collective action

On the one hand, I am as frustrated as anyone with the intractable, deadly conflicts around the promotion of purportedly untainted universal truths that would bring everybody together if only “all those other people would just come to their senses and accept what is obvious to us”. I’m not going to pretend that that I’m OK with manipulative public pulpiteering or that there is nothing wrong with cynically invoking ostentatiously spiritual sentimentality to promote political agendas. I will not go along with willfully ignorant denial of factual reality or condone reckless self-deception with my silence. On the other hand, it is cruel and unnecessary to pull the rug out from under anyone who relies on religion for comfort, security, unconditional love, worthy and meaningful purposefulness, encouragement, and/or a sense of connection with other people and with something larger than themselves. Disparaging those who are doing the best they can to get by does not make the world better or us seem smarter. It only pits us against each other, gets us unnecessarily bogged down in a counterproductive side issue, and takes up energy that could be directed toward common goals. 

The possibility of working together toward a more promising future is not a ridiculously idealistic fantasy. Pursuing it takes us down a brightly-lit, broad highway that has led the greater human community to many historic breakthroughs, surprising victories, and revolutionary accomplishments. Those who have preceded us on that venerable highway didn’t know any better than to challenge set ideas about what is possible. Considerable obstacles notwithstanding, finding solutions to the most difficult problems the global human community faces is not complicated. What we need to do to move forward is as obvious as first grade arithmetic because the main requirement is to get in touch with our commonality, and by definition, commonality is common. While it would be unrealistic to aim for unanimity, if we can translate what we largely share in common with each other into a nonpartisan commitment to the common cause of building up social, political, and economic institutions that foster freedom, fairness, opportunity, personal responsibility, and the common welfare, we can find a rallying point that would bring us together around a shared vision for a society that is more hospitable to basic human decency. There are enough of us who are capable of experiencing a deep mutual affinity that is firmly grounded in our common concerns, our common interests, and our ability to identify and empathize with each other. We can achieve critical mass, unite behind the goal of encouraging sustainable economic growth, and promote a more broadly prosperous global human community through a large scale collaborative effort.

What stands in the way is not a shortage of talent, brainpower, or resources; instead, we are defeated at the very outset by our fear, our short-sightedness, and our cynicism. Whoever first observed that it is amazing what people can accomplish if they don’t care who gets the credit deserves more credit than he or she was probably looking to receive, but actually, what is even more amazing is how many of our worst problems would simply evaporate if we could see the attention-grabbing and the ostentatious self-importance that we take for granted for what they are, a sad charade of one-upmanship produced by childish insecurity. In recent centuries, humanity has come to recognize that the earth is not the center of the universe; most of us however have not outgrown the tendency to view the universe though anthropocentric, ethnocentric, or egocentric eyes. Our skewed perspective distorts reality, crowds out empathy, humility, respect, and trust, and severely limits our ability to work through conflicts, to appreciate our complementary differences, and to foster meaningful unity, impactful solidarity, and productive collaboration. We trade in hope, confident wellbeing, and goodwill for social rituals that perpetuate an endemic pattern of wasted talent, misused time, and misdirected energy. The considerable good that ordinary people have to contribute is driven out of the process or buried by greedy, aggressive pursuits of power prestige and ugly displays of territorialism which are like the dance that dogs do with fire hydrants, often under a thin veil of sanctimonious pretence of moral superiority. 

Consequently, who we are becomes shaped by a paranoiac need to protect ourselves against real and imagined adversaries and against any troubling circumstance, intrusive idea, or uncomfortable awareness that would topple the houses of cards that pretend to offer security and places to hide. A bunker mentality sets in. We hide inside our fortresses of discontented obliviousness, surrounded by stockpiles of yesterday’s distractions, anxiously guarding sentimentalized versions of reality, elaborate museums of what never was, shrines to what will never be, mausoleums of foreclosed possibilities, and hollowed out spaces that accusingly echo and amplify our regrets. We become trapped in a vicious circle of fear, hoarding, and scarcity. As with someone dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean, what we need is abundant but tragically unavailable. Even more tragic, our deprivation is self-inflicted. The situation we are in is akin to the hell described in an old parable known as the allegory of the long spoons. In the parable, everyone in Hell is perpetually hungry because the only means of eating is with spoons that are too long. They are incapable of getting any food into their mouths because of their aversion to feeding each other. In the real world, being in a situation in which the simple willingness make choices that would bolster a rising tide that lifts all boats is too weak to overcome the warranted fear of being taken advantage of is what is known as a collective action problem. The solution is obvious; however, it involves cooperation, intelligent pooling of resources, and trust that others are going to follow suit, and because of costs, risks, and insufficient incentives at the level of the individual, what happens instead is a cascading race to the bottom. Dreams of what could be sit on the shelf collecting dust, producing a return on investment equivalent to hiding our life savings under the mattress.

Recovering humanity, playing on two meanings of the word humanity, humanity as a set of personal characteristics we all share in common and humanity as a collective entity of which we are each inescapably a part, is about the natural reciprocal relationship between the vulnerability that is inherent in humanity at the individual level and the strength that emerges when we gather seemingly unrelated puzzle pieces drawn from our fragmentary understandings and our disparate perspectives and combine them into something resembling a unified whole. As each of us stokes the glowing embers of human sympathy that smolder in our hearts, we augment our bond with the humanity that all of us together instantiate. And coming from the other end, as we recover a communal bond with the humanity arrayed around us, we enrich our connection with the humanity within that is our birthright. We find new connections by looking inward at our own restlessness and incompleteness, looking outward for companionship, similarities that we can identify with, and for ways to belong and participate, looking inward again for stirrings of our most authentically human responsiveness, and looking outward again toward possibilities beyond our own limited reach as separate individuals. If we accept the challenge, dare to care, venture out from the cozy cocoons within which we smugly insulate ourselves, reawaken our imagination, dredge up our buried dreams, bring to the table underutilized talents and untapped strengths, replace unverifiable suppositions with human-centered actualities, and cultivate optimism and openness through mutual encouragement and trust-building, our hopeful gamble will be rewarded over the long haul, if not always in the near term.