Hello dear readers,
You know, I really tried. I started the year with optimism. I believed that things would turn for the better. I had an intuition that covid would look like a big bump is the road towards progress and prosperity. Mostly, that also did seem to be the case. But the 20s continues to churn out terrible things. After pestilence, it’s war now. Hollywood’s most popular villains (is it the Ruskies or Middle Eastern terrorists, though) are back in the news. Stock markets are tanking. World economy, which was already teetering with supply chain issues, is being pulled into an abyss of agony.
And today morning the first thing I read is that Shane Warne’s passed away. This affected me so strongly that I actually felt tears in my eyes (despite the shock and awe of this decade). N felt the same way about Lata Mangeshkar’s passing some days back. May they all rest in peace or may they be just as scintillating in whatever comes next. It just feels like this decade is going to give us more heartbreaks with our childhood heroes.
Let’s not add to that with our own stupidities of war….
“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.” ― John Steinbeck
Putin is almost 70 years old. The man’s effectively been ruling Russia since 1999:
Became acting president in 1999
Won his own election three months later (53% of vote)
Ruled for two terms until 2008
Was Prime Minister for Dmitry Medvedev (who later revealed that the two had cut a deal years previously)
Ran for third term in 2012
Ran for fourth term in 2018 - will be in power till 2024
20+ years is a long time for a country to be in the grip of one person. Russia is a dictatorship. It may have an election process and Putin might make a big deal of running for office but in the end it is no different than CCP ruling China. Are they as bad as North Korea? Arguably not, but that’s no benchmark.
Maybe democracy is overrated ❎
I’ve seen a lot of narrative in the last couple of years, validating Putin and China. You hear words like these:
“Putin is not an idiot, he is a rational actor whom the west demonises”
“Maybe not everyone wants democracy - the west shouldn’t impose its democracy on others”
“CCP has done a lot to lift millions out of poverty, maybe it’s working”
“Maybe democracy is overrated. Nothing ever gets done”
I am hearing the last line repeated more often in the recent past - especially in India. While this scares me shitless, I understand the frustration. Apparently even Socrates was sceptical of democracy:
In Book Six of The Republic, Plato describes Socrates falling into conversation with a character called Adeimantus and trying to get him to see the flaws of democracy by comparing a society to a ship. If you were heading out on a journey by sea, asks Socrates, who would you ideally want deciding who was in charge of the vessel? Just anyone or people educated in the rules and demands of seafaring? The latter of course, says Adeimantus, so why then, responds Socrates, do we keep thinking that any old person should be fit to judge who should be a ruler of a country?
Democracies are less efficient…by design 🐌
There is a reason why companies aren’t democracies. Don’t we all already hate company politics? Democracies elevate the time spent on ‘politics’ significantly. Imagine working in a company where the CEO has to pass every decision through the board for approval, get popular vote every term and has to actively cater to various interest groups at every turn. Public companies do expose themselves to more nuances of democratic decision making than private companies but, still, it’s a stretch to claim that companies are run democratically.
And it’s probably a good thing because slow and messy decision making would be catastrophic in competitive capitalism.
Like Socrates who looked to the heroic entrepreneurial endeavour of his times (sea faring adventurers and merchants), we look to capitalistic companies of the day for analogous thinking. We make simplistic conclusions on how countries should be run:
A few smart people make decisions.
Decisions are made quickly and executed quickly.
Market drives success.
But quick decision making is no signal of quality.
95% of startups fail. This means that there are several factors influencing the outcome of those decisions, including the product, the market and even ultimately the quality of the people making the decision. Bad decisions can be made just as quickly as good decisions. There is no guarantee that the few people making the decisions are actually smart.
The way capitalism solves for all this is to make enough bets at an ecosystem level that a few of the fittest survive.
Countries don’t (can’t) work this way. We cannot run countries to find 5% successful countries nor split countries to 100 different city-states on a blockchain to find the 5% successful ones (despite what your neighbourhood A16Z partner will tell you).
Democracies by design are inefficient because:
They provide a voice for different groups and segments that otherwise get ignored.
More alignment - not everyone follows the maxim of ‘disagree and commit’. E.g. Getting environmental clearances to set up new polluting factories or building a mega project that could displace thousands.
The people serving are watching the polls and popularity of their decisions. So only the popular decisions (not always the right decisions) get prioritised.
We have other institutions, like a free press and courts that share the power and perhaps even slow things down for those that can pass laws. This helps minimise disastrous decisions.
Democracies solve for resilience.
The battlefield we all live in… 🤼♂️
Let’s look at a battlefield we all live in - our bodies (a realisation that hit us stronger in a post-Covid world). Every infection is an inner war with significant consequences. Throughout our lives, our bodies go through many skirmishes from paper cuts to big bone shattering accidents. And while we think of our bodies as fragile, considering how miraculous a system it is - a conscious, thinking life form that can grow and autonomously manage itself - it is ridiculously resilient.
Bones mend. Skin fuses. Blood clots. A key artery carrying blood to my grandmother’s brain had gotten blocked due to calcium deposits. But doctors discovered that the body started rerouting that blood through a different artery. The same is true for the brain itself. People who lose portions of the brain still develop the ability to train the other parts of the brain to pick up the slack.
Our bodies are complex, resilient systems always existing in a war theatre.
They are also not the most efficient. Nor, designed very well.
Because our bodies were built through the obsessive adaptive traits of evolution, it was always making improvements from the existing design. What we have now is a code that’s been built on and improved so much that it suffers from massive tech debt and in need of complete refactoring.
Here’s a couple of examples of bad designs that exist:
Dual function of pharynx - you eat and breathe through pathways that are part of the same anatomical module. Throughout history the Heimlich manoeuvre has saved only a fraction of the total people who’ve succumbed to this evolutionary idiocy.
The painful miracle of childbirth, thanks to an extremely narrow birth canal. Big bulbous heads to think and narrow canal to extract them from, seems like the designer took the day off when thinking about this problem.
But it’s resilient. Homo sapiens have survived in deserts and arctic tundras. This German backpacker, trying to walk a 4000 km journey from NSW to Uluru, survived for a month lost in the outbacks eating flies and insects. We may be unstable on our feet and physically weak, but we’ve proliferated and populated this planet nearly everywhere.
I say this only to draw the analogy. Democracies may feel inefficient but they are like the human body. Strong democracies tend to be incredibly resilient to total collapse even at the cost of bruises and breaks. Dictatorships, on the other hand, may feel efficient, but they may not be resilient.
Dictatorships may not even be efficient… 🚆
Mussolini made trains run on time.
You’ve probably heard this said a few times. It is somehow supposed to indicate that while fascism (and dictatorship) is bad, it isn’t all bad. It is an arrow into the heart of the messy, inefficient democratic process. The infrastructure efficiency angle appeals to people especially when you are stuck with subpar roads, horrible public transport and crumbling bridges. A no-nonsense entity that will efficiently grind away and not engage in silly vote bank politics sounds almost like a trade-off you are willing to take.
Never mind that Mussolini is ranked 13 in the world’s most horrific mass murderers responsible for approximately 400,000 lives.
But apparently he didn’t even make the trains run on time.
As a former journalist, the Italian dictator understood mass media and propaganda, and admiring profiles of the charismatic strongman in the U.S. and U.K. press during the 1920s and early 1930s often dutifully repeated his boasts about Italy’s sweeping modernization. “The story that Mussolini made the trains run on time arose in the late ‘20s and gained credence abroad mainly because of well-heeled British tourists who considered the hopelessly refractory Italians governable only by dictatorial means,” wrote Victoria de Grazia, a Columbia history professor, in The New York Times back in 1994.
The thing with dictators and fascists is that they understand the information warfare very well. From Mussolini to Hitler to Putin and CCP today, they all exerted enormous control over the media. Why? They wanted to craft a specific narrative about the country and their story. So, even when you hear something good about a country run by dictators, it’s more likely than not that it is completely fabricated since there isn’t anyone fact checking nor is information flowing freely.
Verifiable fact: Dictatorships eventually always take a terrible toll 💀
A visionary, vision is scary - Eminem
In any era, the most powerful country of that era determines the global zeitgeist. We probably are in a transition from the western dominated one to…..something else, where China is probably the lead player.
Thirty years back, people in Beijing still wore Mao suits and cycled everywhere. Look at Beijing now, they say. Since 1980 China has raised an estimated 800 million people out of poverty. I mean, there is no question that they are one of the, if not the most, preeminent powers running the world today. All of this happened under a fairly non-democratic CCP which adopted its own brand of open markets to allow growth to happen, recognizing that brand of socialism it was shrouding itself with didn’t quite work.
For many Indians, mired under the rule of corrupt, divisive politicians who are more content playing people against each other, and not having done enough to lift the quality of life of hundreds of millions of people over many decades, this Chinese efficiency feels heavenly.
But the growth is slowing. China’s real estate bubble is popping. Debt is rising. And China’s population is ageing (the one child policy worked too well with unintended consequences down the years). China continues to suppress and torture many sections of people including the Uighurs. Dissenting / other powerful voices are silenced, even if it’s a world famous tennis player or the founder of one of the biggest companies in the world.
Dictatorships thrive for a period. But eventually, things start to crack. People are willing to forget about freedom and rights and such pesky things when their wealth is growing several multiples but this isn’t sustainable. And almost always Dictatorships fall back on two things:
Greater stifling of freedom and control
Stroking nationalistic feelings to lead the country to a war
Seeing the writing on the growth wall, the CCP’s been upping the ante about the security of the country:
The CCP has staked its legitimacy on reabsorbing these areas and has cultivated an intense, revanchist form of nationalism among the Chinese people. Schoolchildren study the century of humiliation. National holidays commemorate foreign theft of Chinese lands. For many citizens, making China whole again is as much an emotional as a strategic imperative. Compromise is out of the question. “We cannot lose even one inch of the territory left behind by our ancestors,” Xi told James Mattis, then the U.S. secretary of defense, in 2018.
A few mad men 😈
It takes several thousand people to dramatically improve the world and then several millions of people to keep it functioning.
To ruin it, though.
It takes just one mad man. A few mad men. Maybe a party of mad men who lead the country into a war that no one else wants.
‘Putin is smart’ is a term that can only originate if you think any white person, by default, is smart (barring Donald Trump, of course). Thousands have died so far. The Russian economy is in shambles. Russia is spending enormous money on this war as it is being cut off financially from the world. The Rouble is hitting all time lows (now worth less than 1 US cent) and bank runs have started in the country. There is no upside for Russia from this.
As much as I hate to say it, welcome to the terrible 2020s.
It started with a pandemic, has progressed to a limited conflict which will have significant implications on the global economy. But it is not going to end here. Germany is arming up again significantly (thanks to Russia’s aggression). Japan’s stance has gotten more aggressive in recent years. India is being set up for aggressive nationalism. It goes without saying that the US will continue to play military interventions in places it does not need to. And most importantly, China has clear, stated territorial goals which it will more likely execute in this decade. So, things are just about warming up.
Let’s not take this for granted 🏝
As a generation that grew up in a fairly liberal democracy, we’ve forgotten the vast benefits we’ve enjoyed being in a democratic framework. Combined with increasing capitalism, it has ensured that there is some kind of system that keeps everyone from completely going off the rails. An electoral process offers a semblance of chance to make your presence felt.
Dictatorships offer zero say. They may look and feel more efficient, perhaps even less corrupt. But they slowly remove all of our freedom and inevitably lure us into wars we don’t need.
So, let’s stop comparing ourselves to China and stop looking at them as some kind of ideal model to run a country. Let’s stop idolizing Putin as some kind of ally and loyal leader. It’s all geopolitics. Indian government should absolutely play it as they see fit and not be pressured by the rest of the world into aligning strongly. Even worse than aligning with vested West would be to align strongly with dictatorial regimes. Because the latter will inevitably also lead us further in the path of aggression, lack of freedom and loss of basic dignity of life.
I leave you all with this clip of Shane Warne taking the first Ashes hat-trick at the MCG. 🙇♂️ Play sports, not war.
Could be worse,
Tyag
Dictators Suck
Tyag - Very well written and argued. Warne video at the end was a great touch as well.
From pandemic to Putin, From Indian politics to Shane Warne, From CCP to Mussolini all these in a crisp capsule may be too big for me to gulo.