What a Tragedy — Swahili Shakespeare
Why there is more tragedy than triumph in evolution
To understand the tragedy of the commons, let us consider this thought experiment.
You live in a flat/apartment, but it is not self-contained. As such, the members of your particular floor share a toilet. There are seven rental spaces on each floor. For this reason, a simple agreement is implicitly shared by the members of each floor. Every day one member on that floor would clean the toilet. This should be simple, yes?
NO!
Say it is Jane’s turn to clean the toilet, but she feels it is not as dirty, so she doesn’t clean it. On the following day, it is Tarzan’s turn, but nobody did a number 2 the previous day so he feels the toilet is still clean.
This cycle continues for a week without the toilet being cleaned. Every person passes up their duty thinking the next person will dutifully perform their task. The end result is a dirty toilet, and a floor with residents thinking every other person cleans up the toilet.
A similar example is traffic.
You have a single private car owner who feels they want to beat the traffic. They swerve to the side and hopefully pass the cars upfront. In anger, the cars further ahead begin to resist this. If several private car owners continue to do the same, the backlog creates a single point of densely congregated vehicles.
The ripple effect?
Traffic begins to form behind them.
Here we witness two forces.
The individual selfish force.
The members of the floor and the car owner are selfish in their actions, thinking their ‘slight’ deviance will be ignored. But once the number of deviants increases, it evolves into a collective force — the second force.
The unseen collective force
This collective force is regulatory and subtly creeps due to individual selfish actions. If your selfishness cannot be capped by yourself, then the evolving system will cap it.
Individuals like to think they are independent. They are, however, a part of a larger system that is responsible for their freedom but also narrows down their options.
For instance, if I had a basketball, I’d dribble it anywhere I’d feel like. However, if I was a member of a basketball team, I’d be limited by my steps, jumps, passes, time, and a restricted area of play.
This thought experiment explains a famous concept — the Tragedy of the Commons. This is a concept popularized by the eminent ecologist, Garrett Hardin. The lesson is important. Without regulative control, systems can plummet into chaos.
A simple way to counter this is through increasing individual responsibility. But what measures are there to enforce this? Are they strong? Are they weak? Are they even existing?
A spinoff from the tragedy of commons is: selfish interest generates external effects.
These interests can even be innocent. A baby might cry because it is hungry. The caregivers are, therefore, nudged to feed it. They have to reprioritize their duties. Often individual actions, selfish as they might be, are innocent and perceptively harmless.
King Kaka, the Kenyan rapper captures this idea when he says:
maneno ikishatoka kinywani hauwezi ifuata (words once uttered, are irretrievable).
Unbeknownst to him, King Kaka also echoes:
bila nare nawawasha’ (no need for a lighter to burn his competitors).
He, thus, reiterates a far-reaching concept. The tragedy of the commons is not only relevant to local systems but to global ones as well. It has effects on the evolution of organisms and systems alike.
Awareness of such forces is one step to controlling it. It also helps to understand one of the forces of evolution. Now, making the next step involves something else. I cannot expound on it in this post. Dana Meadows, however, offers a good primer introduction to solving such problems.
What do we get from all this?
Evolution, as a science, tracks successful events when tragedy dominated.
PS: Some alternative solutions to the tragedies of the commons can be found here, pioneered by the eminent Elinor Ostrom
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