To we who do not maintain our cars,
Performance Demands Maintenance
Picture an ideal luxury car: it’s fast, reliable, efficient; it’s got self-driving abilities, top-of-the-line safety features, luxury interior trims, a smooth ride, all the things you could want in a car; an amazing feat of design and innovation. To achieve this final product, exotic materials were used to achieve the impressive performance, it requires the highest quality fuels and lubricants to avoid damaging the engine, maintenance must be done by specialized technicians because the design is so unique. For the sake of this illustration, let’s say this car is objectively the best model on the market right now. And let’s also accept that the cost of operating and maintaining this car is also higher than the competition to sustain its superior performance. What would happen to this car’s performance if it were not maintained properly? If instead of using premium grade fuel you used a lower quality, or if you saved maintenance costs by using generic replacement parts instead of the exotic metallurgy per the original design? One can no longer expect the car to run as intended, its measured performance metrics would be less than the published specs because of the reduced maintenance spend. What if we took the example to the extreme and performed no maintenance at all on the car? At a certain point, it would become fully inoperable. The nameplate specs would still be incredible, it would still be the best car on the market on paper; but in reality, it would be a useless mass of metal and plastic sitting in your garage.
Something that I am made aware of repeatedly is that everything in this world comes at a cost, there is nothing that comes for free. The cost can be money, but it is by no means limited to that one factor. Cost can be quantifiable like time, energy, resources. But it can also be qualitative like optionality, flexibility; choosing to meet a friend at 6pm on Thursday means that you have also chosen not to go to the gym during that same time slot (i.e. the decision to take any action carries with it the inherent decision to not take several other competing actions).
The Steep Cost of Life
If we look at even the fundamental requirements for life to exist, the precondition upon which all our thoughts of problem solving and optimization stem from, we see that the cost of life is death. The degrees of separation from paying the price and reaping the benefits vary, and the mechanisms of survival can alter the directness of the linkage between death and life, but in all cases, there is no avoiding it. A direct example would be killing a chicken to eat it. But we also kill wolves to protect sheep livestock, be it for food consumption later by humans, for wool, etc. And there are still places in the world where nature has not been so tamed, as it has been in Europe for example, where humans still have to kill lions and tigers directly for their continued survival. Some of us living in our concrete jungles have lost this perspective, but these cities did not always exist as they do today. At one point these lands used to be “wild”, whole ecosystems with their own animal populations. Today, obviously, they are gone, replaced with streets and city-planned housing communities. Whatever animal populations used to live in this space either adapted to urban conditions, were killed in the process, or were displaced, undoubtedly inducing deflationary pressures on the existing populations in those surrounding areas they moved to. Even plants are not innocent in this game of trading death for life. Ignoring the obvious examples of carnivorous plants that eat insects, there are others that secrete toxins to prevent predators from consuming them. On a more fundamental level, if a tree grows in a spot, that eliminates the ability for another tree to grow in that same location. Many grass species, for example, are known to dominate a landscape and prevent other species from growing there if left unchecked. Like animals, plants compete for water, sunlight, and nutrients, and acquiring those resources means depriving those same resources from another competing lifeform that is trying to survive.
If life itself, the foundation upon which all other areas of interest are built, comes at a cost, and a steep one at that, we cannot forget the fundamental rule that everything has its price. This prime rule is easily provable and observable in our world at a glance. There follows a derivative of this rule that is slightly harder to prove: the higher the outcome, the higher the price. To make this a generic rule is hard because how do you define outcomes and inputs when it comes to qualitative metrics? What about when the problem is multi-faceted, there are multiple cost categories and there are competing success criteria? However, in an attempt to illustrate the rule in its simplest form, let’s look at measurable single-variable examples to help us in extrapolating to more complex problems. In a given car, and assuming constant engine efficiency, travelling faster to arrive at your destination sooner will require more fuel consumption than if the car were to travel slower. So the cost for less time travelled is more fuel consumed. The caloric requirements for a professional soccer player who trains everyday are much higher than an average 9-5 office worker who plays soccer once a week for fun; the physical demands of the athlete are higher, so the inputs required to sustain that performance level are higher. There is an obvious category where this rule doesn’t apply, and that is where the quality of the input changes. For example, to supply electricity for a growing city that runs on coal-fired power plants, more coal by mass would need to be burned to meet the increased energy demands. However, if you switched to nuclear energy, a much smaller amount of uranium would be required by mass compared to coal to generate the same amount of power. But this is because the quality of the input has changed with uranium being much more energy dense than coal in its capacity for generating electricity. The same applies to low-grade vs high-grade foods for caloric or nutrient densities, different fuel types for vehicles, and so on.
The Underlying Costs of Democracy
Onto the actual point of discussion: democracy as a method of governance. To most in the West, and to a great extent even many in the rest of the world, democracy is looked at as the desired form of governance, a society where the people participate in how they are governed. But democracy, as with anything, as demonstrated in the preamble above, comes at a cost. Put in another way: for a healthy democracy to function properly, like the top-end car mentioned at the start of this letter, requires a prescriptive set of fuels, parts, and maintenance. Without them, democracy, like the car, sits in the garage useless. There are many different forms of democracy, and the extent of participation and influence from the people varies. The US for example is a democracy, so are France, Russia, and Egypt. Some we may identify as closer to an “idealized” democracy than others, but all have their flaws, all have corruption, all limit the participation of the people to some degree; an absolute democracy after all would be impractical to manage where every single eligible voter needs to vote on every single decision made by the country (Only Human of The Themis Files sci-fi book series describes a society operated on absolute democracy and the obvious stalemate and inaction that arises from such a governance structure). All of the above have some degree of political censorship and punishment for those that step out of line; all use the media to push certain agendas and silence others; all have a non-zero amount of voter fraud during elections; all have some form of autocracy where decisions are made without the input of the governed body of people. Again, this is not to state that all these countries demonstrate equal levels of corruption in executing their democratic processes, but it is to say that all are on a continuum and one can trend historic datapoints to see the trajectory of said democracy and its deviation from the ideal version, its Form as Plato would put it. Let’s not attempt to define what that ideal democracy would be in this letter but leave it for a future one. The common trait of a democracy is that the people are involved in governing themselves, mostly through elected representatives. The advantage and disadvantage of self-governance is that it relies on the people, the populace. And the people can be bought, fooled, lied to, corrupted.
This warping of the democratic process, “gaming the system” as some call it, is evident even in early forms of democracy, the Roman Republic for example. Politicians used power, influence, and money to attain and retain positions of office; those who were master orators and could use their powers of speech would be elected because of their charisma and not their policies. There are similarities between the methods of degradation seen in the Roman Republic and what we see in our modern democracies: those with power and money use their influence to support politicians in getting elected with the promise of having an ally on the inside; people vote based on apparent character and not the actual ideas of the candidate. But there are differences as well. Modern technologies today allow for the spread of ideas faster than what was possible in the past. In my observation, the cycles of human societies follow similar patterns because human nature has not changed much over time, but technology is a catalyst that allows for the cycles to swing harder, to reach higher peaks and lower troughs. Propaganda has always been a tool of motivated parties to influence the popular opinion, be it from the government itself, an opposition group, or some other party with skin in the game. The reach of the media today allows those in power, those with money, or both to send a message of endorsement (or condemnation) for candidates and policy positions. The public education systems create a single point of access to future generations where ideas can be seeded and the fruits reaped in a decade. In a progressively digitized world, the skills of communicating challenging ideas and navigating conflicts in the real world are demoted from necessary to discretionary due to the ability to avoid conflict online and seek affirmation from like-minded, geographically separated individuals to form a group. None of these examples I mentioned are inherently good or bad, they are simply tools to be used for a plethora of goals. But they are more effective at achieving those goals than the tools society had in the past.
There is much to be said about the impact of the internet on modern society, but that is ultimately not the point of this letter. As mentioned above, these same methods for corruption of democracy have existed since its earliest forms and will continue to exist into the future. This is a letter to my fellow citizens living in self-proclaimed democratic societies to check when the last oil change was on our process and if the replacement parts on our last engine overhaul were true originals or cheap copies. The system was never designed to run itself, and simply having a democracy does not mean it is truly democratic in the way it’s sold to the people being governed (after all, many countries are democratic). We claim to have the best car on the streets, but the cost of upkeep is not being paid. Our auto shop is incompetent at best, and I would go as far as to say that they have, at times, deliberately sabotaged our car. This letter is a Part 1, an introduction to the issue. Part 2 will come later and go into details of some of the issues we have, and Part 3 will conclude with (hopefully) some solutions. But that’ll be farther out as I don’t currently have adequate solutions; my hope is to find the answers along the way as I pen more letters on related topics and interesting ideas that could help shed light on the way forward.
Sincerely,
A man trying earnestly to keep his car in working condition.