Godzilla Isn't Good or Bad, He's Just Him

"Godzilla isn’t good or bad. He's just him. He destroys cities because long ago, Man had done terrible things that had angered Godzilla, such as Nuclear Tests, Atomic Bombs, and Wars. If you look at it in perspective, Godzilla is a warning to mankind about the possible mistakes that may occur. Godzilla is an innocent victim of our stupid experiments. His nature is his own vengeance.” – Quora user “Austen” in response to “was Godzilla good or bad?”

You may notice an absence so far from this discussion the largest lizard of them all, governments. Governments are the blunt instrument by which we try and fill in the gaps created when:

1. Shareholder value maximization breaks down and some service or safety that is “for the good of the collective” isn’t able to be provided in a shareholder value maximizing way by our corporate lizards and;

2. There aren’t enough resources gathered by individual lizards who have clicked into human brain mode to solve this gap via charity, goodwill, or other altruistic pursuits

We call these collective action problems. If we have trouble defining what “for the good of the company” means, imagine how much harder it is to get our head around what “for the good of the collective” tangibly means? Where corporations are maximizing for shareholder value, what are governments maximizing for? GDP? Jobs? Individual wealth? Life expectancy? Happiness? Health? Labour mobility? Votes for the party currently in power?

If compensating managers with equity that theoretically ties them to the good of the company has its challenges, then creating a framework to properly incent and hold our national leaders accountable must be even more challenging right? If we’ve organized our entire society and private sector around individuals being motivated by money and we’ve drilled it into everyone that money = good, then it must be very challenging to organize the leaders of the most powerful Godzilla lizards in the world to explicitly reject that paradigm and instead say “nonono money doesn’t equal good, good equals good!” right? And it must be even harder to get them to maximize real “good” when we’ve never actually tried to agree on what it means at any level of our society right?

Yep! And surprise, by and large we’ve done a terrible job of it. Our national governmental frameworks are a widely recognized disaster of conflicting incentives, institutionalized corruption, short-term thinking, vote pandering and wildly uneven messaging. It’s certainly not that “governments are evil mannnn”, but we’ve tasked them with filling in these collective action gaps in our society, but haven’t given them any real frameworks or instincts for actually thinking about what they are trying to do. How does the lizard brain even execute the “simplest, most aggressive, most effective action” when it doesn’t even know what it’s trying to do?

If there is any semi-unifying instinct that we’ve given to our government’s lizard brain, at least in the “shareholder value maximizing” post-cold war West it’s our age-old theory of maximizing dollars = maximizing good. If governments use their “gap filling” power to maximize GDP across the country then they’ve enabled the greatest amount of “good” to exist in the country right? If governments lizard brains lack defined instincts, this problem is exacerbated by the machines (technology and institutions) they have available to them to execute on these scattered instincts. It’s as if Godzilla had the power to defend or destroy humanity but didn’t know which to do or how to do it, and each of its limbs had a different answer.

To recap, we’ve got three layers in the lizard stack:

1. Individual human lizards

2. Corporate lizards

3. Government lizards

As the proxy of money = good has broken and we’ve seen shareholder value continue to tick up and up and up and up, while all of the things it’s intended to proxy for have fallen precipitously. How can we leverage what evolution and biology have taught us to reprogram our lizards and maintain humanity in an ever-quickening machine speed world?