I would imagine a system you’re suggesting would first have to eliminate scarcity of resources. We certainly have the ability to do that with our technology today but choose not to do so. Wouldn’t it require a turn to benevolence by all involved in the society to achieve that? If so, that doesn’t sound like a likely outcome. What, in your opinion, would it take to escape the Tragedy of Commons that is likely to actually occur?
Comment on Not a good sign
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks agoOh definitely, my issue with the concept of the Tragedy Of The Commons is not that shared wealth is not vulnerable but rather that the idea that humans innately cannot function in an environment while preserving and growing a shared commons without some kind of system of authoritarian control and violence actively preserving that shared commons is a deeply political, problematic and scientifically incorrect way of understanding people.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I would imagine a system you’re suggesting would first have to eliminate scarcity of resources.
Provide evidence for this claim.
I understand this has been established as our cultural intuition but it is a near axiomatic assumption that upon examination has very little evidence to support it, whether we look to the natural world or to human societies.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Provide evidence for this claim.
I can provide zero evidence. I’m trying to imagine a world where your proposal works. Scarcity elimination the best possible way I could come up with.
I understand this has been established as our cultural intuition but it is a near axiomatic assumption that upon examination has very little evidence to support it, whether we look to the natural world or to human societies.
If your proposal doesn’t need to eliminate scarcity, I’m even more interested in how it is done. Whats the secret sauce society-at-large has been missing?
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Do you have a human society to point to where your proposal exists successfully already?
Every single human society in history where a commons was maintained via a system other than centralized authoritarian violence?
In other words, every society that isn’t ruled by an oppressive, authoritarian regime and that has some shared wealth whether it be in public spaces, public knowledge, public utilities, public education or other forms of public shared resource.
In the natural world it is very difficult to find ecosystems that function purely on a scarcity mechanism. If one considers the function of a predator in an ecosystem, it is precisely to stabilize the ecosystem so it can absorb large inputs of excess resources without the system collapsing. If one considers the basic function of herbivores in ecosystems it is the same, to stabilize the growth of plants so that abrupt periods of resource abundance and opportunity don’t destabilize the forest.
The only system that functions under the axiom that you suggest, which is that scarcity is a necessary obstacle to tackle before systems can stabilize, are ecosystems dominated by invasive species. This is in fact why invasive species collapse ecosystems.
Which is all to say, there are systems that cannot handle abundance as a temporary state and not a final destination never to be reached, but they are systems of cancer. All the dynamically stable systems we can point to whether they in the natural world or in human societies all feature some degree of scarcity, some degree of abundance and yet still manage to develop a shared commons of wealth.
For example, if you watch how Grizzly Bears eat Salmon, they do a shit job of it. They often become distracted in the process of eating a Salmon and just drop it leaving an only half eaten Salmon carcass on the ground wherever they happened to be. The way you understand how scarcity MUST impact systems cannot explain this blatant inefficiency in a natural ecosystem, individuals in nature are supposed to use EVERYTHING they can right? Evolution selects for efficiency right?.. Except it didn’t because it turns out the Grizzly Bears discarding the Salmon ends up transferring a massive amount of nutrients from the Ocean to the Forest.
You cannot understand the essential aspects of the above example of Grizzly Bears, Salmon and Forests under the mindset that you are approaching this problem from.
Live_your_lives@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think you are overselling it’s incorrectness and so horseshoeing back around to being like the people who oversell it’s truthfulness. Yes, the tragedy of the commons is misleading if taken in isolation, but something being misleading does not automatically make it scientifically incorrect. Do you have direct evidence or an argument for why the tragedy of the commons isn’t the most likely outcome if the circumstances just so happen to match the assumptions Hardin made?
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I think you are overselling it’s incorrectness and so horseshoeing back around to being like the people who oversell it’s truthfulness.
I am not.
Do you have direct evidence or an argument for why the tragedy of the commons isn’t the most likely outcome if the circumstances just so happen to match the assumptions Hardin made?
Here you go
boingboing.net/2019/03/07/scientific-fraud.html
Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.
The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.
aeon.co/…/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-a…
news.osu.edu/the-tragedy-of-the-commons--minus-th…
news.cnrs.fr/…/debunking-the-tragedy-of-the-commo…
landscapewanderer.link/tragedy/
Live_your_lives@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
To be clear, I agree with you like 95% of the way, it’s that last 5% that I still think you are overselling and would like you to be more careful with.
The problem is that Hardin’s argument simply isn’t much of a scientific one in the first place and is instead much more of a logical one. (I was being sloppy when I asked for direct evidence, so sorry about that.) Hardin made the massive assumption that people are wholly self-interested. If people are only trying to maximize their own share of the resources regardless of what it might cost others, then it is impossible to escape the competition that creates for the limited amount of resources that the commons provides. All of the examples and articles you’ve brought up attack that assumption and/or focus on the conclusions Hardin made based on those assumptions, but do nothing to actually disprove the fundamental argument behind the tragedy of the commons.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I see what you are saying but my argument is that in real world systems the vast majority of the time it is in the individual’s self interest to enrich and defend a shared wealth/commons.
The idea that it isn’t is inherently a belief not a finding of science and it has been imposed in us for political reasons.
You can create narrow conditions where the self interests of the individual existentially diverge from the interests of the group, I don’t dispute that… rather I think Capitalism is monomanically obsessed with creating these systems artificially and through violence and imposed collapse.
I am fumbling at things Naomi Klein has already more brilliantly expressed.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
i dunno. the community garden run by the local MS-13 has the weirdest red drip system, but my begonias have never looked better.