One spring morning in 1832, a political economist from Oxford University found himself staring at a bunch of cattle on a piece of local common ground, and idly wondering why the animals were ‘so puny and so stunted’, and why the common was ‘itself so bare-worn, and cropped so differently from the adjoining enclosures.’
He was called William Forster Lloyd, and from his associated researches eventually emerged his celebrated theory of the Tragedy of the Commons. What Forster Lloyd asserted in his paper was that, given a collective asset (eg the common itself), our instinct is always to overexploit it for our private benefit (meaning the owners of the increasing numbers of cattle who overgrazed it). Because the herdsman owned the animals, the profit came purely to him; equally, because the pasture was a commonly owned benefit, its gradual deterioration was shared by everyone. And because the privatised gain would exceed his share of the commonised loss, a self-seeking herdsman would always add another animal to his herd, until the common was ruined, and they all had to go and find new land.
You can find any example you want of this, from the people of Easter Island removing the last tree they possessed in order to build, and move, yet more statues, to our current habit of ripping out of the oceans far more fish than it can sustainably supply us with. I’d like to suggest the addition of one more to this list: Covidiots.
Right now, our house is in isolation. One of us recently had the virus, one has it at the moment: both mildly, And two of us are trying very hard not to get it. The lengths we are all going to in order to achieve that aim are sometimes comical, culminating, each night, with four people eating dinner within 8 metres of each other in front of three different screens and at three different tables. We operate a dead letter box system of piles of washing up, and leave the hallway as a ‘decompression chamber’ for 10 minutes between people walking through. The dogs think it is Armageddon, with walks now consisting of endless loops round the wet garden. In five short days, I have become an enthusiastic online gamer. Online companies and kind friends provide what we need to get by, so we don’t leave the place at all. Never in my life have I felt more of a responsibility to behave myself towards the outside world. Not when I was wandering around the sad streets of Belfast with my rifle, nor when forgoing the second glass of wine before a drive home; not anything. Like most people, I have a well-flawed character, but I like to think that even I can identify the time at which the only requirement is for me to simply try to be a good citizen. And yes, I fully understand how lucky I am, we are, to have a house big enough to do this comfortably, and a garden in which to let off steam when we need to. Not everyone does, but that’s not the point.
To my unscientific brain, things could not be simpler than there are right now. We have the choice to extend, or not, the agony, kill, or not, an ‘extra’ 10-20,000 more of our people and drag, or not, the country a notch or two even lower to what has to be the start point of its recovery. We can blame the government, the civil servants, the epidemiologists all we want, but this one is completely down to us. If we do what we are asked, we will move through this phase reasonably quickly and in good order; if we don’t, we won’t. More people will die. Maybe me. Maybe you.
Yet out there on the otherwise silent streets and derelict basements, plenty of people than are still relentlessly playing the selfish herd game night after night; you know, the one that says ‘something might happen, but, if there’s enough of us doing it, it probably won’t be to me’, the same one that gets seabirds nesting together in huge colonies and that accounts for the vast wildebeest herds on the Serengeti. Who’s going to notice if I only isolate for a couple of days? Or have my mates in for a quick coffee? Or go to a quick rave?
It’s so bloody simple. What part of what is happening to us don’t they understand?
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