Me and Us

Me and Us

The tension between individual and collective interests is new in history: in the past it was dealt with by the near irrelevance of individuals. Sacrifice for the sake of the group is behind the notion of heroism: it is good for the tribe, bad for those who perish under the fever of war. This instinct for heroism and the fading of individual interests in favor of the communal has become aberrant with suicide bombers. These pre-death terrorists get into a mood similar to an ecstatic trance in which their emotions drive them to become indifferent to their own mortality. It is a fallacy that suicide bombers are driven by the promise of a reward of some Islamic paradise with virgins and other entertainment, for, as the anthropologist Scott Atran has pointed out, the first suicide bombers in the Levant were revolutionaries of Greek Orthodox background—my tribe—not Islamists.

There is something like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective when people engage in communal dances, mass riots, or war. Your mood is now that of the herd. You are part of what Elias Canetti calls the rhythmic and throbbing crowd. You can also feel a different variety of crowd experience during your next street riot, when fear of authorities vanishes completely under group fever.

Let us now generalize the point. Looking at the world from a certain distance, I see a total tension between man and nature—a tension in the trade-off of fragilities. We saw how nature wants herself, the aggregate, to survive—not every species—just as, in turn, every single species wants its individuals to be fragile (particularly after reproduction), for evolutionary selection to take place. We saw how such transfer of fragility from individuals to species is necessary for its overall survival: species are potentially antifragile, given that DNA is information, but members of the species are perishable, hence ready to sacrifice and in reality designed to do so for the benefit of the collective.

Antifragility shmantifragility. Some of the ideas about fitness and selection here are not very comfortable to this author, which makes the writing of some sections rather painful—I detest the ruthlessness of selection, the inexorable disloyalty of Mother Nature. I detest the notion of improvement thanks to harm to others. As a humanist, I stand against the antifragility of systems at the expense of individuals, for if you follow the reasoning, this makes us humans individually irrelevant.

The great benefit of the Enlightenment has been to bring the individual to the fore, with his rights, his freedom, his independence, his “pursuit of happiness” (whatever that “happiness” means), and, most of all, his privacy. In spite of its denial of antifragility, the Enlightenment and the political systems that emerged from it freed us (somewhat) from the domination of society, the tribe, and the family that had prevailed throughout history.

The unit in traditional cultures is the collective; and it could be perceived to be harmed by the behavior of an individual—the honor of the family is sullied when, say, a daughter becomes pregnant, or a member of the family engages in large-scale financial swindles and Ponzi schemes, or, worst, may even teach a college course in the charlatanic subject of financial economics. And these mores persist. Even as recently as the late nineteenth century or early twentieth, it was common in, say, rural France for someone to spend all his savings to erase the debts of a remote cousin (a practice called passer l’éponge, literally, to use a sponge to erase the liability from the chalkboard), and to do so in order to preserve the dignity and good name of the extended family. It was perceived as a duty. (I confess having done some of that myself in the twenty-first century!)

Clearly the system needs to be there for the individual to survive. So one needs to be careful in glorifying one interest against others in the presence of interdependence and complexity.4

In the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia, the designation “man of honor” (uomo d’onore) implies that the person caught by the police would remain silent and not rat on his friends, regardless of benefits, and that life in prison is preferable to a plea that entails hurting other members. The tribe (Cosa Nostra) comes before the individual. And what broke the back of the mafia was the recent generation of plea bargainers. (Note that “honor” in the mafia is limited to such in-group solidarity—they otherwise lie, and there is nothing honorable about them in other domains. And they kill people from behind, something that on the east side of the Mediterranean is considered the purest form of cowardice.)

Likewise, we humans may have to be self-centered at the expense of other species, at the risk of ecological fragility, if it ensures our survival. Our interests—as a human race—prevail over those of nature; and we can tolerate some inefficiency, some fragility, in order to protect individuals, although sacrificing nature too much may eventually hurt ourselves.

We saw the trade-off between the interests of the collective and those of the individual. An economy cannot survive without breaking individual eggs; protection is harmful, and constraining the forces of evolution to benefit individuals does not seem required. But we can shield individuals from starvation, provide some social protection. And give them respect.