The Asymmetry of Destruction
It's easier to destroy than to create
Two children sit hunched over a city in miniature constructed of wooden blocks. With precise care, eyebrows furrowed in concentration, one of the children lays the foundation of a new tower. Block by block, the tower grows in height until the child has to reach on tiptoe to make the next placement. The tower sways slightly, but her deft adjustment holds the tower steady. The two girls smile at each other and begin constructing another.
A boy enters the room and sees the wooden metropolis. He approaches the girls and spends a moment examining their tower. He walks around the construction, glances at the girls, then snatches a block from the foundation.
The tower collapses.
The girls cry.
The boy watches them, smiling.
Creation takes time, effort, cohesion. Expertise. It requires competence. It needs the building of consensus. Things have to function properly for a creative act to be successful; creation is fragile. You can’t build things alone; you must work together in an act of cooperation.
The act of destruction is far easier than the act of creation. It requires less care. A path of unilaterality is not only possible, but often preferred. The removal of any element, no matter how small, can break a functioning system.
Masonry arches are held together by the forces of gravity: wedge-shaped stones, called voussoir, stacked on top of each other distribute forces down and out into the abutments of the arch. At the apex of the arch, the keystone locks all of the other pieces together in a cohesive system. The removal of a any single voussoir will cause an arch to buckle inward and collapse. Cessation of function is the point of destruction.
Both creation and destruction are an exercise of power. The asymmetry of effort required in each of these acts means that those who lack competence or a positive vision for the future, who nevertheless love the exercise of power, will necessarily demolish more than they create.
This asymmetry exists in epistemology as well: as said in Brandolini’s Law, “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” I know this fact from my own experience. Our political moment is rife with this reality.
It feels like we are fighting an uphill battle to make the world a better place, and I only hope that capability, passion, and desire to build can outweigh the desire to destroy, despite the asymmetry.
I have worked in clean energy for my entire career because I believe in the power of new technology and the scalability of capitalism to make our world healthier, richer, and, yes, more sustainable. I have a positive vision of a bright future, but that vision is now darkened by clouds of destruction.
Beyond the naked self-enrichment in the ill-named Big Beautiful Bill, it reads as full of policy with an intent to annihilate. The ideology behind it seems to lack a constructive vision for what a good world looks like. It is an ideology of, beyond all else, scarcity. It is completely zero-sum.
The world is not zero-sum. Some have known this since at least antiquity. I write these words with a small silver Roman denarius sitting on my desk next to me. The weathered face of Marcus Aurelius, stamped in the silver nearly two thousand years ago, looks at me, and I can almost hear him saying the words from his Meditations:
Have I done something for the common good? Then I too have benefited. Have this thought always ready to hand: and no stopping.
Title image: Arch of Marcus Aurelius, Tripoli, Libya
Well said. There is an asymmetry but I think its heading towards a bad direction/outcome. The biggest issues are saturation of communication channels with noise compromising communication, and the muddying and removal of objective facts in favor of opaque opinion.
Regarding the podcast you mention, that actually may be worth digging into further for validation than you did in that post.
I've heard that rhetoric, and many collected metrics have been changed in the collection methodology to favor certain narratives. I know for a fact that this has happened with regards to a jobs report where BLS had to revise the report a year after the fact (by more than 1 million jobs , a loss thereof), and its been happening with increasing frequency for decades related to inflation stats, making it difficult to have sound data to make any argument.
Without communication, and objective measurement no feedback related action can alter the current trajectory.
As a result of these things my general inclination (and many others) is that many of the reports are no longer credible, and it takes some creative investigation to find out how that is the case in some cases (that assymetry), but its there with enough objective information.
You may not be aware, but the Fed has silently nationalized parts of the banking industry and by extension much of the economy which doesn't show up these reports. Technically its held in private hands still, but its money printing where they have engaged in picking winners and losers through passthru entities, QE, the most recent turnover of bond exchanges/auction to Blackrock, and abandonment of the fractional reserve system in favor of a modified Capital Reserve system that is based in objective valuation without price discovery (circa 2020). In other words, monetary systems that will fail and in those failures result in a collapse to non-market socialism (that fails too).
With such massive flows from money-printing occurring in the dark with these things, and non-reserve debt being issued to private companies who upon receiving such funds become state actors out-competing legitimate business, forcing small business and medium business closures towards monopoly; there are serious concerns of decline when such printing goes too far and monetary properties fail as they naturally do in stage 3 of a ponzi where objectively measurable debt growth exceeds inflows/assets.
Those properties being a stable store of value/medium of exchange. For the past several decades this has been going on where they sieving through debasement wealth which eventually ends in dynamics forcing a deflationary cycle which may lead to socio-economic collapse.
The boom bust cycle in the last several iterations have required a true-up through bailout/bailin/money printing to kickstart the start of the next cycle, a true-up which requires an exponential amount each time, and we've gone through several such crises now to prevent deflation.
There is great concern given what we know from Malthus/Catton about post-extraction food production capabilities when order fails, as it will chaotically without some counter-acting force of equal economic power to the existing monetary system.
Free peoples do not abide having slavery imposed on them, and will either violently oppose such things, or eliminate themselves and their children strategically so they don't suffer meaninglessly. (Wealth and Poverty of Nations; Landes).