I have a new column today on OnlySky. It’s about why progressive change is so difficult to achieve, why grand utopian dreams often come to grief, and why people stubbornly persist in lives of misery and dissatisfaction when a better solution is right in front of them.
All these evils are tied together by the moral framework called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It’s the fear that motivates people to resist change – even change they’d benefit from – because they fear someone else will take a bigger piece of the pie.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece:
Humans are naturally conservative. Small c.
Not in the sense of a political ideology, but of an inclination. We Homo sapiens are contradictory creatures. We dream of change, but we also fear it. We’re full of hopes and wishes for the future, but all too often, instead of buckling down and doing the work to make those dreams a reality, we fall into a rut of doing what’s familiar and comfortable. Everyone’s familiar with the lies we tell ourselves: “I’ll quit tomorrow,” “I’ll make a New Year’s Resolution to go to the gym more,” “When I get that next promotion, I’ll really turn my life around.”
What’s true of individuals is also true of society as a whole. Everyone wants a better world for themselves and for their children. And it’s not as if we don’t know what we’d need to do to make this happen. The solutions to most of our problems aren’t mysterious.
Sometimes change is only for the worse. For example, I worked for a company with a number of offices, and the one constant would be that the big cheeses would get the prime office space. My team was perpetually being moved to worse and worse office spaces as the company hired more and more big cheeses. We were lectured to embrace change…did that mean we had to embrace the mold literally oozing down the walls? The broken office furniture that you had to jury-rig to keep from killing you? The 80-degree airless unventilated spaces? Was it too conservative of us to resent being crammed into a tiny room elbow-to-elbow in a pandemic while a big cheese got a 4-person office to themself?
Are you sure that’s called the “prisoners’ dilemma?” I thought that was something else, and what you’re describing is called something like “crisis of the commons.”
“Tragedy of the commons”.
The prisoner’s dilemma is a variation on the basic idea of the conflict between immediate personal gain vs long-term general gain.
They’re related ideas, but the distinction as I understand it is that the tragedy of the commons specifically concerns overuse of a shared resource (e.g., fishing fleets driving fish to extinction because nobody owns the ocean and nobody can set limits), whereas the prisoner’s dilemma is a more general framework for any situation where cooperation would be beneficial but every party has a selfish incentive to cheat.
Humans are naturally conservative.
Much of what you write here (haven’t followed the link to OS yet) reminds me of Eric Hoffer’s classic The True Believer.
Risk/reward bias has a lot to do with it. In this case, “change for the better” is a type of reward. Risk is not just relative to how likely you are to lose, but also how much you can afford to lose it.
Low Risk, High Reward: Excellent
Low Risk, Low Reward: Okay
High Risk, High Reward: Desperate
High Risk, Low Reward: Hell no
“Other people opposing me” is one thing which increases the level of risk. To what degree depends on the relative combined power of the opposing side, and how likely they are to inflict violence or take other extreme measures to defend their position. And since people are all over the place in what they think society should be like, that sets the risk factor for social change to at least medium in most cases.
This is far from the whole story, of course; just one piece of the picture.
I went to OnlySky and read your piece in its entirety. It’s clearer what you mean by the term “prisoner’s dilemma” (both cooperate for a small gain, or none cooperate in hopes of a bigger gain) and I agree it applies to your argument.
I still stick by what I said. To rephrase: that some are continually told they must give all to the benefit of the few/the ones who never seem to give anything. That is, I believe, what makes many people unwilling to make changes: they see that it somehow never benefits them.
Having said that, yes, I agree with you that there’s also a general tendency to avoid change even if it’s for the better. Were you alive when the USA removed lead from gasoline? Even back then it was known that the change would bring only good to the environment and to human health, but it cost a penny or two more per gallon at the pump–maybe 10 cents more to fill up–but many people are bad at math and declared they’d be impoverished by the change.
Or for that matter, do you recall when the USA decided it would join the rest of the world in using the metric system? The metric system is much easier to use and simpler to convert–less math involved, just move the decimal point. That lasted a week.
As climate change is starting to occur, the natural tendency of humanity to be conservative and resist change may be providing more impetus to take action.
It’s an interesting dilemma the average conservative human finds themselves in. In order to prevent climate change from occurring they have to accept other changes to their society to prevent (now mitigate) the changes which will occur to the climate. There is no question that change will occur, and people will be unhappy about any changes. But which type of change do they dislike more? Uncontrolled change to the climate, or controlled change to their behavior? There is no other choice.
In fact, there is no real choice at all. We have progressed far enough down the climate change path that no level of societal change will prevent climate changes. The choice now is who drives. Do we try to control our own fate by making societal changes to mitigate the amount of climate change which will occur? Or are we going to be driven to societal changes by the changes in the climate?
I’m not certain I trust Jesus to be my co-pilot on this issue, and I certainly do not want him in the driver’s seat.