This article is about how a nation’s systems can either drive innovation or stifle it.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article on how innovation requires a safe environment. I wrote the story of how I made some new friends in Dubai, some exceptional individuals. I correlated their presence here as them exercising their free will to choose where they live. And they chose Dubai because it offered them the safety and stability they required to excel as individuals.
Some of their achievements are tangible, like the astronaut guy, like the wine collector guy, and some things are intangible like that guy with a VC fund who conquered his own demons and mastered his own mind. Like those two mental performance coaches from my very first week here in Dubai that have built their own frameworks, using both science and soft skills.
So what does building great things actually require? What does innovation require? It seems like it only requires providing the space in the safety for individuals like these to simply come and get a taste of it, understand the implications of what the space can provide for them and not get in their way. That’s it.
There is a caveat. This system only works with people who know not only what they don’t want, but what they really want. As such, this model may not be suitable for younger individuals who have yet to experience complex psychological distress. I believe that, if you give younger individuals space to be free, they panic. They need a different kind of safety. A safety provided only by proper leadership. They need to become leaders. You are not born a leader, despite when anybody tells you. You are forged. And students who are booksmart are not really smart. If they are only booksmart, they only ever mastered books. In this world, you also have to be street smart to be complete. Books can’t do what other people can do.
This experience had made me wonder if all these impressive individuals specifically chose to stay here because they were seeking safety, a level of safety that they simply could not have at home.
I say this because that guy with the VC fund doesn’t want to talk about his dad. That Berliner that sells cars doesn’t really want to talk about what happened to Berlin after the 2016 refugee crisis. The wine collector doesn’t want to talk about his teenage years and the guy with the astronaut startup doesn’t want to talk about the fact that he is still married.
From a mindset perspective, you can say the feeling of safety comes from within, but what is so unique about Dubai out of this entire planet is that people suffering from PTSD can outsource their safety to a government and it can actually work for them. I think there is no other place on earth that provides that.
No other country, no other government can emulate what is happening here. An established state from a western continent where the status quo is so embedded in the fabric of society, cannot emulate the safety, and ultimately the level of freedom that these individuals choose over their own homes, every single time. Because that requires earning the status quo, not enforcing it.
If we try to emulate this in the West, how would that work? What needs to be dismantled first? We can argue that Dubai specifically has managed to achieve that because it’s part of a country, a very young nation state, a little more than 50 years old. What would need to be dismantled and what would need to be unlearned in a different country that has already existed for hundreds, if not thousands of years?
Is it democracy? While they do have a royal family, they also have a president. They have a government with ministries. They do not have elections, but people from the government debate and decide who should be in charge of what. So the demos is surveyed and decisions are made at a higher level. That doesn’t make it undemocratic. That actually brings the democratic system to the 21st-century, emulating startup methodology and product-market fit.
Is it social welfare that needs to be dismantled? Two weeks ago the president of Dubai decided to completely cancel several million dollars worth of personal loans taken out by Emirati people. It was just like the end scene in Fight Club.
Moreover, they have public libraries free for access. They don’t even ask for your ID and you can just go in and read books and sit down and work. They have public beaches free for access. They have some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, constantly tended to, with lovely walkways and bike paths, very well kept. You don’t have to pay anything to enjoy these beaches. They host webinars, and provide educational material every time they adjust fiscal policy. This is not an authoritarian state. This is not even a capitalist economic system. This is a socialist state.
Is it the free market? Indeed the state does not get too much in the way of your business. However, there is compliance. There is a very strict anti-money laundering screening. There is enforcement. If you get ripped off, you can go to the police and report it and the person who ripped you off can even go to jail. So it is a free market, but justice governs it.
Now let’s look at the country where I’m from.
It has democracy. The demos directly chooses one out of, let’s say, five options for president. They don’t get to choose who the five people are. The five people choose for themselves if they want to participate or not, if they want to run for president. The president doesn’t have such an active role in government. Parliament does. And the demos elect parties, political parties. They base their choice on the policy of each party, on what they say they would do from both an economical standpoint, as well as from a legislative standpoint.
As such, the result is Parliament that is made out of several political parties that have more seats if they get votes, or less seats if they don’t. Then these parties engage in coalitions and power becomes concentrated into poles. So the pluriparty system is a lie. What’s worse, the composition of these two poles changes, depending on the personal relationships of the individuals that make up said political parties.
There is no democracy. It’s only performative. The demos does not have control over who gets to run the country as president. The president himself doesn’t even really run the country. He’s just a guy on TV. The demos has absolutely no power to decide what the parliament is made out of. More importantly the demos cannot decide what laws should be in place.
Nobody asks the demos. Nobody surveys them. There might be a referendum, but usually it’s a yes or no question and it happens very rarely. A Yes/No question does not really reflect the collective feeling of the individual.
Is my country a socialist state? Well, we do have homeless shelters.
Before we go further, I will refrain from saying “we”.
They have a pension fund. They have state owned hospitals. They have public schools and universities, but the funding for them gets cut every year, more and mroe. To add insult to injury, the private contracts allocated via public tendering are, many times, granted unjustly, because they simply can.
The system is more powerful than the individual. The individual stopped having common sense.
There is absolutely no reason for anyone to profiteer to this level. They could simply do business properly if they would think it through a little better. But the system, something otherwise abstract, supersedes human common sense.
Is my country a free market? Ever since I started being an entrepreneur 10 years ago, my accountant would inform me every quarter about the fiscal policy changes. She told me, in a moment of honesty, that it is impossible to devise a business plan in a country in which fiscal policy changes every quarter.
There are so many moving parts in that particular country that the only way to excel is by specifically exploiting the system, and not providing true value. The innovation that occurs there is only around how to exploit the system with moving parts, when the parts are configured in a certain way. Some people win while others lose, but then the system changes again and the winners lose, and the losers win.
What needs to change? Is it the political system? Should it change into what? They don’t even know what good looks like. Then, how come the UAE know what good looks like? Well, they don’t. I think they act under the assumption that they don’t know. I think they actually look at all the data they collect and then make informed decisions. I am certain my country would have the technology to collect the data but the European Union wouldn’t allow use of it. Why did they do that? They did that because European KPIs are policies, not outcomes. What the fuck our policies anyway? They’re nothing. The UAE has no policies. The fundamental policy is to get the fuck out of our way.
There is no doubt that the European Union has cleaned up my country at grassroot level. But the system stayed the same and there’s nothing that the European Commission can do. The system is more powerful than the individuals that constitute it. This is not by design. I think it was an accident, but the anti-vaccer conspiracists are right. The system is, in fact, more powerful than the individuals.
So what can be done? Because in Dubai, yes there is a price tag to live here. But there’s a price tag to live in my country as well. The only difference is, if you were born there, you don’t think too much of it. You just pay.
So the difference here is that people understood their freedom of choice. My friends in Dubai understood that they have a right to choose which price tag they pay. The world itself is more or less a free market and I think that is a beautiful thing. Countries as a concept are stupid. Countries are an invention. The planet is of people, not borders.The same types of people congregate when they find each other. These congregations are like bits and pieces of the same star that end up finding each other. They find each other only if they’re free enough to have the opportunity to look.
Good systems are good because they’re elegant. They are simple. Think of the super complicated apartments that ended up being complicated simply because there wasn’t a fundamental design in place. The design process was just reactionary, not holistic.
So a good system would have exactly like Vitruvius said, in the books on architecture:
- firmitas
utilitas
venustas
And if the world is a free market, the people can get to choose. They get to choose what countries are right for them. They get to choose what systems are right for them. For myself, I have noticed that my country’s system is not right for me. Who I am and how I conduct myself does not allow me to excel within that system
People endorse whichever position reinforces their connection to others with whom they share important commitments.
Dan Kahan (2010)