October 11, 2016 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
The Anna Karenina Principle
The Anna Karenina Principle
Leo Tolstoy’s great tragedy Anna Karenina (written in 1870s)
begins with these following lines:
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in
its own way.”
This statement can be generalized to mean that there are
innumerable ways to fail (business, career, nation states, empires), to be
unhappy (a family of an ape or any individual animal) to be unstable (any system)
or to be diseased or dead (life itself being an extreme rarity as far as we
know our universe).
But in order to be successful or happy or achieve stability or be
healthy and alive, multitude of parameters need to be fined tuned and every
possible condition need to be satisfied.
No so simple example being a successful and prosperous society
like the United States.
Myriad random events had to occur and be set in motion very
arbitrarily of course, for it to become a nation which is looked upon as an
example by most apes (Just consider how it’s presidential elections are covered
compared to that of Russia or China which passes without a flutter).
Let me point them out in brief.
It had to be in the right geographic location cut off from the
warring European nations and imperial armies of both China and Japan.
It had to have a temperate climate (and not tropical) keeping the
burden of infectious diseases low.
Adequate area (in terms of population), viable soil and climate
for agriculture and farming.
Suitable species of animals fit for domestication such as poultry,
cattle and horses (and not zebra or giraffe or elephants and Ostriches).
Over these fundamentals, there had to the right triplet
combination of nurturing of an economic system that rewards entrepreneurship
and goes along with the essential greedy nature of human apes.
Any economic system can be considered even remotely workable only
and only if it takes into consideration the tendencies of human nature.
The basic truth is that human apes (like any survival machine) are
essentially greedy and that their brain works on reward or incentive principle.
Law and jurisprudence that keeps crime low within the society and
should take for granted that human apes are inherently prone to cheating and predisposed
to corruption given the opportunity.
Lastly an education system that can nurture both the young and the
great minds capable of total exploitation of both the scientific method and
inevitable industrialization (no matter the deadly consequences to follow from
it).
One can never eschew the subject of adequate population as it is
obvious from our history that whenever there have been surplus men it
eventually leads to civil strife and wars.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average storytelling chimpanzee or
login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
Another great educator and teacher that I am aware of is Professor
Subhashish in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, he actually does and teaches real
mathematics and physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All
his books can be downloaded for free through this link.
For
entertainment may I suggest Kids Songs channel.
Leo Tolstoy's landmark work "Anna Karenina" begins with this sentence
Jared Diamond in his highly acclaimed book "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" used this principle to explain the possibility of domestication of only certain animal species
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