Barack Obama is a Black Swan.  By that, I don’t mean that Obama’s race has something to do with the ornithological characterization.  “The Black Swan” is a concept constructed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan, The Impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE  (Random House - 2007).

From the Prologue - “Before the discovery of Australia, people in the Old World were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence…The sighting of the first black swan…illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observation or experience and the fragility of our knowledge….One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millenia of confirmatory sightings….All you need is one single…black bird”.

Taleb’s book is essentially about uncertainty.  Look at it this way.   Where all the observed swans are white, there is not evidence that there are NO swans of another color. White swans simply exhibit ”no evidence” of swans of another color.   Taleb’s experience with cancer was placed in the same logical framework, where he was pronounced cured of a battle with cancer, but knew that the absence of detectable cancer cells is not “evidence of no cancer”, it was ”no evidence of cancer”.  He described his conceptual Black Swans this way:

First, [a Black Swan] is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.  Second, it carries an extreme impact.  Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

To elaborate, Taleb confirms the way history has been changed suddenly by unexpected and seemingly random events, like the attacks on 911, or the invention of the Personal Computer, the quick rise of Hitler or Islamic fundamentalism, or the end of the Soviet Union.  Barack Obama is close, very close, to doing the same thing.

Why didn’t we see it coming?  Because nothing in the (now) quaint and delusory echo chamber of popular conservatism could have predicted that a young man, embodying all the politically unpalatable and radical qualities found in Obama, would be on the threshold of the White House.  Many of us were content with the fiction of our permanent ascendance since Ronald Reagan.  Some of us are still claiming that “this is a conservative country”.  Is it?  Then what’s going on?  Someone has been terribly wrong.

When conservatism became part of mass culture, it became ridiculous; it grew blind to the landscape of the dynamic world, and tumbled into a well of fantasy.  Floating down there , some of us still fixate on the little disc of sunlight above and ignore the waters all around.  Before the fall, disbelief that a man like Obama could be elected was not evidence that conservatism had prevailed, it was merely evidencee that conservatism was prevalent. 

Whoever wins the Presidency next week, and it might not be Obama, conservativism needs rebuilding.  The old ways and figures and certainties were too far off-the-mark.  If ”we” win with McCain, our current idea systems have no explanation as to why it happened.