The Tragedy of the Commons, Social Sanction, and the Reprogramming of Cults

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). 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.

Learning a Solution

As a practicing human, it’s easy enough to realize we don’t have a built-in mechanism to favor society. That’s because we are unaware of the need, and don’t instinctively understand the subjugation of the individual’s needs. A spider male will mate with a spider female even if they know they are going to be eaten; humans have no corresponding push to give up on selfishness for no reason.

Instead, we developed a system that we share with a lot of other higher order animals, which we call learning. Humans are more dependent on learning than other species, because the vast majority of our lives are spent doing things that we needed to learn from others. We are capable of basic bodily functions, but everything of higher order, from language to hunting, needs to be learned. That is different from other species, in which a lot of behaviors are instinctual. Wolves, for instance, hunt in packs because they are built for hunting in packs. Humans may have been built to hunt animals by exhaustion, but we routinely do entirely different things.

The strategies we used for learning are interesting: there is the direct approach, where we see someone do something that we want to emulate and learn by example. When different people do things differently, we usually trust someone more, and we learn from authority. When a lot of different people do things in a lot of different ways, we usually look at the dominant approach and learn out of conformity.

We need to think about human evolution, in which there is no permanent record of things to learn like there has been since writing was invented. Every human for almost the entirety of the human race had to figure out how things work from other humans surrounding them, without an external authority (a scroll, a book, or Wikipedia) serving as guideline for what’s the best approach.

Piggybacking on Learning

Human societies rely on these forms of learning from others to impart social solutions. We do not just learn practical things, we also learn things that seem irrational at first, and we keep that learning with us.

Take the example of the palm island in the introduction. It would be wise - no, imperative - for the society to convince everyone that taking more palm trees than required to regrow the forest is a tragedy for all. It can do so by using the same mechanism used to convince people that eating the wrong kind of mushroom can lead to certain death, or that it is unwise to climb a mountain when a storm is approaching.

The things we learn are not necessarily self-evident. In fact, learning is most useful when we can’t see the reason for a teaching directly. If we see that nobody in the tribe eats a particular kind of berry, we instinctively copy that behavior, as we figure (consciously or not) that eating that berry is dangerous.

What’s important here is that the mechanism automatically can be used to create rules that benefit society, but not the individual.

Stupid Rules

The mechanism works well enough for self-enforcing learning. If a berry is indeed poisonous, humans with deficient learning skills will harm themselves. If the behavior is not harmful to the individual, though, people that do not learn in the common manners will survive without an issue.

Think of a Commons rule like fallow periods. You may not be allowed to fish a specific area for a set period of time. In modern times, we might realize that the fallow period allows stocks to recover and prevents overfishing. In the past, it may have seemed useless to give up on using a readily available resource.

The problem with fallow periods is that they hinder the individual, who may be hungry, for the benefit of the entire group, which keeps a resource for the long term. The tension is between the individual and the group, and it must be mirrored inside the individual to prevent them from harming the group.

Superego

When Sigmund Freud studied the human psyche, he came up with a model that had three agents: the subconscious id, the conscious ego, and a superstructure over the ego he called superego.

In simplified terms, the id is the animal in us, the “thing” that does things instinctively. The ego, on the contrary, is the conscious, and largely rational self. The id makes us fall in love, the ego makes us buy chocolates and flowers because the target of our affection might like that.

The superego is described as the agent that internalizes cultural rules. It is notable, in that it is perfectly capable of controlling the ego, but has no apparent direct function or usefulness. Freud seems to have thought of the superego as basically a consequence of a human’s upbringing. We depend on our parents when we are young and develop a desire to please them, and the superego is a long shadow of this desire to please.

The problem with that approach is that the superego is a universal structure in the human mind. It doesn’t depend on the particulars of someone’s upbringing and is present undiminished and unchanged in children of non-traditional families. A purely learned behavior would not do that.

Instead, I posit that the superego is the internal (not internalized) mirror of the tension between individual and society that all humans have to contend with.

Social Sanction

The variety of the human condition and of the societies created by humans requires that superego formation be something innate but variable. That is, in some humans it develops more strongly and in others more weakly, and potentially in different people in different forms.

Because a weak superego benefits the individual at the expense of society, there is a net tendency towards its suppression. An individual without superego can be more selfish and ignore a lot of the rules that others will follow even when they do not benefit.

The society hence must introduce a behavioral method to control the expression of the superego. It must find a way to eliminate individuals that do not express it enough for the particulars of the society. This is called social sanction.

Basically, the society monitors the behavior of individuals for compliance with rules. If someone breaks a fundamental rule, the individual is eliminated. This elimination can sometimes be drastic, by execution, or take a milder form - exile, imprisonment, denial of offspring.

To be able to monitor compliance with rules that are hard to monitor, a set of nonsensical but easy to monitor rules are introduced. It may be hard to detect if someone went fishing to a particular area, but a rule about the eating of bananas after dark may be easier to monitor. When the individual violates a rule that is easy to monitor, it’s easy to imagine said individual would not restrain themselves from the harder to monitor, but vital rule.

Taboo and Kapu

Polynesian societies use an interesting concept, that of taboo. In the original, Polynesian form, a taboo is a mandatory restriction. Any violation of a taboo incurs the death penalty, and the culprit can only cleans themselves from the crime by performing a ritual different in each society. In Hawaii, where I used to live, taboo is pronounced kapu, and the violator had to rush to a sacred enclosure (a pu`u honua or place of refuge). If they made it alive, they were spared. Anyone that killed them before they reached the enclosure did a good thing.

Notice that taboos and kapus were justified by the will of the gods. This is both in the original set of rules that could be broken and the required punishment. In general, we find that religion focus a lot on rules and punishment for breaking them. The older the religion, the stronger the focus.

It may very well be that sin is not a consequence of religion, but that the need to explain sin (the rules of the Commons) made humans create gods as a justification. That is particularly probable because social sanction is a mechanism required by all human societies, while religion is not.

The chain, hence, goes something like this: humans realize that certain rules are required for society to survive; the rules cannot be directly justified because breaking them does not immediately lead to societal collapse; gods are invoked to justify the rules.

Superego Injection

So far, we discussed mechanisms. Superego and social sanction are the how. Human societies developed both to ensure that essential rules are followed. The remaining question is the what and the from where. While this discussion touched upon the ways that humans follow rules, it has contributed little to figuring out the rules themselves, or how we settle on them.

There is the possibility of a randomized approach. We try all possible sets of rules, all societies with the wrong rules die off and only the ones with good rules survive. The problem with that approach is simply that there aren’t enough humans to try it out.

We have to somehow rely on a specific method to settle on rules and then pass them on to all individuals in the group. From the way the superego is described, there is an element of temporal continuity that goes with it that spans generations, which means rules are more stable than individuals.

The rules themselves continue being highly variable and hard to predict. The consequence is that human societies have cultures, which in essence are sets of shared rules on how to do things interspersed with facts and artifacts.

The temporal continuity of culture and rules, opposed to the seemingly arbitrary nature of the rules themselves, means that the ego, the rational self, is useless to absorb them. In fact, since the ego is in essence selfish, it must be bypassed to absorb societal rules.

If the superego is a superstructure, its programming has to be performed through one of the underlying structures. Since the ego is not an option, the superego must be programmed through the id. That means that the only way to define societal rules is by injecting them through the subconscious.

Cognitive Dissonance

Id and ego are largely independent structures in our mind whose overlap is defined by influence and not control. Similarly, assumptions and beliefs can contrast with facts and observations. Humans have a hard time with an id/ego conflict, which is known to cause mental health issues.

Superego constructs are particularly dangerous to our ego, because by nature they benefit society and not the individual. As a result, it is built into the human condition to consider them primary to the rational. After all, they are meant not to make sense to the individual, or they wouldn’t need to be injected into the superego.

Humans will hence hold on to superego beliefs long after their usefulness expires, because reprogramming them cannot be performed rationally. You can’t explain a superego construct away, because they are specifically designed to survive rational (selfish) scrutiny.

Our individual solution to a conflict between belief and proof is cognitive dissonance. We see the fact that contradicts our beliefs and simply choose to ignore it. This ignoring is not problematic for our brain, it’s the very mechanism that allows societies to survive.

The power of denial is stronger than that of rationality. Not because of a flaw of human minds, but because that’s what human survival requires at the level of the species. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Reprogramming Cults

Armed with the description above, we can understand why cult members - whether religious or political - are so impervious to rational argument. A rational, ego argument simply cannot work with and for them. The only way to reach them is by superego injection, which requires id reprogramming.

The language of the id is entirely different from that of the ego. It uses fundamentally different mechanisms that those of rational learning: association, repetition, emotional appeal. Rational individuals tend to discount the importance of these mechanisms, but even the most rational of humans will have to admit that repetition is frequently required for a human to learn. Otherwise, we could simply talk a new language by having heard it before.

To program a cult member to see the errors of their cult, it is necessary to create new associations, to repeat new information, and to connect to beliefs emotionally. All of that requires time, a lot of time, and explains why simple rational arguments don’t work.

We need to understand that this is not about drudgery. The beliefs that are being reprogrammed are built to withstand rational argument, because every human is able to create rational arguments supporting selfish behavior. Reprogramming the superego requires emotional work precisely because the superego is built to withstand rational argument, as that is its main function. It needs to be a superstructure to the ego, and hence it needs to resist its categories.

On the plus side, this argues that reprogramming a cult member is universally doable, shows the emotional mechanisms to use, and places a constraint only on time frame. There is no constraint on the nature of the information, there is no constraint on the nature of the bearer.