We, in our naivety, believe that each of us is part of a collective, I’ve referred to this as the herd in past posts. That view is not incorrect in my opinion, but it is also not completely true. I’m going to support it and challenge it at the same time. It’s not a secret to anyone who reads my blog the disdain I have in general for the herd, people going about their lives repeating actions and words to each other, rarely with any originality. It’s just so boring a fact that if you know 10 people from 10 different circumstances then you pretty much know everyone. People are not born boring, they develop their boringness within a society that has rules and norms, and these prohibitive restrictive mechanisms act as a force to homologate. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I am an exception, but I definitely think differently to most of the people I encounter.
If I contend that people are mostly living hum drum lives, and I do contend this, with some interesting exceptions…. Cloning each others desires, seeking pleasure in experiences that were planned and pre-packaged by marketeers, buying products because they think they should, liking what they are supposed to like, following the popular sports person, reading what mainstream educators call the ‘great’ works, eating food they don’t really like while a festival they don’t really understand plays pretend to a god they don’t really believe in…. and I am correct… then yes, people are a herd like sheep, mindless repetition engines.
I’m starting to sound like agent Smith – “Humans are a virus” – (character – The Matrix), but I think Smith is likely on to something. We are mammals, but unlike mammals we destroy everything, and that makes us virus-like. I wondered what way this destruction plays out in the reality we can see every day, in the micro reality that is the observations of a single person or a small group of people in the locality of their small town or their daily commute. So I, as usual, discussed with my pal Dave the frustrations revealed when the necessity of people watching is forced upon us because of a reliance on those people for progression. A lot of things in your life hinge on the deeds and decisions of others, even something as simple as going to work is mostly contingent on the actions of other folks that are trying to use the same pathways; unless you happen to own a helicopter. I hate this and many other things, I hate being employed, mostly I hate when I do not have the choice not to be a participant.
I drive to and from my workplace daily, on a road system that must have been planned by a blind squirrel, Dave uses the same roads to get to his, and we both observe the infuriating actions of other drivers during these commutes. At a particular point a dual carriageway turns into a choice between a sunken roundabout that leads either to a small town, or a fly over to a single carriageway that heads on to the next major town. The latter is the one people are more usually taking. A person may get backed up in traffic while going over the flyover, so some drivers choose to jump into the left lane and use the roundabout and then exit to the junction that leads to the very same road they have just left (the right lane to the flyover). In doing this, they are the cause, and the worsening, of the very problem they are seeking to bypass.
Once this ‘asshole’ move has been made they then need the drivers on the flyover to let them in, which of course relies on people being nice and doing so, because they do not have to give way. They are likely to do so however, the reason we can suppose this is that they were in the first place willing to not use the bypass method, they chose instead to put up with the traffic and stay in their lane because they are not opportunistically assholes. The assumption that other people will be nice enough to let themselves be exploited by your selfishness is the reason selfishness flourishes as a strategy, and why people are persuaded into it. Where collaboration works people will do that, but while driving we are savages it would seem.
This is the Nash equilibrium, a condition where people will only pursue strategies that are beneficial to all persons if they are of benefit to themselves also, or they feel assured that they are not giving greater personal participation. An illustration of this is a student accommodation sink where no-one does the dishes because one person will not do the dishes of another person, and there is maybe one person among the group that has not participated. Result: nobody participates because they do not wish to be exploited, in case that exploitation signifies weakness and then becomes a habit. The dominant strategy of each person is to do only the amount of dishes that they create, so if it is their turn to wash up they expect only the amount they make, multiplied by the number of residents, divided by the amount of turns agreed. As soon as this is not in-line with their expectations they will withdraw their participation in some way.
If we go back to the junction in question and think about what motivates some people to use the bypass method, knowing that they are pursuing their dominant strategy, yet also knowing that they are contributing to the problem they are attempting to bypass, we see where people will exercise a perceived advantage at the detriment of others, if they benefit even slightly, regardless of if they cause or contribute to other peoples problems. This does not bode well for people who are to live within a society that relies on others to act in certain cohesive ways.
Knowing that people act in this NASH observable way, we then can predict that it will influence others through noticing the phenom, figure it out that they would also benefit, and copying it. In this way an act of selfishness becomes an inspiration to those that first may see it as an act of injustice, and second may consider that they may be missing out by not doing it. This is the theory of ‘crabs in a bucket‘ where any crab that climbs onto another crab and maybe could have gotten out of the bucket is immediately stopped by another crab that notices them and tries to get on their back, thus bringing the whole stack collapsing back into the bucket.
People hold back the best interests of all persons when they act to exploit their own advantage within situations where, through setting a trend of behaviour, they make the problem they are attempting to circumnavigate, actually worse than it would have been if they had acted according to the specified, and planned, method of travel. It is pointless to rebel against a thing that has no benefit awarded for the rebellion, when there is no way to make the path of travel shorter or faster. Yet everyone does try, and this becomes natural behaviour, but as a whole society it is the strategy whereby everyone loses.
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