What Resilience Is Not
A little over a week ago I published an article at The Automatic Earth by our friend Dr. Nelson Lebo III from Wanganui, New Zealand, named Resilience is the New Black. After being reposted at Zero Hedge, Naked Capitalism and at least a dozen other sites, it may well have had more hits than everything he ever wrote put together. While that is obviously great, Nelson also did come away feeling a bit misunderstood – in particular, about what resilience actually is, and how he made it part of his life -, and he said he wanted to try and set the record straight. By all means. Here’s the doctor:
The other two things that surprised me were the misreading of the piece and a huge amount of confusion and uncertainty about what ‘resilience’ even means. I’ll address both in this article.
Ilargi first alerted me that Yves Smith had posted the article on Naked Capitalism with some comments of her own. I had a look and was a bit shocked at what she had written. Her comments appear to misrepresent the article and perhaps served to bias readers before they got into the piece itself.
It appears that the two main points of her critique miss the mark: 1) that I have abandoned the notion of sustainability; and, 2) that I have turned my back on the world and focus only on “me, mine, my family”.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
