Aadhar Card & Evolution- An Observation On Complex Systems

A couple of days back I was at an Aadhar Card Centre to get my details updated. While I was waiting for my turn, I was just observing the surroundings and just about so, I went into the rabbit hole of thinking about how the Aadhar Card as an idea must have originated. It must have started with a purpose that every citizen of India must have a unique number through which the person is identified. Sounds simple, right? While the idea is simple at its core, when implemented at scale it becomes extremely complicated- a complex system, if you will.

Let me go down the rabbit hole even further and I will do that by making a conjecture, the conjecture being, that any Primitive Idea when it is scaled at large becomes a very complex system. And moreover, the same pattern can be observed everywhere, right from the formation of cities from an evolutionary biological standpoint to the present-day human behavior in society and whatnot! Let me explain what I mean.

To implement the idea of assigning a unique number to every citizen of the nation, an organization must be formed in the first place, which essentially then branches out into various forms of employment of the first order. Once that is formed, enrolment centers have to be established across the nation, this is the scaling part I mentioned earlier. As and when the idea is scaled, more jobs are created, which means the hierarchy is formed across each enrolment center, which in turn means there is a division of labor and finally to maintain the process of enrolling and keeping things in place, a specific framework or a system must be created so that the entire process goes through the cycle of what it has to go through, as intended originally. Now, by the time every person is assigned a unique number, the system would have grown into a complex system by the virtue of variables associated with it, in the form of people, organizations, governments, and whatnot. And not just that, when the system starts to interact which other existing systems it becomes even more complicated (in this case, banks). The interesting part is, that once the system is established and it starts to interact with other complex systems, it is almost impossible to isolate the individual system, it goes on like a snowball as it was.

Now, I will digress a bit to make another analogy thereby moving a step closer to the conjecture that I initially made. To keep it short, during the evolution of homo sapiens, particularly at the point when sedentary human civilization rose and the evolving humans started agricultural practices, it reached a point where the food that was being produced exceeded. When one group of people started distributing the surplus food to the other tribes, the one who produced the food started marking territories around his place, to captivate the other tribes into his territory thereby forming cities, or to put it more crudely forming groups of people employed to do certain tasks, now we are talking hierarchies, further, as a by-product emerged a system which specialized in the work of a particular kind, which later on went on to become what we now call it as states. Apply the same logic to any emperor who desires to conquer the world. It all starts with a desire to expand the empire. In the process of doing so, by virtue of interactions and forming relationships with other existing systems, it grows to become a complex system at large. Add evolution to it and bam it goes on and on and on as if it were forever.

By now it is only a matter of recognizing the pattern by the means of analogy. I am convinced that understanding things by analogy is such a powerful thinking model! Now, look around. Observe. Take the simplest example that is right in front of you and go deep into the rabbit hole to find yourself in the world of patterns that are repeating themselves over and again just in different names and forms.

I will conclude by saying one thing, that is “Any idea or desire for that matter looks seemingly simple at its core, but when zoomed in, it becomes a complex system. And the world is a simulation of such infinite complex systems on a treadmill, we as individuals, are just a part of the system that is almost impossible to isolate”.