Hardin, Ostrom, and the Rest of Us
This essay argues that humans are wired for both competition and cooperation, which is why the tragedy of the commons is avoidable in theory but hard to overcome at a global scale.
Garrett Hardin called it “the tragedy of the commons”: a social dilemma in which individuals, each acting rationally in their own self-interest, deplete or spoil a shared, unregulated resource, even though doing so works against the collective good of the whole group.
Elinor Ostrom challenged the inevitability of Hardin’s claim. She argued that his model presented a false choice by assuming the only solutions were full privatization or top-down government control.
My take:
In theory, the tragedy isn’t inevitable. Communities can protect shared resources through agreed limits, monitoring, and accountability. In practice, that hasn’t worked out very well. Maybe in small pockets. But the rivers that run through those sanctuaries are polluted upstream. The air above them is polluted too. Runoff from the neighbor’s industrial farm damages their soil.
A small pocket of responsibility can’t offset the global irresponsibility around it.
Humans are, at their core, individualistic. Our primary survival locus is… ourselves. We’ll join a tribe or community when our survival requires it. We’ll care for our offspring if we have the drive to do so.
Basically, we’re most concerned with ourselves and with whatever concentric circles around us we consider necessary for our survival or success. We move only as far from that center as we must. We’re wired for competition, but we’ll settle for cooperation when we have to.
The research seems to agree. Ostrom found that cooperation in the commons rarely survives on goodwill alone. It needs monitoring, consequences, and visible benefits for the people taking part. People don’t sacrifice for abstractions. Concern radiates outward in rings: self, kin, then the people we depend on. Kin selection and reciprocal altruism seem to be essential to whatever selflessness we manage.
But the deeper I go down this rabbit hole, the less cut and dried it becomes.
What about people who willingly sacrifice themselves for others? Parents go hungry so their children can eat. Soldiers die for the person next to them. Toddlers help strangers before anyone teaches them to. People pay real costs to punish unfairness that doesn’t even affect them. Disaster research consistently finds that people organize and help each other rather than panic or loot, even when their own safety is most uncertain.
Hardship seems to make behavior more variable, not uniformly selfish. Some people close ranks. Others become more generous than they’d ever be in comfort.
Maybe competition and cooperation are both native to us. That leaves me with one question: are we truly built to need each other?
In theory, humans can act together responsibly. But will we do it on a scale big enough to save the planet, and ourselves? There’s little global precedent for collective action that large.
So Hardin was right. And Ostrom was right too.
Either way, humanity keeps moving through its cycles of creation and destruction, endlessly caught in the yin and yang of duality.
It’s neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It just is what it is.
Cheers.
