You can’t live a life without considering tradeoffs. To inform your boss you want a raise or sit quietly. Or in poker, to hold or bet. Or in nuclear war, to use aggressive rhetoric or to allow cooler heads to prevail. My working belief about what drives the decision to act or to wait are feedback loops.
Feedback loops are powerful. They can reinforce, balance, or limit behaviors of systems. Between 1947 and 1952 (4 years), the United States 64x’d their atomic bomb stock from 13 to 841. Driven, as sold to the American public, by a need for deterrents. The reinforcing feedback loop looks like this: the more bombs we have, the more secure we’ll become, and we need to increase our stock of security. But our system exists in a zoo, with other nation states and their systems.
Russia and other nations increased the stock of their own bombs for similar reasons. The reinforcing loop in one system influenced the behavior of another system. Economists call these spillover effects, externalities.
While the system of production does its thing, it’s the system of people and their deliberations and their beliefs which ultimately set a catastrophe in motion. The decision to allow cooler heads to prevail, or the decision to be aggressive. Of course, that all depends on the reinforcement feedback loops present in those social and political systems.
The takeaway for me is simple: your system of thought and life matters — your inputs, your outputs, and the feedback loops that help shape your processes all matter. Your system helps create a life of contentment vs war.
Inspiration and facts about bomb production from Annie Jacobsen’s “Nuclear War: A Scenario” — continuing to be the one of the best books I’ve read… and I’m not a war junkie.