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5 hours ago
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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
