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In the mid-1850s, one story goes, during the British Raj (rule) in India, the Brits became increasingly concerned about the incredible number of venomous cobras in Delhi, India.
Ahoy. They were going to save the Delhians, they decided, from these horrid fanged beasts!
So, naturally, the Limeys hatched a foolproof plan. Clear and simple as the truth, it was. They offered a bounty for cobras.
What could possibly go wrong?
And, of course, it was a wild success. Thousands of venomous snakes were brought in and slaughtered in mere weeks. Thousands more in mere months. But, oddly enough, the cobra population didn’t cease. They just kept coming in ever-greater numbers. Week after week, month after month, the dead cobras kept flooding in. And the program was starting to put a strain on the coffers.
Finally, the Brits realized what was happening. Thousands of Indians had started to breed the cobras in their villages for the extra income.
They slapped their foreheads. They’d created a market for cobras!
Upon this discovery, naturally, the appalled Brits scrapped the program immediately, realizing how much money they’d wasted. And, naturally, upon realizing their cobra pits worthless, the breeders set their snakes loose. The cobra population quickly became even worse than it was before.
THE TALE OF THE TAILLESS RATS
The French apparently made the same mistake in Hanoi, Vietnam, when it was under French colonial rule.
The rat population was so large, the regime decided to offer a bounty for each rat killed. The rats were a nuisance and they carried disease. It was a win for everyone.
To collect the bounty, one had to simply bring in the severed tail of each rat killed. Simple enough.
Well, of course, you can imagine what happened in the coming weeks: The rat population exploded.
Residents would catch the rats, chop off their tails, feed them and set them free so they could breed and create even more rat tails. As a result, Hanoi had more disease-ridden rats than ever -- just most of them didn’t have tails.
This phenomenon is now referred to as the cobra effect -- when an attempted solution makes the problem worse.
And 99.9999% of the time, it begins with good intentions.
Such is the nature of unintended consequences. The world is complex. We can never truly know how our decisions will reverberate out into the world-at-large.
DECENTRALIZE EVERYTHING
Which is why, of course, decentralization of power is so important. Humans are infallibly fallible creatures. The more power in a few hands, the more systemically f*cked the system is when these people are wrong.
Decentralized power allows for smaller areas of decision-making. It allows for smaller, lighter and faster "nodes" to learn from one another in a constructive way. And to recover quicker from bad decisions.
In enormous, sweeping, centralized power structures, even the purest-hearted ideas can lead to armies of poisonous beasts and streets full of disease-ridden tailless rats.
Decentralize the things.