The commonality between the two starts with explanation of diet part, then the medical system, society, social engineering, then Unix/Linux philosophy.
Starting with Diet: The evolutionary side of our survival mechanism has something called the Motivational Triad that is within every organism on earth.
It is a three-part mechanism that 1) seek pleasure 2) avoid pain 3) conserve energy. The ‘pleasure, pain avoidance, energy conservation’ (Lisle and Goldhamer 2003).
This is to further an organism’s well-being and propagate its the future generation. An organism going to the direction of self well-being and increase reproduction chance will ‘feel good’.
However, when an organism is removed from its natural environment and gets these Motivational Triad stimuli in concentrated, refined, and/or artificial forms, these stimuli tend to work against an organism.
For example, evolutionarily human have taste for fatty stuffs. Fatty food (including meat, which has 30-40% fat) is energy reserve for hard times when there is famine. Not so long ago famine was frequent and periodic events. We do not have famine, but we eat more fatty food than we ever did.
Industries follow whatever consumer demands the most – the Motivational Triad driven demands (which is closely related to dopamine addition). So when food is getting sweeter and fatter, it leads to more sales, but it also leads to such a blatantly obvious problem America faces today.
The addiction blinds this type of abuse. Also abused human psyche drive this addiction economy – alcohol, tobacco, drug, coffee, refined sugar, refined flour, factory farmed meat, and such.
There are tens of thousands of different types of diet. However, seldom they look at this fundamental problem – the fact that we are living in distorted sense and paradigm. The simple approach to going back to the whole, unrefined/unprocessed food that we are evolved to eat not only help us lose weight and makes us better, but it has overall good effect in other areas of life including mental health and planetary sustainability.
Just to try to make a few things faster by ignoring these rules makes everything else breaks down.
The addiction driven distorted Motivational Triad runs our society. This is also how our medical system is run, how our business is run, the paradigms of this society and civilization.
For example, our medical system runs according to this Motivational Triad, which is the cause of tragic results (Lisle and Goldhamer 2003), which also vastly contributes to resource waste.
For example, cardiovascular related disease can be reversed and totally eliminated by a change of diet alone (Esselstyn 2008). However, cardiology alone is responsible for about 45% cost of Medicare (Esselstyn 2021). If we can get rid of heart disease, we will save $40 trillion (Murphy & Topel 1999). However, what is touted in the media is the studies that said our bad habits are okay or even ‘healthy,’ instead of studies that confirm messages like ‘eat your vegetables’ (Davis & Jacobson 2015). Thus, even the publication of these studies is ruled by these Motivational Triad, which of course, leads to skewed and biased public opinion.
Our business model is run in similar manner. The underlying social problems – corruption in governments and businesses, secret collusion, chronic social problems such as drug abuse, physical, mental, sexual abuse – all have this distorted Motivational Triad embedded in them in conjunction with psychological distortions that seeks stronger stimuli which can also be explained with Fairbairn psychology model (Celani 2011).
It has been proven that, early childhood abuse/trauma and other types of trauma induces addiction which leads to other abuse / addiction and resources waste (CDC 2022) – due to its damaged psychological structure (Celani 2010, 2011). This also characterize the ruling class of British society and how British Empire was built upon (Schaverien 2015).
Also, in social engineering, sustainability, search for happiness, making system efficient etc., are also colored by such addiction driven (distorted sense of Motivational Triad) and abuse induced addictions of the society. People do not think twice about this or often it is ignored (willfully or otherwise), but it is everywhere.
For example, to make apps and platforms successful, software engineers use such addiction driven mechanism of human psyche (dopamine addiction). Because of this, software and platform has been increasingly engineered toward making people more addictive to their products with faster speed. While this seems to be the way for success of their product, the deeply troubling trend of addiction has been ignored. Some may say there is nothing to be worried about here. I would say this has always been something to be worried about, but what it is to worry about is the essence and the power of the driving force behind this.
Unix creators Thompson and Ritchie thought that modern computing systems, including Linux, have become overly complex. Simplicity, modularity, clarity, and freedom, these fundamental four principle philosophy in Unix/Linux system design gives many benefits including less bugs, security, easier to understand, maintain, faster system, efficiency, easier to customize/optimize, and better modularity.
Conversely, ignoring these make systems more prone to bugs, vulnerabilities, more complex, harder to understand, and to maintain. Increased complexity also makes these systems more prone to exploitation and attacks.
There is close parallel to this way of reasoning in terms of diet in relation to: nutrition, weight management, overall health, fighting diseases, and social problems, planetary sustainability (Campbell 2013). This begs question in that in terms of our thinking, the simple, fundamental principles cannot be ignored in any problems, whether it is computing, science, health, human relation, and such.
The problem of sustainability that we are facing seems to be so vast and insurmountable that people switch their awareness to off including these fundamental principles – and wonder about dysfunction of our civilization.
What we face as civilization today in terms sustainability seems complex, but with concrete example that shows link between these, one will see that there is nothing mysterious about it. Just like following simple rules in Unix/Linux environment, we can do so much as well in terms of our mental and physical health, social well-being, and planetary sustainability. The connection between these all have common characteristic that the important underlying principles have been ignored. These in turn can be much remedied if we are willing to face up to the truth of it.
We should be reminded that we cannot perpetually grow our economy by consuming everything around us – or is perpetual growth even necessary to the well-being of the humanity and the planet as the whole? We should radically re-examine our economy model that instead of cutting-throat competition of dog-eat-dog capitalistic mentality, it should be more of cooperation based economy model, just like Open Source.