Can You Repair a Broken System?

Spoiler alert: no.

I started this essay nearly a year and a half ago, finished what felt like a publishable draft a few months later, and then sat on it for over a year. It is a meditation on a simple principle, and one that drives a lot of my political and philosophical impulses. It is also intended to be an invitation, to an ongoing conversation, which I hope you will accept.

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You Can’t Fix a Broken System

from the sublime opening sequence of Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)

First, a definition:

System: any established set of entities (people, organizations, institutions, machines) and processes that are designed to perform a specific set of functions.

Some examples:

• Healthcare system

• Criminal justice system

• Public education system

• Financial regulatory system

I'm sure you can think of others.

It is easy for us to understand that none of these systems are one entity -- or even a well-defined set of entities. Rather, they are comprised of the private businesses and public agencies that are complexly intertwined to accomplish a relatively narrow scope of work. Human health, civic justice, child education, economic stability, etc.

This all seems self-evident to me, but maybe it isn’t to you. Either way, for the sake of argument, let’s say we agree on these premises.

OK then, a theory:

Every entrenched system is unfixable.

By entrenched, I mean well-established and irreducibly complex, and by unfixable, I mean unfixable.

I'm no cynic, but you'll have to stay with me.

The so-called healthcare system is a good example because it neatly illustrates all of our local definitions, and everyone — everyone — believes it is broken. The Gordian Knot of nested bureaucracies and conflicted interests are profoundly inefficient, corrupt, bloated, and wasteful, to the point that it would be hard to overstate how bad things have gotten. So bad, in fact, that most people are already convinced the healthcare system is basically unfixable.

My contention is that this example is in no way anomalous.

In the case of nearly every entrenched system, if you peel back the curtain, lift up the tarp that covers the pit of dark and terrible truth, you can't help but recoil in horror at what you see. Your mind, overwhelmed at its own inability to fully comprehend the magnitude of corruption and waste, may deploy tools to block out the reality.

Simple Solutions

Among the more popular of these tools is the retreat into deeper corners of conviction about the efficacy of simple solutions. "If only we would do THIS..." or, "If only people would understand THAT..." then the problems would be solved, and the system would be fixed. A pet law or a scrap of legislation. Some idea you hope to spread. Privatize everything! Socialize everything!

People chase simple solutions to impossibly complex problems to stave off despair, and frankly, it's hard to blame them.

Other people, perhaps a bit wiser, work hard on more complex solutions. But they often still struggle to accept the truth that, in the case of a sufficiently entrenched (and sufficiently broken) system, every attempted solution, regardless of its sophistication (or lack thereof), only makes the problem worse.

Remember the Affordable Healthcare Act? Go ahead and do some before and after cost comparisons if you want to have a bad day. And lest you be tempted to begin the blame game, consider whether winning that game actually matters. (Hint: it doesn't.)

The problem is, as it ever was, that the people who possess the power to fix things lack both the incentive and the competence to do so. To save time, I'd like to fast forward to the part where you accept the axiom I'm trying to establish: broken systems are unfixable.

Congratulations! You are no longer an ignorant or delusional partisan. Neither are you hiding from the horrible truth, or actively denying what you know.

Great. Now what?

Three Postures

There are, perhaps, three dominant postures among the disenchanted. Let's start with the stupidest one.

Posture #1: Burn it down.

After all, if it can't be fixed, it can't be saved, so why not reduce it to ashes and make room for something better?

Somewhat predictably, this is the logic that drives neo-conservative militias and radical left groups like Antifa alike. All extremists use a remarkably similar mode of reasoning. It is the political equivalent of throwing a temper tantrum. When something makes you mad, you want to break it. And what could possibly make you madder than realizing the game is completely rigged, and there's no way to win?

So yeah, we get it. You’re mad.

Unfortunately, the consequences of the actions these people take are the ruin of chaos in the short term, and a very high probability that whatever comes after the fire is even worse than what you managed to burn down.

Posture #2: Fuck it.

In 12-step communities, recovering addicts will warn one another to "watch out for the fuck-its." By that, they mean the hopeless abdication of effort. "I can't win, so why try?"

In the context of political or social disenchantment, the “fuck-its” are what sap away all the energy of engagement.

In the end, this posture is just a less violent version of the first one. They are both the product of hopelessness and cynicism. "Yep, we're all screwed. Oh well."

Posture #3: Build.

If the current system is unfixable, then we'd better get busy building a new one.

This is how a lot of innovation has happened in the market economy, for instance. An upstart competitor solves problems better than the legacy business until eventually the legacy business can't compete, and dies off¹.

We can think of a lot of past examples in the business world, but does the principle still hold today, and outside of that category? Can huge, broken systems be replaced by new and better systems from underneath?

Of course they can.

The era of disruption never ends. Human ingenuity marches on. Technology becomes more sophisticated. Corrupt, incompetent leaders eventually find themselves outmatched and beaten by fresher, nimbler challengers.

This is already happening with blockchain technologies. Foremost in the sector of finance, which might be one of the most important and foundational systems in the world. Blockchains are disrupting finance by introducing a brand new, decentralized system that is becoming better and better at the very jobs the old, broken system was originally designed to do. Eventually, the old system will collapse under its own bloated weight of irrelevance, and blockchain-enabled decentralized finance (DeFi) will become the dominant financial system in the world².

The same thing will happen with governments. Talented people are even now working out how to build decentralized, self-governing communities that can provide important services more efficiently and effectively than federal, state, and local governments do, or can³. Many of those efforts will fail. But some of them will be so successful that they replace the old broken systems of government.

Not that those old systems won't fight back. Of course they will. But only because they feel threatened, which typically will not happen until the new systems have already begun to outperform them.

This is one of the great positive corollaries of the unfixable-system axiom: old, broken systems will usually fail to perceive outside threats until it is too late to effectively respond.

And while conflicts between old systems and new systems are costly, the alternatives to building new ones are far more so -- e.g. the old systems continue onward, with increasingly ruinous corruption and waste; or, much worse, the black-pilled cynics successfully burn them down.

The Way of Nature

Do you know how bodies die? They stop building new cells.

From the moment you are born, your body continually replaces old cells with new ones. It doesn't repair, it replaces. When cells are dying, they get replaced. Whey they stop working, they're replaced. When they become corrupted and start doing the wrong job (like spreading a virus or becoming cancerous), they get replaced.

Life is nothing more, and nothing less, than building things over and over and over.

When you go to the gym, your body builds stronger cells, and lets the weaker ones die off and get recycled.

When you learn something new, you build new neural pathways that make old ones obsolete, and they eventually wither away.

When a snake sheds its old skin, it’s because the skin underneath is ready to take on all the jobs skin is supposed to do.

Old systems are just scaffolding for the new, which become scaffolding for the next ones after them.

No Such Thing as Done

Nothing is ever perfect. Every time a new system successfully supplants an old one, it introduces a new set of (probably) unfixable problems.

There are lifecycles, though. We stake our hope in the idea that a new system will be better than the old one in some ways, even if it eventually becomes just as dysfunctional. Thankfully, there will always be innovators and iterators — people hard at work building the next one.

Because no matter our failures or achievements, no matter how good or how bad things get, the objective is the same…

Keep building better systems.

Our work is never done, and that's OK. It's not supposed to be done. If it was done, we might as well be dead.

And this world, for all its problems, is very much alive.

1. The late Clayton Christensen made this case so effectively in The Innovator’s Dilemma that it has become axiomatic in the world of business. His recognition of this phenomenon was sort of like Isaac Newton outlining the effects of gravity.

2. I wrote that paragraph at the end of 2021, during the peak of a bull market. 2022 has been hard on every market, and especially crypto, as ponzi schemes run by big centralized exchanges imploded, doing massive financial damage to millions of people.

Even after all the market trauma, though, the most robust currencies and defi exchanges are still standing. My conviction that blockchain technologies will eventually replace their legacy predecessors remains unchanged.

3. See The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan.