Efficiency is building ONE road from place A to place B. Why spend the extra money to build two or three roads to the same destination? Building one road saves money and time (in the short term). This is the logic of short-sighted individuals: politicians, bureaucrats, CEOs. And this works great until a tractor trailer turns over, blocking the path for thousands of commuters and vital emergency services. “We couldn’t have seen this coming,” say the politicians who already got reelected and and CEOs who spent their sizable bonuses. “It was an act of god!” But any reasonable person understands that efficiency saves money and time at the expense of increasing fragility for a given system.
Redundancy is the game that nature plays. That’s why you have two kidneys and two lungs and multiple arteries carrying blood to vital organs. That’s why there’s so much gene variation between populations and individuals. You don’t know what catastrophe awaits in the future, so it’s best to diversify your assets to ensure that something will survive.
For the last several hundred years, our world has increased its focus on maximizing efficiency. And it seemed for a while that we could play this game forever. But with increasing efficiencies comes exponential fragility. And with exponential fragility comes the increasing risk of everything falling apart, because the complexity required to manage evermore efficient systems quickly becomes unmanageable.
We find ourselves sitting on a pile of thermonuclear weapons that can destroy the earth hundreds of times over, playing childish political games of chicken, hoping the other side is sane enough not to push the button. We conduct genomic viral research, creating monstrous pathogens that eventually leak into the population, disrupting economies and killing millions of people. We print and spend trillions of dollars that belong to our grandkids because we can’t control our materialistic/consumeristic appetites and are unwilling to face the reality of the imminent collapse of our fiat monetary system.
But at least we have more media and entertainment than ever before so that we can distract ourselves while everything around us crumbles.