Transcriber: Rosemary Amadi Reviewer: Anna Sobota
Imagine this:
you’re going trick-or treating, and you go up to a house.
You see a bowl of candy with a sign that says, “Take one
You look inside, and you realize that there’s no candy in the bowl at all.
So, you walk away sad from that house, and you move on.
Now, imagine a different situation.
You’re waiting on an important email.
You get 12 new notifications from your inbox.
So, you take out your phone and you open the app,
only to find that all of those notifications were from spam mail.
Lastly, imagine you’ve contracted tuberculosis
and you had to go to the hospital,
only to find out that the strain you had contracted was resistant to antibiotics.
Now, take a moment to think about how all of these situations are connected.
It may seem like there’s no correlation between any of these
because how could getting free candy, receiving emails,
and taking medication for illnesses have anything in common?
Let me explain more.
On Halloween people put out bowls of candy
and trust that other people will only take one piece out.
In reality, many people take two or three or four,
or they just dump the whole bowl in their bag.
If this mindset continues,
this would be a disadvantage to all the other trick-or-treaters.
Moving on to spam emails,
I’m sure everyone here has received some.
Spam emails can range from companies that want you to buy their items
to emails that look like they were sent by three-year-olds.
Most of the time, senders are just looking for those that are most gullible
to maximize their profit.
Lastly, antibiotics and pathogens.
Pathogens are able to carry information from one to the other.
When antibiotics are applied and some have resistance genes,
those are the ones that survive.
They are able to reproduce, mutate,
and transfer this information to other pathogens.
Thus, illnesses that may not once have had resistance to antibiotics can develop it.
So, returning back to my earlier question:
What do trick-or-treating, receiving spam, and using antibiotics
have anything in common?
There is one thing that they share.
They are all subjects of “The Tragedy of the Commons”.
It affects everything around us,
everything we do.
If you’ve taken any environmental, economic, or government class
you’ve likely heard of the term, “The Tragedy of the Commons”,
coined by Garrett Hardin.
The Tragedy of the Commons is a situation when people act according to self-interest
when it comes to open access resources.
In more precise terms,
it is mass selfishness that affects everything we do.
When people neglect to be considerate to others, in pursuit of personal gain,
everyone, including themselves, is harmed.
In every example of the Tragedy of the Commons,
there is an Individual Actor,
Shared Resource,
Selfish Behaviour,
and a Tragedy.
Let me bring this back to trick-or-treating.
The individual actors in this situation are the trick-or-treaters.
The shared resource is the bowl of candy.
The self-centred behaviour is the people, who take more candy than they should.
And the tragedy is the sad children, who don’t get candy.
Now, this situation may seem trivial
since it’s something that happens once a year
and is an event that only children take part in.
A more common example is the spam emails, I mentioned earlier.
We can run through this process again.
The individual actors are the people that send out these emails.
The shared resource is the emailing system.
The self-centred behaviour is sending the email without thinking of the consequences
And the result?
A 3.1 % loss of productivity per corporate employee, according to the study titled
‘Mitigating the Tragedy of the Digital Commons’,
an increase in carbon emissions that weren’t necessary in the first place,
and the overall degradation of the emailing system.
The most serious of the situations I’ve mentioned earlier is the antibiotics.
The individual actors are those that apply the antibiotics,
the shared resources are the antibiotics themselves,
and the selfish behaviour is misapplying antibiotics
for ailments that don’t need them.
The tragedy is that those that may be seriously affected by illnesses
aren’t able to use antibiotics, which may result in the loss of life.
As you can see, the Tragedy of the Commons affects everything.
It is not only limited to these examples.
Others include fast fashion, air and water pollution,
traffic jams, the spread of fake news, social media...
The list goes on and on.
The consequences of selfish behaviour are becoming increasingly worse,
immense and immeasurable.
Now, you may be thinking, “Lauren, we know.
Selfishness is innate to human nature.
It is always going to exist.”
When I first heard about the Tragedy of the Commons, that is what I thought too.
Garrett Hardin, the person who came up with this term,
proposed that we establish rules and regulations privatizing common resources,
so that mass selfishness wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
After all, selfishness is human nature.
We must put strict and stringent regulations on everything
to prevent terrible consequences.
The Commons are all around us:
the Internet, the Wi-Fi, our social platforms,
the air we breathe, waters and streams, the oceans, and much, much more.
Regulating Commons as large as these is important,
as it protects our environment
and prevents mass exploitation of natural resources.
Even our social platforms are a major example of a common resource.
These are all Commons that may need some regulation to really prevent exploitation.
However, we’re looking for a solution that encompasses mass selfishness
that harms all
Common resources can be mundane,
like the trick-or-treat bowl I mentioned earlier.
How would you feel if you had every single common resource you come across
be regulated?
Like the hand sanitizer dispenser at the front of a store,
or pencils in the classroom?
For one, regulating these Commons is impossible to do
because of the sheer number of free resources out there,
as well as the unease we would feel every day,
knowing that we would have to follow these strict rules.
Law experts, like Professor David Brown,
cite that regulation, especially incarceration,
does not deter wrongdoing.
He says the system has little to no deterrent effect.
All this is said under the assumption that selfishness is innate to human nature.
However, in reality, most of it is learned behaviour that is masked as innate nature.
As evidenced by scientists like the psychology professor, Natho,
who state that there is evidence pointing towards humans being innately cooperative,
with a few exceptions.
But selfish behaviour is so prominent in our society
that many learn it early on.
Almost no behaviour is entirely genetic.
This means that altruism is present within the brain.
Even though recent generations may have already been exposed to selfishness,
we could raise the next generation to be more altruistic than we were taught.
Though we may not be able to rewrite our past and our history,
we are still able to raise the next generation
to become less selfish, more altruistic,
and more compassionate of those surrounding them.
And, maybe then,
we would be able to work towards bettering our natural environment,
as well as our society, along the way.
Now, obviously, striving for utopia is impossible.
But the amount of selfish behaviour seen in society currently is tremendous.
All behaviour that stems from selfishness has caused other people harm,
whether it comes from political schisms, different beliefs,
use of natural resources, or everyday tasks.
But, admits the chaos that has struck the world,
the divide and the destruction,
it may be best to steer society the right way.
As the Dalai Lama once said,
“Love and Compassion are necessities, not luxuries.
Without them, humanity cannot survive.”
I hope that this can be a lesson to my generation,
to be able to give up a few of our selfish desires,
to teach the younger generation to become more compassionate, selfless,
and sensitive to those around them.
Maybe, then, we can all steer humanity in the right direction,
bettering our environment and ourselves along the way.
Thank you.
(Applause)