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, one of the many reasons 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, stop frequencies, speeds, routes, etc. Essentially, 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 the 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 specific 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. A family tends not to have any specific goals, except to treat each other well or maintain general cohesion. Hence, the rules are informal. Societies also have shared laws and norms, but in general, they are even more abstract and geared toward 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 differ from those of the military; hence, they have different codes. While peacetime goals target prosperous coexistence, military code demands predictable, 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 judgments. Soldier code has its purpose, just that it’s unaligned with peacetime goals.

To go back to the original bagger vs 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 outcomes through actions. Satisfaction in life relies on a fabric of alignment across time, constantly evolving to satisfy the changing needs. Such an outcome on a larger scale demands the use of a powerful multi-purpose instrument — the law.

Republished at ridersmodel.com

Walter White, from the popular series Breaking Bad, said, “I was alive.” What essentially drove him to build a Drug Empire was entrepreneurship, that excitement of feeling alive. It was not about providing for the family. Being alive is about being in direct contact with reality — absorbing and processing external signals. It demands constant awareness – processing stimuli, gauging situations, and adapting accordingly. In that sense, being alive is also a lot about being human. What separates us from animals, at least most of us, is the ability to not just instinctively react, but instead employ higher levels of cognition. Having that widespread opportunity to develop higher levels of thinking through individual ownership and responsibility deserves some acknowledgment. For most of human history, this was a privilege reserved for the few.

Being alive is quintessential Americana; few civilizations have managed to formally encode this at scale into a political Constitution and broader social fabric. Devising a layered framework to limit the collective while defending individual volition at this scale is unique because arguments for such a framework run counter to intuition.

Channeling essential English liberties and the Scottish Enlightenment, American Framers executed something different in terms of impact and scale. They made a well-reasoned argument for Federalism and achieved a democratic consensus. A sufficiently intricate argument was framed, communicated to the broader population, and executed as an institutional change. Selling an idea this sophisticated is not easy – usually complex ideas find agreement among a limited minority, and then the results motivate slow widespread adoption. But the American framers abstracted the underlying principles of the existing society to a higher level – to that of a union of states and drove mass consensus from there. Being able to execute something like this without corrupting those core ideas through demagoguery or personal agendas is uncommon. In fact, popular support of ideas that refuse to pander to baser instincts is an unusually rare phenomenon.

There is an interesting scientific aspect to this. Being part of a collective is comforting. Whether it’s politics, sports or music, we tend to seek out that tribal identity. It’s probably our hunter-gatherer instincts, constantly pushing us to belong. In that sense, American institutions elevated the overall social order by channeling tribalism as a check. To paraphrase F.A. Hayek — ‘man got civilized despite his best efforts’.

James Madison quite presciently stated in defense of Federalism — “the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority”. Instead of enforcing compliance through centralized mechanisms, American framers accepted reality as it exists and attempted to work within those constraints. It simply grounded republicanism in a more realistic understanding of human nature.

While many societies enforced conformity through top-down control and directed purpose, American framers showed unusual practical prudence. They allowed civil society, order, and purposes to emerge through peaceful coexistence. From that perspective, American Federalism created a framework of incentives favorable to the formation of civil society. A society where individual volition can survive, where coexistence was the path of least resistance, and, more importantly, where an individual could feel alive.

Even though, at a more basic level, riding a motorcycle is also a lot about being alive, and probably more about staying alive too. For starters, you are always in touch with the realities of the environment. You’re expected to be responsible for your own safety. You’re not protected by the collective, their seat belts, or air bags. You must be aware of the lifted truck with no visibility or minivan with a driver busily sifting through critical social media reels. You simply need to adapt your path to steer clear of them, or any other potential threats, social media-driven or otherwise. But the flip side is, when you are riding, all the other travails blend into the background. So plugged in to that sublime present, there are no cognitive resources to think about an uncertain future or that disappointing past. In that sense, you feel alive, but in a different mode of engagement with reality. But, there’s a prerequisite for encouraging that feel-alive-individualism – equality before the law.

Republished at ridersmodel.com