CHARLES HUGH SMITH: Grey Swans Are Circling. “A grey swan is an event that is known and possible to happen, but which is assumed to be unlikely to occur. The term derives from Nassim Taleb’s black swan theory, which describes an event that is unlikely but unknown.”
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Equally interesting is the mass of propaganda being spewed to cover up the systemic vulnerabilities that might have played a role in the Syrian regime’s collapse. The tsunami of propaganda is intended to bolster the everything is forever narrative, but the enormity and virulence of the propaganda effort suggests the opposite: extreme vulnerability and fear of other regimes that they could be next.
Discussions of what triggered the Western Roman Empire’s collapse shed some light on the ease of embracing an interpretation that misses the mark. Gibbon concluded that Christianity undermined Rome’s coherence; others view Christianity as the alternative structure that enabled Europe to maintain critical coherence in the centuries after Western Rome fell. (The Eastern Roman Empire–the Byzantine Empire–had a different set of circumstances and endured in truncated form for almost a thousand years after Rome fell.)
Moral and social decay are often listed as causal factors, but dismissed by those who see the increasingly capable Barbarian armies as the cause of Rome’s collapse. Others have widened the narrative from war and internal decay to climate change and the ravages of pandemics.
The relevance of all these factors leads to a diagnosis of polycrisis–the collapse cannot be attributed to any one factor but to the confluence of many factors, each of which undermined the status quo’s moral, financial and material bases which fatally destabilized the coherence of the regime’s military and political responses.
From the perspective of polycrisis, the collapse of Syria’s regime could be a harbinger of future collapses, not a one-off event. The reason for this is that many of the keystone/linchpin elements of polycrisis are visibly global in nature: they affect every region and nation-state, regardless of size or location.
As Glenn noted in yesterday’s substack, “one of the virtues of democracy is that it shakes things up, and allows preference cascades that don’t require leaders to be beheaded and masses to be slaughtered.”
Indeed.
One of the less obvious blessings of Trump’s election win last month is that (unlike in 2020) the country’s pressure valve was allowed to function as designed — no gray swans (much less beheadings or slaughters needed) to oust the Democrats. Even better for keeping the gray swans at bay, Trump is serious about undoing the damage done.
Authoritarian regimes like Russia, China, and particularly Iran appear strong right up until the gray swans start circling.