Me, Not Us

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. — Garrett Hardin

We all have those gray areas and questions in our lives where moral or ethical boundaries are not necessarily paired with a heavy underline.

• Should I drop this paper into the recycling bin or is the trash fine? Will it really make a difference?
• Is a rolling stop or skip of a turn signal ok as I’m driving? There aren’t any other cars around.
• Is buying some shares in a company that I happen to know will go up in value soon a bad thing? I have a cousin that works there.
• Should I use ChatGPT to write this essay for a class? I have more important and stressful things I need to focus on.

None of the actions associated with these questions will necessarily have an immediate negative impact on anyone if they’re carried out by one individual. They also seem posed to result in a personal positive benefit in terms of gain, easing of effort, and convenience. Good for me, and not bad for you.

So what’s the problem then?

Whenever I read the news, hear my kids complaining about all the academic cheating that happens at their high school, or learn about the scalpers swooping into the local Target to buy up all the recently-stocked Pokémon cards, I keep coming to the same conclusion in my mind — we seem to be having a giant accountability crisis in our society today. I’m sure this isn’t a new thing (we are selfish humans after all) but it does certainly feel worse now than it did when I was younger. I recognize that this could be entirely a perception issue on my part, tied to age and being curmudgeonly. Recent politics and the absence of consequences at the highest levels in government make me think otherwise, but then, there has been corruption in politics for millennia.

It’s actually not the general accountability problem that I find interesting. Rather, it’s the strange reality that if a large group of people all continuously make choices that are not meaningfully negative to the immediate individuals around them, the ongoing collective result can still end up being incredibly damaging to the society itself.

The driving example is a concrete one. If I roll through a stop sign or don’t use a turn signal, it’s not a problem if no one’s there. But if everyone adopts that behavior and it becomes the collective norm, then suddenly there are car accidents happening frequently and people are getting hurt. There aren’t nearly enough police officers to enforce the rules of the road for everyone, so governance ultimately depends on whether I’m going to be accountable for my own driving, for the sake of upholding the system of safety itself.

I think this intersection point between cultural self-centeredness and the inability (or unwillingness) to project the consequences of it onto the world we live in may perhaps be one of the fundamental flaws of human society, at least at a large population scale. We are really good at evaluating “right now” and terrible, as common individuals, at understanding the collective consequences of our actions on the society around us, especially when we don’t perceive harm to others in the moment. And when the capability to project social consequences becomes outweighed by self-interest at a high enough level in societal structure (for example, in government) then the collective safety or effectiveness of that society is at risk of breaking down.

You can strip ethics/morals out of it and call it a systems problem of cause-and-effect complexity, but even if that’s the case, the result is the same. What I’m not sure about is how you reverse the trajectory away from more and more self-interested decision-making as time goes on. It could be possible that the anonymity and tribalism enabled through the internet and our technology have played a part in eroding our capability for considering the “us together”. Has the isolating nature of text bubbles versus looking at each other in the face on a regular basis made us nothing more than digital avatars to each other?

We act based on what we feel to be the most real for us. Maybe the giant collection of contact profiles on our phones and in our apps doesn’t feel real, so we choose ourselves instead?

What happens to a society when its people can’t see each other anymore?