So yeah, I struggle with that too. Here's the difference with it as compared to all of history: scale.

We live in a different world as it is radically connected like never before. Taleb refers to our current age as "Extremeistan" and the previous world history as "Mediocrastan". It's about power lawn distributions and this happens overnight now across vast swaths of the population. [1]

[1] https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html