---
title: "The Tragedy of the Commons, Social Sanction, and the Reprogramming of MAGA"
date: "2026-03-07"
author: "marco"
tags: ['society']
categories: ["Writing"]
featuredImage: "2026/03/2026-03-07-tragedy-commons-social-sanction-reprogramming-maga.jpg"
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---

# The Tragedy of the Commons

We are on an isolated island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The year is 1200 AD, only that we don't call it that because we have no idea (yet) what an _annus domini_ might be. We live a peaceful life of fishing and harvesting, and our big preoccupation is typhoons. Aside from that, life is sweet.

To build our fishing canoes, we need hollowed out palm trees. Palm trees are useful, in general: we eat the fruit, we build houses with the trunks and fronds, we make fibers for clothing, etc. Sadly, the palm trees grow only in one section of the island.

The population grows, because life is sweet and love making abundant. More people need more fish, so we start using more trees to make canoes. There are fewer and fewer trees. Some people realize that's a problem and call for restraint. But you need a canoe, so you cut a tree. Maybe you do so at night, and once the tree is felled, what's the point of telling you you can't have a canoe?

Eventually, all the trees are gone. No trees means no fruits, which means you can't even grow more trees. So now you can't have more canoes - but also no more fruits to eat, no more fronds for roofs. Life, which was sweet, becomes hard: there is less and less food, less housing, less ability to move around. By the time you realize you need new trees, the last canoe has broken down and now you are stuck on an island with no ability to get out of it. Tragedy ensues.

This may or may not have happened in real life. It certainly is a myth that is commonly passed on, the island in the Pacific being a stand-in for any system where environmental degradation caused by individuals can lead to systemic collapse. The idea itself is literally ancient, having been discussed by the great Greek philosopher Aristotle.

# Evolution and the Tragedy

The tension in the story comes from an interesting issue: what is good for the individual may be bad for the commonwealth, and vice versa. The problem is that the individual is part of the collective, and as a result suffers from the consequences of their own selfishness.

This is something that is common to all life, especially to social species. When plants first started emitting oxygen, the stuff was highly toxic and almost killed everything on the planet (see (Great Oxidation Event)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event]). That included the plants that produced the oxygen, themselves.

In social species, the problem is both more acute and more tractable. A species is social when the individual does not survive on their own but needs the collective of the species to do so. Sometimes that's because individuals in the species are highly specialized (think bees), sometimes because the offspring can't survive on its own (think humans), and sometimes because the species developed a survival strategy that requires numbers (think wolves).

In a social species, there is evolutionary tension between the species as a whole and the individuals within. Obviously, a species cannot survive if the individuals don't, but sometimes it's preferable to kill an individual for the good of the species. Think some spiders, where the female eats the male after copulation, because once the sperm is passed on, the male has fulfilled their role and is more useful as free food than as individual.

# Logic and the Commons

Humans have replaced a lot (but not all) inborn behaviors with logic and thinking. We don't really sacrifice for the species as a whole, or for our governments, unless there is a rational reason to do so. That can be something like patriotic thinking or the threat of prison; in no case is it something that our biology demands of us.

Still, humans must deal with the same issue that all social species encounter: how to ensure the survival of the individual _and_ that of the species in a world where the balance between the two is constantly changing. We must have built a mechanism that allows us to benefit humanity at our individual expense, a mechanism flexible enough that it can be expressed more or less strongly, or entirely blocked when required.

This mechanism must be built-in: we cannot rely on people to learn it, because a society in which this mechanism is not present is condemned to the death of the commonwealth. Only those societies that spread the solution of the tragedy thickly enough survive, just like only a group with sufficient vaccination rates is immune from a disease.