Why Things Go to Shit

A lot of people wonder what it’s all for. Does the universe have a purpose or a destination? Are we coming together, expanding, or building up to something momentous? Where’s it all going in the end?

Well, I have the answer: to shit. Flesh decays, stars burn out, democracies backslide, matter drifts apart, status games collapse, cars break down, cancer grows, and organisms go extinct. There’s only one thing standing in the way of this lugubrious process: incentives.

In a previous post, I defined incentives as “things in the world that human primates evolved to want.” In this post, I’ll define them even more broadly as things in the world that human primates, and physical systems in general, want or move toward.

This brings me to The Big Law—the idea at the heart of this post:

Everything goes to shit, unless there’s an incentive for it not to.

Let’s look at some examples.

1. There’s no incentive for a tornado to steer its way around our homes and businesses, because tornadoes don’t have values. So when a tornado appears, everything around it goes to shit.

2. There is no incentive for a toddler—a cute version of a tornado—to avoid making a mess, because they’re not the ones who have to clean it up. So everything in a toddler’s path goes to shit.

3. There’s no incentive for crops to naturally provide us with bountiful and delicious food, or for animals to willingly throw themselves onto our plates, or for trees and rocks to spontaneously arrange themselves into Spanish-style villas. So poverty is the default state of life. It is only when you have certain economic incentive structures, like a stable currency, a global marketplace, and a division of labor, that wealth slowly comes into existence.

4. There is no incentive for us to acquire accurate beliefs about the world beyond our sensory awareness and practical decisions. So beliefs beyond our sensory awareness and practical decisions go to shit (of the male bovine variety). That is, unless there’s an incentive structure, like the prestige economy surrounding scientific research, that guides them toward truth.

5. There’s little incentive for natural selection to keep an organism alive and well after it has reared its offspring to maturity. So mutations that harm organisms late in life, after successful reproduction, will be relatively “invisible” to natural selection, accumulating in a species over time. The result is that post-reproductive organisms go to shit—or, you know, age.

6. There’s little incentive for natural selection to purge the genome of harmful recessive genes, because they’re relatively “invisible” to natural selection. They only get expressed—with a 25% chance—when both parents share a copy of the gene. So the more genetically related a set of parents are, the more likely they are to share harmful recessive genes, and the more maladapted their offspring will tend to be. This explains why we evolved to find incest icky, and why the recessive part of the genome is filled with maladaptive or non-adaptive traits (i.e., pretty shitty).

7. There is no Darwinian incentive for an organism to act “for the good of the species.” Instead, organisms evolve to act for the good of themselves and their genetic relatives—and against their rivals. This can lead to costly competitions that make the entire species worse off. In extreme cases, a species might evolve such bloodthirsty rivalries or cumbersome sexual ornaments that it can no longer survive in its environment. This sort of thing is known as “evolutionary suicide,” and it might explain why over 99% of species that have existed have gone extinct.

8. Which reminds me… Humans are animals too, right? Uh oh. That means there’s no Darwinian incentive for humans to act for the good of humanity. Instead, humans evolved to act for the good of themselves and their genetic relatives—and against their rivals. This has caused a lot of costly competitions that have made humanity worse off, and it might ultimately cause our species to go to shit.

9. But what about moral progress—the expansion of “the moral circle?” How was that incentivized? As I wrote in a previous post, one plausible answer is: “with cash.”

   “If you only sell stuff to members of your tribe, you’re not going to make as much money as someone who sells stuff to everyone. The same thing goes for consumers. If you only buy from your tribe, you’re going to get crappier stuff. Ditto for workers. If you only work for your tribe, you’ll get fewer job offers. And if you reward workers based on tribal loyalty, instead of productivity, you’ll get lower productivity, and less profit.”

10. There’s no incentive for an autocracy to act in the interests of its citizens, because the citizens have no safe means of incentivizing the regime to act in their interests. So the autocracy will tend to enrich itself at the citizens’ expense—and, from the citizens’ perspective, go to shit.

11. So democracies can’t go to shit, right? Wrong. They just go to shit more slowly and quietly. There’s no incentive for democratic governments to provide objectively good policies (as opposed to good-sounding policies), because voters lack the expertise to assess the complex effects of any particular policy on any desired outcome. This is because 1) it is extremely hard (if not impossible) to acquire that expertise, 2) voters are largely ignorant and biased by tribal allegiances, and 3) each citizen’s vote has essentially zero impact on political outcomes, giving them essentially zero incentive to acquire that expertise or overcome those biases. Therefore, democratic governments gradually accumulate good-sounding (but ultimately bad) policies, grow increasingly sclerotic and inefficient, and go to shit.

12. This is becoming a bummer, so let me cheer you up with some dead animals. There’s no incentive for dead animals to remain present and intact. So they’ll break apart and decompose, getting devoured by microbes that emit unpleasant odors, going to—and smelling worse than—shit.

13. Something like this probably happens to organizations when they get too big to reliably monitor, like a dismembered body unable to control its limbs. Such expansive, dismembered organizations get devoured by principal agent problems and “rot.”

14. All this doom and gloom reminds me: the universe has no incentive to be inspiring, politically congenial, or existentially satisfying to apes like us. So the universe will tend to be pretty uninspiring, politically awkward, and existentially disorienting to apes like us.

15. If you drill deeper, you’ll find this law at the heart of matter itself: it’s the second law of thermodynamics. There’s no incentive for a substance to move toward greater order, because there are many more ways for a substance to be disordered than ordered. Similarly, there are many more ways for something to be shitty than good. So the universe will naturally move toward entropy and shittiness unless there’s an incentive for it not to. Which reminds me…

16. There are two local exceptions to the second law of thermodynamics I’m aware of: 1) the force of gravity, which provides an incentive for bits of matter to clump together into stars and planets, and 2) natural selection, which provides an incentive for bits of self-replicating matter to build organic forms that promote their own replication.

17. But stars eventually burn out, and natural selection only “cares” about the frequency of individual replicators relative to their alternatives. Which means that everything else—the good of the species, the fate of the cosmos—goes to shit.

So if you care about something, make sure you build a good, strong incentive to keep it from going to shit. Because if you don’t, that’s exactly where it will go.