I loved university, colloquially called “uni” in the UK. Uni was a luxury, not for the education, but for the idleness. For the huge gaps of non-compulsion. Lovely in its painful slowness and eerie silence. But as the years go by, I increasingly understand an under-discussed luxury of life: time to idle. What is freedom if not the ability to be idle? Do we not pursue wealth to be free, to have the choice to idle? I think we do. For a period, I was a wealthy man. The luxury of idleness was in excess.
Statistically speaking, most lottery winners end up broke. Like most who end up winning the lottery, I had no idea how to manage my newfound wealth. In hindsight, could I have spent my time more effectively? Absolutely, but I was busy with important uni things, such as learning to interact with other humans (barely), and my Computer Science degree (Have you turned it on and off?). I took away one thing: a rekindled reading habit. I read a moderate amount, at a good time too. I was impressionable and in need of guidance. Where does an insecure 18-year-old go for non-judgmental guidance without fear or shame? I’ll wait… The answer is anywhere you can get it.
Finding guidance in books is strange. What books do you read, and how do you ensure they convey the right information? I figured, I’ll just read the classics. This was a solid strategy due to something called the Lindy effect. The Lindy effect is a phenomenon that proposes the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like technology or an idea, is proportional to its current age. This was my philosophy around reading: read things that had a decent amount of age to it, as those beliefs are better understood to stand the test of time. If it’s old, it must be gold.
So I read. I read with no structure or end goal, just a yearning for knowledge and a mental model that was riddled with gaps. A model I would have to develop for myself. As far as I could tell, I was a blank canvas (I was not; I was just confused), and I had many questions. The thing about questioning life is that there aren’t definite answers. You can’t infinitely delve; eventually, you must do. There's wisdom to this, but if that guidance is misinformed, due to being dated, lack of perspective, or being flat out incorrect, you’re a step behind the curve, and the curve punishes slow steppers.
I’ll summarize roughly 10 years of readings, and without a doubt, butcher it all. In the end, my mental model ended up looking like a layered node cake. Each layer represents different concepts. Change tends to be slower the further down you go. Now get ready for the stream of consciousness.
Nature
Whether that be the nature of people or earth, nature has resources, and access to them is important. If life is a game, this is the board game that we play on. Geopolitics, essentially. Sometimes you roll the dice and end up in a resource-rich area. Other times, not so rich. That can be a good thing that benefits everyone. Other times, it’s a curse that keeps countries poor. A mountain can be a peacekeeper between two peoples, or a river can send two countries to war. An influential example would be India and China, each housing more than a billion people and between them nearly half the world's population, but only ever entering into minor skirmishes because the Himalayas are between them. Or ideas, traveling slowly throughout Africa because the makeup of the region is jungle, deserts, and unnavigable rivers. For much of history, it has been limited in its exposure to the idea exchanges on this side of the Atlantic, and its geography was generally not as easy to explore. All the best trade routes and protections are those enabled by nature. Flatlands, mountainous regions, and navigable rivers. Everything of material value that we create is either under the ground, the ground itself, or on top of it. I cannot emphasize that statement enough. Then there's the tendencies of humans: in-group, out-groups, disparities, cohesion, comparisons, bias, fallacy, community, identity. Indelible parts of being human. Human nature.
Culture
A subset of nature. Cultures differ across regions. When regions are interconnected by nature (and accessible), culture spreads. Culture wars occur, how topical. This is where things such as religion, tradition, and ideology come into play. This is in and of itself a layered system. Two groups of people can be exactly the same, but a different subset of a religious ideology can be the difference between murdering your neighbor or not. I think of Shias and Sunnis, Protestants and Catholics, people that vote for the Blue team vs. the Red team in politics. You get the gist.
Manifestations or “memes” within a belief can have a massive influence further down the line. Culture is meme-like in nature in how it spreads and becomes viral. A culture typically consumes another, evolving in the process. This results in differences in voting patterns (if they can vote), polarization, and different societal outcomes. Changes in the very nature of a community, whether that be its dissolution or creation. Legitimized by legislature. “I believe X is bad for the culture, so this should be codified by law as the Y legislature. As we all believe X is bad”.
Governance
Power applies rules in a tangible way from culture. Those in power are either voted in or they seize power, maybe a mixture of both. The ability to do this is also informed by culture, at least initially. The rules they set become the rules that we all live by; you just have to hope it’s the same set of rules for everyone. How robust is the system, what are the feedback loops? An example of this is the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary as a system of checks and balances in the UK. Rule of law, constitutions, and monopolies of force. It’s in the name. Government; they are meant to govern. Effective governance is born over a very long period of time. Lots of civil unrest, violence, and bloody noses. The modern concept of a “peaceful” nation-state that we now know was born of a lot of blood.
This was seeded alongside the creation of the printing press, meaning people could organize at a scale never seen before, and the Eight-year and thirty-year wars were a result. Yes, eighty years; they fought a lot. Resulting in the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648. This set the ball in motion as the states that could organize better than the others could dominate. With that domination came might. From the Dutch, to the British, to the Americans. This played a huge role in European colonial expansion. They had played this game before and were better at it.
Infrastructure
Infrastructure development is a primary output of an effective government (alongside legislature and a monopoly on force). I read a TL;DR of Biden's initial proposal for the Inflation Reduction Act. He described infrastructure as hard and soft infrastructure; I’m a fan of the concept. Hard typically refers to the physical infrastructure necessary for the economic operation of a society, transportation networks, utilities, and buildings. While soft refers to institutions and services necessary for the functioning of an economy and society, such as healthcare, education, financial systems, and governmental services. All things that bad governments suck at.
Commerce and Consumption
Commerce theoretically should allow humans to develop a framework where we optimize for what we as humanity want, the legendary “invisible hand” (It’s not very invisible; it’s very visible, and I don’t like what it’s pushing me). Generally, people want to be happy, healthy, and wealthy, whatever that means. Everything else is an abstraction. You need coffee to feel energized; you don’t want coffee, you want to feel energized. Feeling energized is part of being healthy. Most material goods follow some form of this formula. Given sufficient impetus through the stability of the aforementioned layers, we are now at a place where a long and interconnected journey occurs for everything and anything. A great story is 'I, Pencil.' Showing the thousands of hours required to produce something as simple as a pencil and the myriad of people, things, and processes involved.
This process ends in consumption. Pencil in hand, you are ready to draw the plans that inform nature, culture, governance, commerce, and consumption.
Back to the main point
This is a huge simplification, but this layered mental model for how the world works has helped me to look at this layered cake that we’re living in and be a little bit more objective. Some things are faster within different layers, but each layer typically informs and weakly affects every other.
After I had ingested all of this information initially and it had been brewing in my head, not quite yet settled, I remember talking to a friend. Stubborn as anything, usually not in a good way. We were discussing the cause of the biggest issues, and I said, “To be honest, man, it all starts with nature.” He proceeded to call me wrong with zero discussion, and I couldn’t refute him. I still probably can’t; this was a bit of a ramble. The systems thinking approach to the world misses out on lots of information, and the boundaries are weak, merge into each other, and inform each other, but it’s all I’ve got. Whenever I see an issue, I observe it through three lenses. One of which, I’ve just explained above. This layered cake, a 1% deviation across millions of people, results in HUGE changes, and this cake, being a non-static system. The world is similar to cake, but it’s much less delicious.
The world through this lens makes a bit more sense. The further you go away from the base layer, the faster the changes are and the more leverage there is. A change to nature has huge downstream (layer) effects. A fashion trend changes quickly, but public infrastructure lasts for a long time. The government that built it will probably last even longer, with the culture that allowed such a system of governance to develop lasting hundreds of years. Nature changes at an even slower rate. You can even go really sci-fi and look at the timeless nature of the fundamental particles the building blocks of building blocks. Within my lifetime, I will be seeing the nature layer jiggle with global warming, and systems the world over may not be able to adapt fast enough to deal with it. A very messy cake indeed.