I’ll start this article out by blowing your mind away instantly. Take a look at this map:

That’s right, Thailand ≠ Taiwan.

Now that we acquired the required background knowledge out of the way let’s get down to business.

First impressions

A few years ago when I first set my foot on the island the culture shock did not wait too long to hit me.

Holy crap, it’s so hard to breath!

Of course, coming from a country that doesn’t have a sea, I was not used to this humid, tropical weather.

Immediately after, another completely unexpected shock followed the first one.

Holy crap, everyone is Asian here!

And the third one.

WTF, this place is an unorganized mess!

People were shouting to each other all the time. I thought they were always fighting, but later I realized that’s just how the Chinese language is. The roads were a mess. Sidewalks are bumpy, occupied by street vendors, trees grow out in the middle of them, often nonexistent or just painted. I had no idea what rules to follow. And ironically this brings me to my point.

Taiwan is great, because it’s an unorganized mess

At least that’s what you spot first, but you don’t let it and try to figure out the rules, because there must be some system in place. That’s right and it’s simpler than you’d think. Let’s rephrase the word unorganized to decentralized. And now suddenly everything starts to make sense. There is no question about the superiority of some decentralized systems, like Uber to Taxis, or Bitcoin to fiat money. Turns out it’s the same with countries. To understand why and how, take a look at the following excerpt from the book, called Mastering Bitcoin on how the leaf cutter ant is organizing its society.

The leafcutter ant is a species that exhibits highly complex behavior in a colony super-organism, but each individual ant operates on a set of simple rules driven by social interaction and the exchange of chemical scents (pheromones). Per Wikipedia: “Next to humans, leafcutter ants form the largest and most complex animal societies on Earth.” Leafcutter ants don’t actually eat leaves, but rather use them to farm a fungus, which is the central food source for the colony. Get that? These ants are farming! Although ants form a caste-based society and have a queen for producing offspring, there is no central authority or leader in an ant colony. The highly intelligent and sophisticated behavior exhibited by a multimillion-member colony is an emergent property from the interaction of the individuals in a social network. Nature demonstrates that decentralized systems can be resilient and can produce emergent complexity and incredible sophistication without the need for a central authority, hierarchy, or complex parts. Bitcoin is a highly sophisticated decentralized trust network that can support a myriad of financial processes. Yet, each node in the bitcoin network follows a few simple mathematical rules. The interaction between many nodes is what leads to the emergence of the sophisticated behavior, not any inherent complexity or trust in any single node. Like an ant colony, the bitcoin network is a resilient network of simple nodes following simple rules that together can do amazing things without any central coordination.

The one simple rule of Taiwan

In Taiwan if you want to cross the red light, you just cross it. In Taiwan if you want to walk on the road, you just walk there. In Taiwan if you want to open a bottle of beer in the street, in a shop, in a library, in a school or in a police station you just open it. Nobody minds your business, as long as you don’t hurt anyone. When rules are not enforced they are not rules, right? But wait, does that bold sentence resembles you to something? That’s the libertarian non-aggression principle. I am not a libertarian, I don’t know much about libertarianism, but I know they keep repeating it, so it must be important.

You can do anything as long as you don’t hurt anyone.

And, here we are. The libertarian wet dream to have a society based on the non-aggression principle is actually a reality. And the result? Happy, relaxed, friendly, tolerant and smart people, where crime and homelessness is nonexistent.

Furthermore Taiwan has an extraordinarily high percentage of pretty girls. But I am not sure that’s the result of the non-agression principle, too. However one might can argue, since there is no crime and very little judgement, they often dress up in provocative ways and that results this statistics.

Conclusion

The whole World could take some lessons from Taiwan on how to organize society. And you, Taiwan shall learn from your own example, too, and not screw up what you have by ever growing government and regulations. But rather start deregulating and further decentralizing yourself to be more awesome, but also resistant against a potential Chinese invasion. What would you rather fight with in your home? A rat or a leaf cutter ant colony?

Oh, and if you are wondering which is the best country. It’s the Internet, dummy.

Easter egg

Did you notice it?

What is Liberation Day?