★ The Rubik’s Cube Monkey Ritual
January 2026 (1517 Words, 9 Minutes)
When I lived in Berlin, the city introduced legislation to control rent prices. As a consequence, the supply of housing for rent fell, and it became increasingly hard to find an apartment. The problem became that for every new apartment on the market, hundreds of people applied to rent it. I’ve been to so many flat viewings where, when I arrived, a queue was already forming all the way to the street. When the legal market can’t satisfy demand, people find “creative workarounds”. The people who had apartments to rent out could pick among so many applicants, and so the non-monetary demands increased. This leads to abuse: You want the flat? You have to renovate out of your pocket before moving in. Black markets appeared, where you can illegally rent, for example, a moldy cellar for astronomical prices. The situation is desperate.
Now, after having moved to Barcelona, the city has introduced legislation to control rent prices. I’m starting to see the same shortage symptoms here. And besides Berlin and Barcelona, there are more cities that have fallen into the same trap of rent control leading to falling supply leading to all the ugly consequences of a shortage.
What puzzles me is this: Why do we keep making the same mistake? Up until now, the answer that I found most convincing was a mix of economic illiteracy among the electorate and easy “fixes” sold by politicians. But this explanation never fully satisfied me. If it was just economic illiteracy and short-termism, I wouldn’t expect it to always lead to the exact same type of price-control legislation. If it was just incompetence, I would expect cities all over the world to experiment with and implement different kinds of solutions. If it was like this, by pure chance, someone might have even found a real solution. But that doesn’t seem to be what is happening.
I realized that I didn’t learn about supply and demand until university, and only because I studied business administration. Therefore, I think it’s safe to say that a large portion of the supposedly comparatively well-educated German public has never heard of supply and demand. But there are probably hundreds of TikTok videos explaining these econ 101 concepts, like how prices form with supply and demand. While it might be the key piece of information needed to understand the fundamental problem with price controls, the availablity of that information does not seem to be the problem.
Another problem with the “it’s ignorance” explanation is that it doesn’t seem complete. In politics, I’ve often heard the view that voters are being manipulated, are deluded, and are “voting against their interests.” Funnily enough, this judgment is almost always reserved for followers of rival ideologies, never for one’s own camp. So, let’s not fall into the same trap and avoid any simplist “they are ignorant and are being manipulated” explanations.
While watching a video about emergent complexity, I had a thought: “What if the problem is not in understanding supply and demand but in a lack of humility towards things we can’t fully understand?” I started writing a blog post exploring why the economy features a profoundly different type of complexity than a car engine, for example.
But as you might have realized, this brings me back to the same problem. A lack of understanding, in my mind, would only explain misguided but varied attempts to solve a problem. If you gave 100 monkeys a Rubik’s Cube each and expected them to solve it, I imagine you would get many different attempts at solving it. It would be weird if they all failed to solve it in the exact same way. And it would be even weirder if you allowed the monkeys to watch how previous monkeys failed and they still all attempted the same failing strategy. But if our monkeys do repeat the same failing move, there must be something we are missing about why. In the meantime, just to make sure that it’s not lack of knowledge, we are going to play them short tutorial videos of humans solving the Rubik’s Cube.
Finally, while going through articles attempting to write the emergent complexity post, I stumbled on a clue as to what I was missing. But first, we need to take a detour through the stable.
I’ve always considered the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the far left and far right to be similar in tone. Mind you, I can only speak for Germany and Spain, the two countries whose political happenings I have somewhat followed. This view is called horseshoe theory: the political extremes have much in common; the political spectrum is a horseshoe.
René Girard argued that when two political groups fight intensely, they eventually lose their substantive differences and become mirror images of one another. He called them mimetic doubles. Each side claims to be the moral opposite of the other, but as the rivalry heats up, they copy each other’s tactics, rhetoric, and accusations. Their mutual hate is better explained by what they have in common than by what separates them. From this perspective the far right and the far left are mirror images that are in conflict because they compete for the same anti-capitalist voter looking for radical change. Girard also identified the ritualistic scapegoating mechanism as the way these political groups maintain internal unity. A political group often feels most united not when they agree on a policy, but when they join together to expel or demonize a specific target.
While recognizing one set of mimetic doubles, the extreme-left & extreme-right, it seems, I still managed to miss another set of political mimetic doubles. Because I always thought leftists hyper-liberals and classical free-market liberals to be different from each other. Leftists want to intervene in markets for social equality; classical liberals want to leave markets alone to generate prosperity. Leftists want control over what is being said; classical liberals defend free speech. Leftists want a big redistributing state with high taxes; classical liberals want low taxes and a small state. And so on and so forth.
In my mind, the differences between leftists and classical liberals are so big that I wouldn’t have thought to explore what they have in common. Even though, embarrassingly enough, in the USA both are called “liberals”. That is, until I recently found the contemporary philosopher John Gray. Gray explores their common root in his recent books and essays. He identifies John Stuart Mill’s (1806-1873) philosophy, as one of the commonon roots of both classic liberals and leftist hyper-liberals.
Sections of his On Liberty (1859) read like the fantasy of the Übermensch seen through a bien-pensant prism. For Mill, progress meant promoting a higher type of human being that displayed “individuality”. The goal for everyone was to realise themselves as unique personalities. Transmitted through the Bloomsbury intelligentsia and resonating in the cultural revolution of the Sixties, self-realisation has become the core liberal value. Human beings must be able to make of themselves whatever they wish.
John Gray in Why I am not a post-liberal
Leftist hyper-liberals and classical liberals have common intellectual ancestors and they might be mimetic doubles in the present. Both camps share a fundamental, almost religious faith in rationalism and Progress, the idea that history has a direction. They differ in how they want to promote that Progress, but they both believe in it.
Gray even argues in his book The New Leviathans, that the root of liberalism is Christianism, which goes back more than 2.000 years. He argues that the defining ideas of liberal thought are continuations of Christian monotheism.
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils.
— 1 Timothy 6:10 (NRSV)
In Christianity, greed is treated as a serious moral failing. Because liberalism emerged from a Christian moral framework, and because ritualistic scapegoating remains a powerful force, someone who can be accused of greed becomes an obvious scapegoat candidate.
We now have all the components for a better answer to our initial question: why did Barcelona implement a rent-control policy that was doomed to fail? Why did opinion leaders omit the toxic side effects of previous rent-control implementations? And what about our monkeys? Have they noticed the tutorial videos?
Our sneaky monkeys keep repeating the same moves because their goal isn’t to solve the Rubik’s cube. To tell you the truth, I don’t think they give a single shit about solving these cubes. I mean, the videos are right there, if they cared about the solution. We even mixed in engaging videos about bananas that should have caught their attention. But they are busy. They are preparing to hold a ritual that will unify their group. They have found a sinner and are going to make a sacrifice to achieve redemption.
The rent-control law is a successful ritual. It perfectly achieves its true purpose: the unifying scapegoating of the “greedy landlord.” This is made possible by a liberal rooted-in-Christianity faith in Progress: the belief that the world is a problem to be solved, and that its solution is guaranteed by Progress itself. This framing enables a moral, rather than economic, reading of the housing crisis.
The failure of rent control—the black markets, the queues, the abuse—is the inconvenient, profane reality. But the political reality is that the law successfully performs a moral function. It affirms the shared liberal faith in Progress by identifying and punishing the designated sinner for obstruction of self-realization. And the punishment is rent control. It is repeated almost identically in Berlin and Barcelona because the underlying Christian mythology is the same across the West. With blinding certainty, the perpetrators believe they are enacting righteousness, even as they create suffering for the very people they claim to help.
Thank you to E for reading a draft of this essay and providing feedback. Also, thank you Grok for mercilessly roasting previous versions of this essay.
I appreciate any kind of feedback or thoughts! I’m also accepting translations, if you want the essay to be available in more languages. To contact me please email me at:
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