Weak Points

My daddy, who was a mechanic all his life, used to say that every vehicle ever made had a weak point. Some part or system that did not perform as well or last as long as the rest of the vehicle. One of his stories revolved around a situation that came up because of such a weak point.

Back in 1959, he was running a little garage in Stewartville. A young man of the community came to him and told him that he was going to build up a hot rod and wanted to know if my dad had a good V8 engine that he would sell him cheap. My dad told him that he did in fact have an V8 engine from a 1955 Buick that he would let him have for $50. Now this was when Coca Colas were still 5 cents so $50 was not a small amount of money, but it was much less than what the young man expected to pay. He asked my dad what was wrong with it? Nothing, there is just not any demand for them. The boy was skeptical and did not buy the engine. My dad said that the reason there was no demand for them was that they would run forever. Unfortunately they were coupled to Dyna-Flo transmissions which were not so robust. The transmission was the weak point on the 55 Buick and a good transmission was what everyone was searching for, they already had a good engine. My Dad always finished the story by saying that if he had asked $200 for the engine, the boy would have bought it.

As I have gotten older, I have decided that cars are an appropriate metaphor for all things in the universe, including people. We all have our weak points. Fortunately in most cases, the weak points offset each other. I may be good in math, you may be good in the arts, someone else has a talent for cooking. It all kind of works out most of the time.

However, there is one weak point that seems to afflict a majority of our species. It is the desire for complexity. Look around you. Everywhere you look you will see people dedicating their lives to making things increasingly complex. Ultimately all things touched by human hands reach a level of complexity that is unworkable, unsustainable and they ultimately collapse. In some cases the collapse comes quickly. VCRs for instance had already become completely impossible to program before DVD players came along and put them out of their misery. In other instances the rigging and iterations drag on for centuries. Most governments and many religions fall into that category.

Don't despair though, just as the DVD replaced the unprogramable VCR, so to will other devices and systems replace all the current ones that are becoming overly complicated. Of course as soon as these new simple systems arrive on the scene, the majority will set about to complicate them as quickly and completely as is possible. Such seems to be our nature.