Today I am thinking about the human ego. Or, more precisely, the fact that there are nearly 8 billion egos extant on planet earth. Our ego is the means by which we filter our life experience. It is a portal of our self awareness. But it has some flaws, the greatest of which may be that we can't truly see ourselves, and our view of others is colored by what our egos tell us. Our eyes can only look out upon the rest of the world, never back at ourselves. and what we see in the outer world is drenched in the "I" of our egos.
I wrote recently about the simultaneity of time. Our experience of space/time is as one ego, and to that one ego, OUR experience is huge and intense and important. We fill our own screen. And that is how it must be. When a baby is born, however adorable, he or she immediately begins constructing a self. And without this sense of self, we could not function.
But, with this sense of singularity in a shared world we soon run into problems. We are social animals and need each other to survive, but even if that were not true there are just too many of us not to bump up against each other. And it is a world of limited resources and where the repeated actions of one group can harm all the others, as when one band would hunt a food source to extinction in days gone by. The worldly philosophers have grappled with this. At one time, the forces of culture had overcome the forces of ego and created a great system of commons.
The commons remained workable for centuries until the philosophy of "enlightened self-interest" that became popular among the wealthy, who then destroyed those commons and replaced them with enclosure. Then, in the 1960s a philosopher named Garrett Harding wrote an essay called "The Tragedy of the Commons" only what he described was actually an open access situation. The two are like chalk and cheese. They seem the same on the outside if you don't look closely. The commons, however, was shared but not open. It was a monument to people putting community needs ahead of their own for the greater good. An open access situation is the opposite. Anyone can use it, but nobody bears any responsibility for it.
In the 1960s we saw this in crash pads which were little test labs for egos gone wild. In one instance a group called the Earth People bought a big piece of land in northern Vermont. Anyone could come and live there and build something. There was a small river running through the land. The people upstream began dumping human waste into the river without regard for the ones downstream.
There was nobody to tell them to stop. If one of the peace loving people downstream had showed up with a large weapon they may have prevailed, but that would be the beginning of gangster rule. And within two years a group of hardcore bikers came in and took over. It was Garrett Hardin's tragedy, but it was never a commons.
And that is why the capitalist theory of enlightened self interest will not work. I saw it again while taking the bus every day from Sonoma County into San Francisco, a ride that once took 50 minutes and at that time took well over two hours. I would watch as cars entered the freeway, and then left it. Each car carrying a person whose perceived self-interest led them to get on that freeway, but the net result was always a traffic jam. Every day.
If you take it a level deeper, the systems we created in service to somebody's ego in the past may look like they serve our self interest, but we can't see the larger picture. The existence at all of internal combustion engines or freeways is damaging the very planetary systems upon which all life rests. But, as individuals we NEED them to live in the world we have made, and as egos we want ours to be big and shiny.
Our egos can sometimes lead us to do good in the world, but that too can be distorted. If you have the traits of what is known in psychology as the light triad, you may think often of saving the world. In your ego, and for no good reason, you believe that you alone of all 8 billion of us can somehow do the trick.
This can be a good motivator to action, but it will not actually save the world. The people who become leaders on the world stage have to have the structure of a huge ego to propel them forward through that street fight writ large. And in those positions they may do more than most of us. But each of them falls short of saving the world. And always will.
Which means the rest of us will never come close. In the mature person that egoic need mellows into the willingness to improve some small part of the world instead. And that is enough, for the world and for us.
Finally our egos face the biggest conundrum. Mortality. Our individual "I" is so engrained that it is almost impossible for us to conceive of a world without us. But, with luck, the mature ego comes to terms. I will die as we all do. Though my mind can't often understand a world without me in it, I know the world will go on. I imagine that there will be some who are sad, and a few who will truly mourn me. I will be remembered by those people as long as they live, and then slip into the anonymity of eternity.
We as a species are on the verge of a great catastrophe. Our individual egos are driving part of it. Can we remain self aware beings and yet rewire this feature to be able to see the big picture? Can we overcome the distortion of the "I"? Much hangs in the balance.
Thanks for the clear look at what the Commons really entailed.