lucky to have companions in his mission. He was a member of a community at the gate of the desert intently looking together at the horizon. Drogo had the advantage of an association with peers and the avoidance of social contact with others outside the community. We are local animals, interested in our immediate neighborhood—even if people far away consider us total idiots. Those homo sapiens are abstract and remote and we do not care about them because we do not run into them in elevators or make eye contact with them. Our shallowness can sometimes work for us.

It may be a banality that we need others for many things, but we need them far more than we realize, particularly for dignity and respect. Indeed, we have very few historical records of people who have achieved anything extraordinary without such peer validation—but we have the freedom to choose our peers. If we look at the history of ideas, we see schools of thought occasionally forming, producing unusual work unpopular outside the school. You hear about the Stoics, the Academic Skeptics, the Cynics, the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, the Essenes, the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the anarchists, the hippies, the fundamentalists. A school allows someone with unusual ideas with the remote possibility of a payoff to find company and create a microcosm insulated from others. The members of the group can be ostracized together—which is better than being ostracized alone.