Taleb on the Sacrificial Hero. But Whatabout Women?

I just finished up Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Actually, it's a bit of a hot mess. The key concept, he says, is "ergodicity." What does that mean when it's at home?

Ergodicity: In our context here, ergodicity holds when a collection of players have the same statistical properties (especially expectation) as a single player over time... Absence of ergodicity makes the risk properties not directly transferable from observed probability to the payoff of a strategy subject to ruin...

But he does say something very significant that complements my Good Life philosophy, in which the highest, best person is the Sacrificial Hero, who dies that others may live. He writes that 

Courage is when you sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of the survival of a layer higher than yours.

He has a six-layer hierarchy as follows:

Ecosystem
Humanity
Self-defined extended tribe
Tribe
Family, friends, and pets
You

Now that fits right into my notion of courage being honor among men. The courage to fight a duel, I would say, is not a sacrifice for the survival of the group. Or, as I say, the Ego Heroism of Nietzsche's Übermensch is not the highest form of courage.

But, I thought, all this is guy stuff. Whatabout women, you sexist? As we know from James Bowman's Honor: A History, honor among women is the reputation for chastity: broadly, the reputation for being a good little girl. So how would women fit into Taleb's notion of courage as sacrifice for the bigger community?

I was pondering this in the middle of last night, as I am wont to do. And the answer from my unconscious came pretty quickly. The answer is: Forgiveness. 

If women don't forgive, then the community of women is all bollixed up with destructive Mean Girl competition and the seminal "I can't believe she said that." Because women play-acting at chastity are the first to name, shame, and shun other women as whores. And as we know, women can hold a grudge for a lifetime.

Indeed, I remember distinctly a acquaintance reciting how, whenever he did something wrong, his wife would rehearse The Catalog of all the things he had done wrong since he and his wife first met 40 years ago -- for which she had still, it appears, not forgiven him.

This notion came upon me pretty strongly while watching the Polish movie version of Quo Vadis: a Narrative of the Time of Nero. In the DVD version it is a six-part series. 

Quo Vadis is all about Nero sending the Christians to the lions after Rome burned. The book was originally written by a Pole, Henryk Sienkiewicz, so you can see why the post-communist Poles would be eager to do a movie version.

But the big scenes occur when someone does something really bad and St. Peter forgives them in the name of God. This concept of forgiveness absolutely knocks everyone for a loop in good old pagan Rome. They never heard anything like it in their lives.

But that's the highest thing for you, ladies. Forgiveness. But whatabout a recipe for living?

Taleb has a three-point program for a guy to live as if he had Skin in the Game:

1. Never engage in virtue-signaling
2. Never engage in rent-seeking
3. You must start a business

Obviously, this is a guy thing. But whatabout for women? As a starter, I would say

1. Never engage in virtue-signaling
2. Never say "I can't even!"
3. You must learn to forgive

Whaddya think of that, sports fans?