The Hummingbird and the Poison Tree
I recently ripped through Stephen Johnson's How We Got to Now, where he coined a wonderful phrase: the Hummingbird Effect. That's where a breakthrough in one area of life leads to unexpected progress in seemingly unrelated domains.
One of the best examples from the book is how the invention of the printing press led to a surge in people realizing they were farsighted, which led to a surge in eyeglass manufacturing tech, which led to an eyeglass maker creating the microscope after watching his children play with two lens, which lead to the microbial theory of disease, which led to dramatic improvements in medicine and human longevity.
The Hummingbird Effect may sound a lot like the Butterfly Effect from chaos theory where the flap of a butterfly's wings starts a typhoon in China. But the two ideas are totally different. Chaos theory tells us there are so many variables in life that you simply can't trace the chain of causality backwards because it's too complex. A small change like the way a butterfly's wings flapped last week may be connected to a typhoon halfway around the world but there are so many variables in between that we simply don't have the compute power or the right mathematics to map out that mind-bogglingly complex chain of events.
But something wholly different is at work with the hummingbird evolving to pollinate certain kinds of flowers. We can spot the high level links and trace how the changes in flowers led to the co-evolution of the beautiful hummingbird and its hypnotic wings so that it can hover long enough to pollinate them, just as we can trace the rise of eyeglass tech to the microscope and germ theory. Without the eyeglass boom, the glass maker never sees his kids playing with two lenses and has a brainstorm. Without the microscope, nobody can prove that there are tiny organisms floating around in water that can make us sick or floating through the air when someone sneezes. Until we understand that we can't make medicines that attack those invisible bugs. The Hummingbird Effect is subtle but if we're eagle-eyed enough we can trace the lineage of the co-evolution of systems and how one thing affects something else down the line.
But after I read the book something really bothered me that I couldn't quite place. As I thought more and more about the hummingbirds and the bees and the flowers and the trees, I realized Johnson had missed something critical.
Then it hit me.
The Hummingbird was an inherently positive metaphor and his book traces dozens of examples of beneficial evolution in systems and society. But there's an inverse effect that he never touches on, where a dark idea or negative trait takes root and leads to destructive changes in systems and eventually to their death and decay.
I call it the Poison Tree Effect.
It came out of phrase I coined years ago: "Poison trees make poison fruit," or just "Poison tree, poison fruit."
Sometimes a system is resilient enough to have poison flowers and poison trees in the ecosystem. There are enough beneficial plants to keep the parasitic plants at the fringes, doing light damage but never taking down the entire system. But sometimes those poison trees spread, choking out the rest of the forest, their seeds floating away on the wind and infecting distant ecosystems and their fruit killing off the animals and insects that eat it and causing a chain reaction of decay. Too many poison trees and a system collapses.
(Apparently there’s a legal term called “the fruit of the poison tree” that I’d never heard before writing this. It refers to something different, namely evidence obtained by coercion or by illegal search.)
Both of these ideas link up neatly with another idea that comes from Malcolm Gladwell: The Tipping Point. That's a point when ideas and events in a system hits critical mass the system surges up or down dramatically in a way that's virtually unstoppable. Once the printing press takes off, its power ripples out into the world and society undergoes tremendously positive changes, with literacy rising, knowledge spreading and advances in science and medicine taking hold, while the darkness of the middle ages starts to recede.
On the flip side, take something like a big economic downturn, when economics collapse and that helps a strongman into power in a democracy. That happened in the 1930s when Hitler came to power. The Nazis had a mere 2.6% of the vote in the 1928 election and they were nothing but a tiny, angry fringe party. At that time the country was still stable and holding off the fringe extremists but more poison trees were growing and taking over inch by inch. The country had moved from monarchy to tentative democracy but never really embraced it. Many of its soldiers and people nursed a seething resentment to war reparations payments and secretly believed their leaders had surrendered in a war they were winning. Its monetary policy was weak and inflation was threatening to get out of control. It had a dark undercurrent of acceptable antisemitism. But still the society remained healthy on the whole.
Yet when Germany's economy collapsed following the Wall Street crash in 1929, small businesses closed and money went into hyperinflation, Hitler surged into power with the Nazis and the communists gaining more than 40% of the vote in the 1930 election. The economy proved one poison tree too many and it ignited the tipping point that let fascists take absolute control of the country. After that German society underwent a sudden and brutal decay across everything from individual rights, to health and longevity, to rule of law, to income potential and creativity. That decay spread to the whole world as World War II ripped the planet and every country on Earth surged into battle and 50 million people died.
As I thought about it more deeply, I realized that the Hummingbird and the Poison Tree and the Tipping Point don't just apply to the evolution of technology but to the evolution of ideas. They also apply equally well to both the big and the small, the macro and the micro. Everything from a marriage, to a system, to a company, to a society and a nation, to a planet can either thrive and flourish through a confluence of beneficial effects or decay and die based on a confluence of negative effects.
And the more I looked at it, the more I realized that both positive and negative evolution have many of the same characteristics and traits that remain remarkably similar whether we're talking about a successful and thriving marriage or whether we're talking about a company that was once profoundly influential but is now slowly dying as it's outflanked by smaller and more inventive competitors.
Let's take a closer look at the traits that mark the rise or fall of a system.
Knowing them gives you a crystal ball to see into the future.
It's not a perfect crystal ball as the future is governed by that crazy chaotic butterfly effect too and as Yoda says "always in motion is the future, difficult to see." Unexpected variables can and will pop in suddenly and take us in a totally different direction. Black swan ideas or technology change the game and the movement of a system as a whole. With the future you can only play the probabilities.
But on the whole, if there are more positive characteristics, then a system is much more likely to keep trending in the right direction and you can ride the tide to prosperity and joy.
On the other hand, as dark characteristics take hold you should grow wary and start looking for an exit fast before the system decays too far and collapse becomes inevitable.
Dark and Light
If you look across history and you look into human psychology and across the rise and fall of civilizations and you examine companies that went from good to great or flipped from great into rapid decline you can spot a clear pattern. Growing systems are marked by a clear set of characteristics and so are dying systems.
By and large, thriving systems have the following traits in abundance:
Creativity
Openness
Meritocracy
Loose and flexible hierarchy
A balance of personal and public focus
(aka the John Nash observation: "The Best for the Group comes when everyone in the group does what's best for himself AND the group.")
New technological innovation
Prizing knowledge and learning
Flexibility
Most notably a willingness to change such as changing one's approach when it proves wrong
Decaying and dying systems exhibit the following characteristics:
Viciousness
Tribalism
A rigid hierarchy
A dark meritocracy
(Where the most violent, angry and vicious rise to the top instead of the most qualified)
Focus on control
Demonization of opposing ideas
Widespread lies and disinformation
Escalating violence
Hostility to criticism
Delusional thinking
Rigid and inflexible
Such as digging in when you're wrong and blaming outside forces or imaginary enemies
Of course, no organization or relationship will be perfect. An organization might have most of the characteristics but not all of them and still fall into the spectrum of dark or light.
A classic example of an organization thriving and growing based on the Hummingbird effect was the famous Bell Labs in the 1940s-1960s. Many of the most important inventions of the modern world came out of the Bell Labs teams, such as Information Theory, that underpins the entire communications infrastructure of the world wide web and intercontinental communications. And maybe the most important invention to come out of the Bell Labs team was the transistor, the centerpiece of modern communications and the foundation the computer chips, to name just a few.
Profiled in the fantastic book, The Idea Factory, we can think of Bell Labs as the first true think tank and it had many of the characteristics of the growing and thriving organization, whose benefits ripple out and affect adjacent domains all over the world. They had a flexible hierarchy that allowed people to be creative and put those ideas into practice. The Labs leadership put together theoretical thinkers, mathematicians, applied science masters like metallurgists and chemists, and they let them figure out how to make something incredible together. They had enough funding to allow people to think in decades, instead of super short term. Managers were not allowed to take credit for the work of the subordinates, so that encouraged everyone to contribute without worrying someone would steal their thunder and claim it for their own. Failure was expected and treated as another step in the learning process that led to a better solution to a vexing problem.
Beyond that, a Hummingbird policy that proved tremendously unique allowed the ideas of Bell Labs to proliferate out into the world in an amazing and fluid way. Government monopoly watch dogs wanted to break the company up but couldn't find a way to do it without badly damaging US communications infrastructure, not to mention sensitive military technology developments so they came up with an ingenious compromise. As part of the monopoly settlement Bell Labs "agreed to license its present and future U.S. patents to all American applicants, 'with no limit as to time or the use to which they may be put.' In other words, eighty-six hundred or so of AT&T’s U.S. patents “issued prior to January 24, 1956 are in almost all cases to be licensed royalty-free to all applicants.” (All future patents, meanwhile, would be licensed for a small fee.)", writes Gertner in the Idea Factory.
This one unique policy idea created the modern communications revolutions as companies around the world started licensing the transistor and the other incredible technologies that were coming out of the idea factory at a breakneck pace and that set the Hummingbird effect into overdrive with hundreds of companies benefiting from the ideas and the technology there. A short list of technologies that started at Bell Labs and spread out into the world include the photovoltaic cell, radio astronomy, the Unix operating system, the programming language C and C++, lasers, and a myriad of wired and wired transmission tech.
The most incredible Hummingbird moment occurred with the transistor, which was created to amplify voices in AT&T's network. It went on to replace vacuum tubes in the old analog telephone networks and it ended up coming to dominate radio technology too because it used 10,000x less power than the tube.
But the transistor was so much more and it had a much bigger impact on an adjacent field: computers. It was the perfect digital tool. Cluster a bunch of those tiny little electric switches and you ended up with the foundation of the microprocessor. Taken together those cluster switches could represent logic, a 0 or 1, or a yes or a no and then back again all in billionths of a second. Put that together with information theory and you now have a universal way to communicate that would ironically, destroy the AT&T monopoly because now anyone could encode information perfectly and transmit it perfectly and decode it. The transistor became the core of routers and switches and microchips and a new communication ideal.
The Hummingbird effect of the transistor was summed up perfectly by Gertner in a quote of Ian Ross, who worked on transistor development in the 1950s:
“So often the original concept of what an innovation will do frequently turns out not to be the major impact.”
Even in the same domains, the inventions of Bell Labs had unexpected beneficial evolutionary effects. The Unix operating system was the centerpiece of many big computing companies like IBM and Solaris but those operating systems could only get so far as the companies that backed them could only hire so many engineers to improve its features.
The Unix operating system led a young programmer named Linux Torvalds who was frustrated with the licensing requirements for Unix, to make a clone of Unix called Linux many years later which he coupled with a new idea called open source, a development model that swept the world over the last 20 years. Instead of a single team of engineers building the OS, now millions of engineers around the world helped to build the OS as it grew, a scale that even the deep pockets of Bell Labs or IBM or Oracle could never match alone, even in their heyday. There is just no company on Earth that can afford 1 million developers. Open source turned the idea of licensing on its head and established a way for millions of companies to work together on the same foundation, no matter if they were friends, frenemies or enemies.
Because the OS was free for anyone to use it quickly became the bedrock of modern computing, sweeping away the old proprietary Unixes. When a young recruiter asked me what I wanted to do in the late 90s I told him I wanted to work with Linux and he said “all the jobs are in Solaris.” I told him, in a decade Sun won’t even exist and he looked at me like I had two heads. A decade later Sun was dead, killed off by the unstoppable power of open source.
The Linux operating system itself now powers every Android phone, nearly every supercomputer on the top 500 list (plus the secret ones not listed there), billions of edge devices, most data centers and every major cloud, including much of the cloud of the former epicenter of proprietary operating systems, Microsoft, with its Azure cloud now fully stacked with Linux at every level.
Strange Effects of the Hummingbird in Unexpected Places
Of course, there are exceptions to the rules for Hummingbird systems or Poison Tree systems. It's not whether any of the dark or light characteristics exist in an organization in isolation, it's whether those dark or light characteristics come to dominate that organization or system or relationship. A good example is the military. Military organizations by their very nature have a more rigid hierarchy than other facets of society, with strict top down governance and a chain of command. And of course, their very purpose is to kill and use force when necessary. But even within that unique structure we can see the examples of the Hummingbird or the Poison Tree at work.
In World War II, the American army allowed for a great deal of flexibility for its officers and how they ran their operations. Admiral Nimitz largely left it to his supporting generals to figure out how to get the work of winning the war in the Pacific done. He interfered on only a few occasions, most famously in the Battle of Lyfte, when he sent a famous (partially mistaken) message "where in the world is task force 34 the world wonders" when Admiral Halsey had left the coast undefended to chase Japanese ships far out at sea. But overall, his generals and admirals had a great deal of flexibility in tactics and strategy, as did many officers and non-commissioned officers below them in the field. Because of that they were able to adapt and change to the ever shifting priorities of battle.
In contrast, the Japanese had all the marks of a society in total decline. The far right faction of military agitators, dreaming of a return to the glory of the Shogun era, had taken control of the government at every level and purged anyone who didn't fall in line. In a classic example of Poison Tree delusional thinking they cut off trade with their largest trading partners, the US, the Netherlands and Britain, which accounted for over 80% of their trade, trade that was essential to their resource poor island, and threw their hats in with fascist Germany and Italy.
During the nineteenth century, the samurai elite of the Meiji era realized they needed oil and other commodities that simply didn't exist in Japan and they rapidly filled that need with foreign trade. But the delusional junta that now controlled Japan decided military glory was more important than food and even the oil needed to fight a modern war. At the time Germany and Italy exported very few goods or raw materials and Japan's leadership had joined them, making enemies with their primary trading partners, decisions that would haunt them later as their ships were starved for oil and unable to leave port and their citizens were starving late in the war.
The country also had a rigid and totally inflexible military hierarchy where officers often had to wait for orders and follow exactly what their commanders told them to do. They often couldn't make decisions if they were cut off from higher command. Japanese soldiers in the war took inflexible orders so seriously that they were routinely told to "die to the last man" and suffered 97-100% casualty rates which dramatically depleted the army of its best and most experienced soldiers. They also rarely deviated or adapted their strategies. As Ian Toll wrote in the second book of his incredible history of the Pacific war, The Conquering Tide: "Joe Foss, a marine fighter ace, scratched his head at the tactics employed by his Japanese counterparts. Most were obviously highly skilled, but they failed to adapt to changing tactics and became predictable: 'They tried the same thing all the time'."
That inability to adapt comes from a rigid hierarchy that doesn't allow for improvisation or changing tactics in the field. The Japanese also demonstrated many of the other characteristics of a decaying society, such rampant lying. Aviators and soldiers constantly reported absurd levels of success to their higher-ups, who passed it onto their higher-ups. It was completely common for Japanese commanders to report sinking 10 or 20 ships when they had sunk one or two.
In a decaying structure, lies are common because failure isn't tolerated or even the hint of failure and this has a ripple effect where delusional thinking takes deeper hold and commanders can't make good decisions because their decisions are all based on garbage information, which further accelerates their decline.
When you start from a lie all your decisions afterwards are poisoned because you started from nonsense information.
The Dark Forest of History
History is filled with dark and terrifying periods that seem almost as if they are simply too insane to be real but they are very, very real.
A dark forest of poison trees come in many forms but the damage they do to a society or an organization when they spread is monumental.
A series of lies in a relationship can lead to a massive breakdown in trust and make a couple turn on each other, which in turn leads to the breakup of the partnership.
A company leader who refuses to ever be wrong eventually attracts people willing to lie to them at every step so that they never get good information and eventually make worse decisions because they started out in the wrong direction from the very get go. That gives rise to bad managers taking power in the company, who prize activity over true productivity and who seize on their subordinates ideas a their own, which causes a brain drain to set in. As more people leave the company more mediocre people join and the organization starts to rot from within.
Maybe one of the most terrifying examples of the poison tree effect comes to us from history of Soviet Russia and Communist China. Both Stalin and Mao followed a path that led to widespread suffering and famine in their own countries and all of it was because dark multipliers accelerated their problems exponentially.
When Stalin came to power the Soviet Union was a major exporter of grain. Small farms produced the majority of the food for both local consumption and export. But Stalin wanted to industrialize Russia fast and he decided the best way was to crunch together smaller farms into “collective” farms owned by the state.
He hoped that would boost production. “In some three years’ time, our country will have become one of the richest granaries, if not the richest, in the whole world,” Stalin declared in 1929, as he unveiled his plans, writes Tom Standage in The Edible History of Humanity, a history of how food affects world events. He wanted to double steel production and triple iron production in five years and prove the massive superiority of socialism as the Soviet Union rapidly industrialized.
But it didn't go as planned.
Naturally the most successful farmers, who also happened to be many of the most productive farmers, resisted. Stalin crushed them, murdering many of them and their families with impunity. That left less productive farmers to run the collective farms and they quickly failed to produce the expected yield windfalls. Even worse, the delusional leaders above them had no idea how to run farms, while still having supreme confidence that they did, in a classic example of the Dunning Kruger effect where stupid people overestimate their own intelligence and push forward boldly into more and more mistakes. Soviet leaders set absurd expectations of growth that simply couldn't be met, which led to further rounds of purges and murders, which further depleted the human resources needed to produce surpluses. Because there was no profit motive, farmers were incentivized to lie and to work less because there was no benefit to them to work harder.
Terrible droughts, bad weather and not enough horses to work in the fields also meant that the harvests of 1931 and 1932 were even worse than usual, so Stalin was trying his horrific experiment and demanding more agricultural goods right at the moment production was falling badly. But admitting that collectivization was impossible to Stalin and Soviet leadership. Like all psychopathic strongmen, he had to project the false bravado of strength, even when he was dead wrong. Instead of facing the truth, Stalin had his minions reported record breaking harvests, and he carried that delusion even further and swore that his plan was working and that the only reason it appeared to fail was because farmers were hiding their produce.
That led him to demand more produce from those farmers as punishment for their "lies." Any farmer that failed to meet their quotas got fined with the government taking even more crops. At the same time, Stalin kept up exports to create the illusion that there was a massive surplus, further depleting grain supplies. In the cities the confiscated crops kept the industrial workers well fed, and exports doubled, but farmers were starving, which further depleted the workforce of capable food producers.
All over the Soviet Union, farmers had much less to eat but in some areas it was much worse. If you wonder why Ukrainians are fighting back with a vengeance to keep their country now, you need only look at Ukrainian history. The Ukraine is a rich and fertile growing area and often accounts for a whopping 6% of world calories today and even more back then. Because the Ukraine was so fertile, the Soviet state hit them with even more demanding quotas. But they were based on nothing but delusional greed and when the expected surplus didn't materialize, local officials were ordered to step up their searches for "hidden" stores of food.
As Standage writes "Stalin decreed that retaining so much as one ear of wheat from the state was punishable by death or ten years’ imprisonment. One participant recalled: “I took part in this myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain, testing the earth with an iron rod for loose spots that might lead to hidden grain. With the others I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the women’s wails. For I was convinced that I was accomplishing the transformation of the countryside.”'
Instead of admitting defeat, Stalin's insane paranoia got worse and he posted soldiers outside granaries to protect them from starving farmers who wanted to storm them. A soviet writer at the time saw people eating mice and rats and earthworms and grinding up leather in shoes to eat. But still Stalin pressed forward, swearing the failures were "class enemies" and idlers who deserved death. He turned Lenin's idea into a slogan "he who does not work, neither shall he at" and he deliberately let millions of people stave, instituting a series of internal passports to prevent farmers from fleeing to cities from villages in the Ukraine and the North Caucasus, which is now remembered as Holodomor or "the Terror Famine."
The famine only ended in 1934 when Stalin reduced gain confiscation and granted households a paltry plot of land to grow their own vegetables and where they could keep a cow, a pig and up to ten ship for themselves. Secretly, those private plots of land provided the vast majority of the country's food for the next fifty years while the Soviets publicly promoted the insane collective farming system that have never worked.
Roughly 7-8 million people died of starvation with the greatest impact in the Ukraine.
But in a classic idea of how poison trees spread to far away ecosystems, the worst was yet to come. The Chinese would then follow the same system, believing that it had worked spectacularly, when another vicious strongman came to power in China; Chairman Mao.
History's Most Horrific and Unnecessary Famine
When the Communists seized power in 1949, they wanted to mirror the Soviet collectivization model.
Privately, Nikita Krushchev, the Soviet leader who taken power after Stalin's death in 1953, warned Mao not to go forward because he knew just how much destructive power Stalin's policies had wreaked on the countryside and Krushschev had secretly rolled the policies back while still never admitting failure publicly. Mao ignored him and vowed to triple crop yields and triple the output of steal.
As Mao followed the Soviet model and collectivized farms, grain production predictably plunged by 40% in 1956 alone. People started to starve. They ate their animals which meant there were less to work the fields which led to even worse short falls. Meanwhile the Communist Party boasted of its tremendous success by cooking the books. They revised 1949 harvest figures down to make 1950s figures look even bigger, in a classic example of a dark meritocracy where liars rise to power and work to conceal the truth from everyone. But that wasn't enough and Mao wanted to even outdo the Soviets so he launched into the horrific “Great Leap Forward” a plan to rapidly industrialize China in five years.
Wikipedia gives a near perfect snapshot of the devastation the Great Leap delivered: "Local officials were fearful of Anti-Rightist Campaigns and they competed to fulfill or over-fulfill quotas which were based on Mao's exaggerated claims, collecting non-existent "surpluses" and leaving farmers to starve to death. Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster which was being caused by these policies, and national officials, blaming bad weather for the decline in food output, took little or no action. Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second largest famine in human history."
As the rot set into Chinese society, increasingly delusional policies took hold and poison trees rippled to every aspect of Chinese society. At one point Party officials ordered backyard furnaces built and told every peasant to melt down their cooking ware and metal to make weapons for the planned invasion of Taiwan, but that's not how metallurgy works and the iron was worthless and not a bit of it was ever used in industrial capacities. It simply left peasants with no way to cook, as parodied in the fantastic movie of the era, To Live, where the great actress Gong Li, playing a farmer's wife, asks the local party leader what will they cook with if they melt down all their pots and pans and he replies: "We're marching towards socialism and you're worried about food!"
From 1958-9162 Mao also got the idea that killing all the sparrows would bring a breakthrough in crop yields so he encouraged all the peasants to get out there and slaughter every bird they could with the notorious "Four Pests Campaign." They did. They came out en masse in villages and banged gongs and noise to keep the birds from landing until they tumbled out of the sky and died.
Wikipedia tells that tale: "Millions of people organized into groups, and hit noisy pots and pans to prevent sparrows from resting in their nests, with the goal of causing them to drop dead from exhaustion. In addition to these tactics, citizens also simply shot the birds down from the sky. The campaign depleted the sparrow population, pushing it to near extinction."
Because there were no sparrows left to eat insects, it led to a massive plague on the crops, with locust populations surging across the country and destroying untold amounts of wheat and rice. The Chinese eventually resorted to importing 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to replace the devastated ecosystem.
Mao also based is idiotic planting ideas on the work of another psychotic pseudoscientist from the Soviet Union, Trofim Lysenko, and he wrote up a list of instructions for farmers on how to have a record harvest.
As Standage writes, "Mao advocated dense planting of seeds (which meant the soil could not sustain them), deep plowing (which damaged the fertility of the soil), greater use of fertilizer (but without chemicals, so household rubbish and broken glass was used instead), concentrating production on a smaller area of land (which quickly exhausted the soil), pest control (killing rats and birds, which caused the population of insects to explode), and increased irrigation (though the small dams and reservoirs that were constructed, being made of earth, soon collapsed). Party officials, fearing for their own positions, went along with all this and pretended that Mao’s instructions had resulted in amazing improvements in yields."
When one Party leader, who was an experienced farmer, dared to tell Mao that his ideas simply wouldn't work, he was exiled and killed and that set in motion another classic poison tree effect, the rise of people willing to conceal the truth rather than give leaders' the hard truth.
Increasingly, as crops failed, the Party and local officials made more and more insane and bizarre announcements, like growth of massive "super vegetables", ripped right from the pages of Marvel. They circulated fake photographs of crops so abundant that children could sit on them, while children were really sitting on concealed tables behind the crops.
One time when Mao was touring the countryside to see his great success, peasants were told to pile up food by the roadside and Mao was told they'd grown so much food that they'd simply thrown it away because they had so much to eat that the didn't need it.
Of course, as all this was happening in classical Poison Tree fashion the Party reported the harvests were doubling and so they naturally demanded more of the crops.
As more and more people perished under the delusional programs of the Party, Mao followed the classic Poison Tree path, just as Stalin had. Mao refused to believe the collectivization program itself was the problem and blamed farmers for hiding food and laziness and so he stepped up purges, killing more of them, and sending the starvation into overdrive.
In total, some estimated 50 million Chinese perished during those years, in what is considered the worst famine in history.
And it was entirely man-made.
When poison trees come to dominate a society, inevitable suffering flows from it like a dark river.
Don't Let Your Hummingbird Eat from Poison Trees
Marriages, relationships, societies, systems and nations live in a constant and ever-shifting delicate balance. Every system has wise people and vicious people lurking inside them. Every relationship, whether they're as small as two people, or as big as a billion, have the power to bring tremendous balance or great suffering.
The collective traits of Poison Tree systems and Hummingbird systems follow a smooth determinism towards joy and growth or death and disease.
And yet a system could be thriving only to have the rot start to set in or a dying system could suddenly turn around. A single change can be the difference that sends a system hurtling into growth or decay.
A system can have a preponderance of good traits and thrive while keeping its poison trees at bay, only to have one poison tree too many trigger the tipping point that sets a system into unstoppable decline. Often that's the rise of a single bold personality or a single bad policy that causes the system to start to fall apart.
By the same token a single good policy or idea can set the system on the path to thriving resurgence and growth.
Right now, all over the world, we're seeing the rise of strongmen and spin dictators, who manipulate the truth and surround themselves with people willing to lie to them. They hate resistance and gut the courts and purge opposition in ways more subtle and sophisticated than Mao or Stalin could ever imagine but with equally devastating results. The pathways of any society that falls prey to these delusional personalities is utterly predictable and will play out as they always do.
Poison trees always produce poison fruit.
We're seeing it now with the invasion of the Ukraine and the global economic downturn that is causing people everywhere to suffer and could lead to widespread, man-made famine again. We're seeing it in the culture wars of the United States and the paralysis of legislators who can't seem to find any common ground and who blame the other side for any problem and fail to see the problems their own disciples create.
But at the same time we have hummingbirds everywhere in the forest too. Artificial intelligence is moving forward at a tremendous pace and the productionization of intelligence will open up brand new vistas of problem solving and affect society in ways we can barely imagine now, just as the transistor and information theory made the modern world. Vertical farms are getting better and better and we're figuring out how to bypass the cyclical nature of the sun and wind and rain to make crops more secure and abundant.
Any relationship is a delicate equilibrium between dark and light, often intimately intertwined. Everything is a balance and the slightest missteps can tip the balance in one direction of the other. A good policy leads to a proliferating company and happy workers or a bad policy cripples innovation and sets a society back decades.
Wherever you go and whatever you do, seek out as many Hummingbird relationships as you can find and when you spot the Poison Trees taking root, look to get out as quickly as possible. Sometimes it's not possible to escape because the rot is so widespread and the tremendous damage limits the escape possibilities. But if you're eagle eyed and paying close attention you'll spot the decay setting in early and that will give you time to adapt and make changes that just might change your life.
And the more you find yourself in a good system, the more your life and the life of everyone around you will be filled with joy and happiness and fulfillment, a forest filled with flowers and hummingbirds in abundance, instead of a dark and twisted forest filled with decay.