Wheels or doors

It has come to my attention—largely through many hours of sitting in a pub garden, that there is a debate. I use the term debate quite loosely, in the same way one might describe a group of toddlers fighting over a crust of bread as a "diplomatic summit." This debate concerns the relative global populations of wheels and doors.

One might ask: why? Why are we doing this? Have we, as a species, finally exhausted the mysteries of the universe? Have we solved the problem of existential dread to such a degree that we must now turn our collective cognitive engines toward the counting of inanimate hardware? Apparently, yes.

So, let us descend. Let us look into the abyss of the wheel. Let us knock upon the metaphorical, and literal, door.

Before we can count, we must define. This is where the madness begins. If you ask a man on the street what a "door" is, he will likely point to a rectangular slab of wood and say, "That." He is a fool.

In the eyes of the true investigator, a door is a movable barrier used to block off and allow access to an entrance to an enclosure. If we accept this, we must accept the kitchen cabinet. We must accept the glove box. We must accept the Advent calendar—a terrifying object that, in December, briefly inflates the global door count by billions, only to be discarded in a fit of post-Christmas self-loathing.

And wheels? A wheel is a circular component that is intended to rotate on an axle bearing. Simple. Until you consider the LEGO wheel.

The LEGO Variable: In 2011, LEGO produced 381 million tires. They are, by some metrics, the largest tire manufacturer in the world. If we include LEGO wheels, the "Wheels" faction gains a demographic advantage so profound it borders on the totalitarian. But does a plastic wheel on a toy car count as a Wheel? If a child loses it under a sofa, does it cease to exist in the global census?

The wheel is the foundational myth of human progress. We are told that we "invented" the wheel, as if one day a Neolithic man named Gary simply got tired of dragging a mammoth carcass and thought, "What if this were more... round?"

When we look at the world, we see wheels everywhere. Not just on cars—though there are roughly 1.47 billion cars, most with at least four wheels and a steering wheel (five)—but in the hidden guts of civilization.

• Office Chairs: Every mediocre middle-manager sits upon a throne of five casters. That is five wheels to one door (the office door). A 5:1 ratio in favor of the wheel.

• The Supermarket: A fleet of trolleys, each with four wheels. The supermarket has doors, yes, but the ratio of trolleys to entrances is astronomical.

• Conveyor Belts: Every distribution center is a landscape of thousands of tiny rollers. Are rollers wheels? They rotate on an axle. They facilitate movement. They are wheels.

If we include every ball bearing in every fidget spinner, every cog in every watch, and every wheel on every toy, the "Doors" argument begins to look like the desperate plea of a man trying to hold back the tide with a sieve.

However, we must not be hasty. The Pro-Door lobby (which I imagine consists mostly of very tired locksmiths) has a compelling argument rooted in the sheer density of human habitation.

Think of a skyscraper. A single apartment building. You have the front door. You have the back door. You have the doors to the individual apartments. Inside those apartments, you have bedroom doors, bathroom doors, and the aforementioned cabinet doors.

• The Cabinet Explosion: A single kitchen can contain twenty doors. It contains zero wheels, unless you count the little rollers on the bottom of the dishwasher rack—and if you do, you are a pedant of the highest order, and I salute you.

• The Hotel Factor: A hotel is essentially a vertical filing cabinet for humans. Thousands of doors.

• The Cruise Ship: A floating door-metropolis.

And what of the metaphorical door? The "door to opportunity"? The "door of perception"? If we are counting, do we count the abstract? No, we don't. This is a dry inquiry. We stick to the physical.

The car is the primary battlefield of this conflict. It is the demilitarized zone where wheels and doors meet in uneasy truce.

In a standard four-door sedan, you have four road wheels and one steering wheel (5 wheels). You have four passenger doors and one trunk (5 doors). It is a tie. It is a perfect, mathematical stalemate that reflects the inherent balance of the universe.

But then, the van enters. The white transit van—the backbone of the British economy and the bane of the British cyclist. Two doors at the front, one sliding door, two at the back. Five doors. Four wheels. The van is a Pro-Door vessel.

Conversely, the unicycle. One wheel. Zero doors. The unicycle is the anarchist of this debate, a chaotic outlier that cares for neither symmetry nor logic.

We must consider the places where humans do not go. The factories. The automated warehouses.

In these cathedrals of efficiency, the wheel reigns supreme. Thousands of miles of conveyor belts, millions of pulleys, billions of ball bearings. A ball bearing is, for all intents and purposes, a spherical wheel. If we count ball bearings, the door is dead. The door is a relic of a bygone era when humans needed to move from one room to another. In the world of the machine, there is only the constant, frictionless rotation of the sphere.

Yet, consider the shipping container. There are approximately 20 million shipping containers in the world. Each has two large doors. They have no wheels. They are moved by wheels, but they themselves are door-heavy.

For the sake of our own sanity - we have to ask what it means to "be" a wheel.

Is a pizza cutter a wheel? It has an axle. It rotates. It facilitates the movement of a blade through a lukewarm Margherita. It is a wheel.

Is a CD a wheel? It rotates on a spindle. It provides access to the mid-career discography of Simply Red.

Is the Earth a wheel? It rotates on an axis.

If everything that rotates is a wheel, then the "Doors" argument is not just wrong; it is a category error. It is like trying to argue that there are more hats than there is nitrogen. The scale is simply incompatible.

But if we restrict "Wheel" to "a thing that rolls on the ground to move a weight," and "Door" to "a thing that swings or slides to let a person through," then the fight is fair. It is a scrap. It is a pub argument that ends in a broken glass and a lifetime ban from The King’s Head.

After 2000 words of contemplation, where do we stand?

We stand in a world that is increasingly wheeled. Our technology moves on wheels. Our data moves on spinning disks (which are wheels). Our very concept of time is dictated by the circular motion of clock hands (wheels).

The door, by contrast, is a symbol of exclusion. It is a barrier. It is a "no." The wheel is a "yes." The wheel is "go."

However, in the privacy of my own home, as I look at my four doors and my zero wheels (I do not own a bicycle, as I find the posture undignified), I am forced to concede that for the individual, the door is the dominant species. But for the collective, for the machine, for the LEGO-strewn floors of the world...

The wheels have it. They have it by a margin so vast it makes the counting of them seem like an act of madness. Which it is. We are all mad. We are sitting in a void, counting hinges and casters while the sun slowly expands to consume the orbit of the very Earth—the biggest wheel of all.