Delete One Thing

 

My cousin David posted the graphic shown here on Facebook earlier today.  “If you could ‘Delete’ anything in the world, what would it be?”  My response was, “Good question.  I am going to ponder this one.”  David responded, “I was hoping this would spur a ThisSideOfFifty piece on the all-too-obvious answers as well as the much-less-than-obvious answers. It perfectly suits your deep-thinking mind.” 

First, I have to thank my cousin for the very kind compliment.  It is a mutual admiration society as it should be with cousins that eerily think a lot alike.  Secondly, he is absolutely correct about the all-too-obvious answers versus the much-less-then-obvious answers and that I would be soon blogging about this.  On queue, a contemporary of our fathers’ posted a one word response:  HATRED.

I thought of hatred.  That is a great answer.  Who wouldn’t want a world without hatred? I also thought about hunger.  What a better world it would be without hatred or hunger.  We could do with no crime, disease, natural disasters, and pestilence for that matter.  We might consider eliminating death or better yet aging beyond thirty years.  On the more esoteric side, we could eliminate failure.  Imagine a world where nothing anyone ever did failed!  It would be a great idea to delete global warming.  We could delete man’s ability to lie, steal, cheat, or kill.

The problem with many seemingly good ideas is the economic notion of unintended consequences.  We enact laws, policies, and regulations all the time with the best of intentions that don’t quite work out as planned.  Big issues and big problems are complex and not so easy to solve by thinking a one-dimensional solution will solve a multivariable multicriteria problem.  We still have problems with poverty, drug abuse, human trafficking, and many other things for which we have laws that was supposed to eliminate these very things.

Another factor is that necessity is the mother of invention.  People need to strive and struggle to make progress.  We strive against oppression.  We struggle with grandiose wants and needs in a world of scarcity.  We need competition to better ourselves.   We struggle and compete with each other and look at how far we have come.  This is all part of Adam Smith’s concept of the Invisible Hand.

Smith put forth the notion of the invisible hand in arguing that free individuals operating in a free economy, making decisions that are primarily focused on their self-interest logically take actions that benefit society as a whole, even though such beneficial results were not the specific focus or intent of those actions. ~ Invetopedia

Many people mistake self-interest for selfishness.  They are not the same.  Maybe deleting selfishness might be a good option. 

Deleting one thing in the world is a delicious notion.  But as stated above, the world is a complex interdependent multivariate network, the machinations of which none of us mere mortals fully understand.  There is no telling what could happen to the system by altering one major variable or dimension.  The rest of network would morph to accommodate the change in ways we could not predict and might not like.

Yet, the question is still on the table: “If you could ‘Delete’ anything in the world, what would it be?”  I guess I would probably go with hatred.  What could possibly go wrong?