Making the Trains Run on Time in the Tragic Commons

Today’s big government finds running Amtrak too large a challenge, and Trump’s roundup [of undocumented immigrants] would be about 94 times larger than the wartime internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent. But Trump wants America to think big. The big costs, in decades and dollars (hundreds of billions), of Trump’s project could be reduced if, say, the targets were required to sew yellow patches on their clothing to advertise their coming expulsion. There is precedent.

George Will

            The basic problem in the Tragic Commons is that despite the fact that our gains as a community are far greater when we cooperate, it’s always in everyone’s individual interest free-ride or cheat.  Who wouldn’t ordinarily wait for somebody else do the work or make the sacrifice for the community and then take advantage of the benefits that accrue?

            But we know this, and that’s why we spend so much time and effort trying to cope with the logic of human nature.  Sometimes we find that we can use incentives to get people to do what they know they should do anyway.  And sometimes, we realize that the inclination to be selfish is so strong that we must resort to penalties to discourage the behavior we don’t want.  Fortunately, we seem to have no shortage of people who derive great psychic pleasure from enforcing the rules we adopt as a community through democratic processes.

            Every once in a while, though, a vociferous segment of our population grows weary of our democracy.  The people in it have no inclination to contribute to the cost of encouraging people to do the right thing, and they lose patience with people who, despite our penalties insist on doing the wrong thing.  They get angry.  They lose faith in the admittedly slow, deliberative process through which our community makes decisions, particularly when we tend to make decisions they don’t particularly like.

            “What we need,” they conclude, “is a real leader who can make the Commons great again.”  They don’t care about his policies or his political ideology.  Even if they did, they have no inclination to make studied inquiries, either because they don’t have the intellectual tools to do so, or because they believe that nobody really cares about those things anyway. Except for the mainstream media that, as everyone knows, favors the other side.  What these denizens of the Tragic Commons want is a leader with a bold and abrasive personality promises results.

            So they latch on to a charismatic sort who promises to fix things using simple, common sense methods anyone could have thought up sitting around a kitchen table or a bar.  They are willing to trust him because he’s prone to saying all the things they believe deep down in their guts but won’t say publically for fear that the rest of us may become offended and begin to think ill of them.  It helps if their new leader seems beyond corruption, perhaps because he has already been successful in one realm or perhaps because he is extraordinarily rich.  After all, when you’re rich, as Tevyeh the milkman says, they think you really know.

            He feels their pain, though he’s never actually experienced it.  But, he knows who has caused it.  “Your woes are not your fault,” he tells them.  Instead,  “the blame for your problems rests at the feet of a discreet group of your neighbors who are not like you, who have no right to be here and who do not deserve the bounty of your Tragic Commons.  Let us deal shrewdly with them lest they conspire with our enemies to destroy our shining city on a hill.”

            The tactic is as ancient as the Pharaoh in Egypt who sought to exterminate the Israelites, or the ancient Persian courtier Haman who tried to get the Sultan to do the same thing.  As he, who, in accordance with Godwin’s Law, must not be named in an internet argument, found out, it doesn’t take much to convince ordinarily good, peaceful and civilized people that their salvation lies in rounding up their neighbors and putting them on boxcars bound for oblivion.

            You cannot blame the object of the people’s affection for any of this.  What is democracy but a marketplace of ideas?  Voters listen to the pitches of those who seek to lead and decide who is saying the things they most want to hear.  The bearer of those popular messages gains electoral support while the bearers of less popular messages become “also-rans.”  In the democracy of the Tragic Commons, the leader is nothing without the support of those who placed him in that position.

            And that, perhaps, is the most chilling thought of all: the leaders chosen reflect the choosers.  Even the unthinkable is thinkable in the Tragic Commons when good people give in to their frustrations and to their fears.