Spring poses interesting opportunities, especially if you can manage to ride up to the mountains. It’s not every day you ride through icy roads on a bright day, at near zero temperatures, and with a backdrop of snow-covered mountains! Not to mention occasional water streams gently crossing the freeway, and a highway shoulder precariously stacked with freshly removed snow – guess this is why motorcycling is called sensory overload? As usual, the fuel tank was running low; the two-gallon tank has been a bit difficult to handle, especially when you go exploring. But, like every other time, when it was close to being empty, providence manifested in the form of a Shell gas station.

Group riding on this motorcycle is going to be a tad annoying for others. You don’t want to ride with someone who is constantly on the lookout for a gas station — it introduces unnecessary friction, especially if someone is ahead with a five-gallon tank. In that sense, groups do pose different trade-offs. We all prefer different riding patterns, different frequencies for stops, speeds, routes, etc. A 2-gallon cafe racer will find it hard to get along with a bagger.

Not just in group riding, even general social order demands a certain degree of shared compatible rule following.  Without commonly agreed code, large groups of people will not get along. For example — top-down hierarchical code is mandatory in the military. While role-based layering is common in private organizations. Government bureaucracies depend on documented processes and structure, where adherence to processes often becomes a primary objective. Achieving such goals at scale requires a rule-based coordination. These properties are often decomposed and applied at different layers of the system.

As evident above, the nature of this shared code also depends on the social sphere. The military has a targeted purpose and hence a strictly enforced structure. Here there is little room for malleability. While private organizations tend to have more abstract goals – selling products and services, and are therefore more open-ended, evolving based on contingent profitable circumstances. While a family tends to not have any specific goals, except to treat each other well or general cohesion – hence rules are informal. Societies also have shared laws and norms, but in general they are even more abstract and geared for coexistence. For example, we don’t need to be nice to our neighbors if we don’t infringe on their rights.

The pattern is clear – group goals are mapped to some shared code, and effective compliance determines the outcomes. The goals of a free civil society are not the same as the military; hence they have different codes. While peacetime goals are limited to prosperous coexistence, military code demands predictable and disciplined behavior. While creativity and exercise of individual volition are peacetime virtues, a volatile wartime environment prioritizes disciplined execution under pressure. A soldier is forced to apply predefined rules of conduct to moral choices while a free individual can exercise subjective ethical judgements. Soldier code has its purpose, just that it’s unaligned with peacetime goals.

To go back to the original bagger v/s cafe racer problem – their riding incompatibility is because their motorcycling goals and internal inclinations are different, and that same difference reflects in their machines and riding rules. Eventually, whether it’s riding or life, we’re always part of various groups – and what we seek is elusive harmony of goals, codes, and resulting actions. Peace relies on having that fabric of alignment across time, constantly evolving to satisfy the changing needs.