From Tragedy of the Commons to Victory of the Uncommons

The late #Brexit has inspired a lot of criticism in the world. You can oppose to that or like it, fact is, it was definetely a kind of larger scale wake-up call for humanity. And I suspect this will not be the last call but it could be a trigger for more wake-up experiences.

It reminded me of a few blogs I wrote some time ago which adressed the ‘Commons’ theme. I refer to Wantamatics, Worldish And Abundology: Key Ingredients For The Next Era and also to If Anything Should Be Common, It Is Sense and Why You Should be Careful When Trying to Centralize Something.

The drive to go for some ‘Commons’ is a natural human drive. It is inspired by trying to reduce ‘waste’ because if two or more distinct things look almost the same, we tend to try to make them the same, thereby eliminating the sometimes subtle differences. This leads to centralization approaches.

These approaches are no more than disguised discrimination strategies because if I centralize something, I disregard the beauty of the diversity that was there before I centralized it. So be very careful in what you want to centralize. Because it might at first hand tend to be more efficient and create less ‘waste’ on the centralized topic but it indirectly always creates a new layer of ‘waste’ elsewhere. Because what was once diverse, always will want to regain it’s uniqueness in one way or another.

I am not saying I am against centralization or for decentralization, but I do think we humans still are not very good in overseeing the consequences of larger centralizations, like the EU as it currently is. So before we embark on such an immens complex journey, let’s try to do it with very small steps at a time, and take a lot of time to find out if it works before you add more discrimination to the already complicated integrated system. Autocratic approaches tend to survive not very long (max. 100 years!), so let’s be very careful with assuming we have the arrogance to let them work well now!

A rule of thumb might be: if things already work out fine on a local level, don’t disturb them, let them go. If things don’t work out fine on a local level, discuss them on a global level but implement changes again, preferably on the smallest, local level. Experiment a lot. Accept the World as perfect already in it’s current imperfection.

In this era of disruptions we don’t need more commons anymore, we need uncommons! So let’s step away from exclusive ‘divide and conquer’ style of efficiency thinking. Let’s move towards inclusive ‘diversity’ thinking. Let’s step away from exploiting the Earth in all kinds of ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ ways and find a new uncommon direction that works: Victory of the Uncommons!