The Real Tragedy of The Commons

We all Eat Lies When Our Hearts are Hungry.

This post uses a deceptively simple parable to press on something raw and unresolved in modern life—our failure to grow up. Through the metaphors of root cause analysis and Victorian theatre, it reveals, piece by piece, how the collapse of meaning and leadership is not accidental, and why most of us are more complicit than we think. Using a folktale frame to explore how we perform blame, miss the real cues, and repeat the same tragic arc.

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Before we begin, please note that you can listen to this post like a podcast episode by downloading the iOS app. In fact, would thinking of this as a podcast episode change the way you engage with it?

As always, this post is an invitation to slow down. The smart money here is to slow down and be really present for a moment. Isn’t it always true that if we fail to reset our state of presence, we allow the weight and intrusions of the previous moments in our day, to overshadow this one, and rob it of its gifts.

This post is aimed at souls of a certain stripe, who are struggling to thread the needle of sense-making and meaning-making in our troubling present moment in the world. This insight can be a medicine of sorts and is actually just a single patch of a larger quilt of sanity and meaning I am making for the human family to keep, during the long, dark winter of meaning we have already entered together, feeling so anxious and alone.

Sigma Quotient

You will often notice in my writing that occasionally the narrative voice oscillates between first person plural (“we” and “us”) and direct second person (“you”) without clear segue. This is not accidental, and is a nod towards the indelible symmetry that exists between our collective selfhood and our individual selfhood.

‘The Commons’ is a word for our shared and public resources. ‘The Commons’ and the individual are not discrete or separate, not entirely. They are instead inextricably intertwined. The path of collective stewarding and the path of individual initiation are both parallel and mutually entangled.

This notion is precisely encoded and reflected in the Sigma Quotient logo that I embed in my written online work. Sigma Quotient is our capacity for agency, real self-awareness of the limits and patterns in our life and the ability to expand and enhance that capacity through intentional practice. Isn’t that, after all, at least half the meaning of any meaningful Life?

That said, let us Begin.

Act 1 - The First Great Tragedy of the Commons

‘They’ say the First Great Tragedy of The Commons is how, in moments of crisis, or simply in a general air of apathy, neglect and ignorance, ‘the People’ will end up destroying whatever common blessings and resources they have, for lack of appreciation and self-restraint.

Think of how humans behaved when the toilet paper ran out at the supermarket during COVID. Remember that impulse to stockpile. How very human.

We were caught between judging people for their small-minded thinking, and then as we realise the scarcity they are helping to exacerbate, we become helplessly incentivised to do exactly the same thing. This is the ironic paradox of the Prisoner's Dilemma: that even when cooperation is the better outcome for all, mistrust, fear, and short-term self-interest make selfishness seem sane and rational to the individual.

I have seen entire natural forests of trees cut down and birdsong silenced forever by a great, sterile and utterly unhealable scar of blandness scored across an entire province in Zambia in Southern Africa, because ‘the people’, lacking fuel and forethought, had cut down every tree for the cooking fire. Their reason for doing this was part crisis and part apathy. This had infinitely more to do with survival needs than pure wickedness.

To live in the modern world is to be guilty of a kind of wickedness, which is itself a brand of entitlement that we can all quietly admit is decidedly non-wicked, but closer to a pragmatic selfishness. Altruism doesn’t put a meal in my belly.

There is a story in Ireland about a magic cow that was the very symbol of abundance. The story goes that any vessel or bucket could be filled, and none would walk away empty-handed.

One day, a witch happens upon the naïve maid minding the cow, who proudly regales her with tales of the infinity of the abundance, and the abundance of the infinity. The witch feigns disbelief, and—using reverse psychology—tricks the maid into daring her to bring any vessel she likes, and see whether the cow will not effortlessly fill it.

We all eat lies when our hearts are hungry.

The witch goes off and doesn’t she just presently return with a pail, and also a riddle, an old word for a sieve, with which she milks the magic Cow of Abundance, without rest or chance to recover, for seven days straight, until at last on an eighth day the cow staggers off and dies. This is a nod to the secret and universal wisdom of an archetypal sabbath.

If we do not accommodate a metaphoric seventh day of rest, renewal and replenishment, we kill our sacred cows of abundance.

Act 2 - The Second Great Tragedy of the Commons

The Second Great Tragedy of the Commons is how we waste our Common resources on the most senseless Pursuits and neglect our noblest causes out of Apathy.

And now we all sort of want to know what happens next, don’t we?

And to teach us something subtle but necessary, we discover that this is the end of the story. We are left to carefully consider what the moral is, mostly because we are trying to work out if we are the maid or the witch, and on certain days, don’t we sometimes find ourselves empathising with the cow, actually, as if we know what it feels like to be milked to depletion.

The maid, of course, is the naïve participant in us, who has not yet been initiated into the wisdom of the sabbath, allowing things moments and days, seasons of rest and renewal. Abundance can only be abundant if it is allowed to renew and replenish. That’s why we rest on the seventh day, why fields are left fallow for a season, why wise people fast, and why we go to sleep at night.

The witch, of course, aside from being the archetypal Trickster, is the one in us for whom there is no such thing as ‘enough’. It is the mindset driven more by entitlement than greed, an entitlement born more of scarcity than disempowerment. What we are living through is a Famine of Meaning, not a limit of enablement. This is what people mean when they say, “We are starved for Meaning.”

We are enabled to the point of delinquency. We cannot ‘adult’ for ourselves. We don’t have the understanding, the skill or the maturity to lead ourselves.

Who Done It?

The Core Tragedy of the Commons is that anything ceded to the control of ‘the People’, becomes its own evidence of their unfitness to govern themselves.

What is the lesson in this?

What is the Invitation that is reaching out towards us in the face of this story, and its all too literal consequence we are helplessly reenacting?

Who or what was to blame in that story?

The Maid?

The Witch?

In our modernity of HR departments and corporate sensibilities, we don’t like to blame people, we look for root causes instead. So then, what can we say was the root cause here? Was it perhaps something abstract like Greed, or Naivety?

Can you guess?

How wise are you?

We all do this, we make judgments. The biggest ‘bug’ in the Christian moral software is the confusion around judging. We don’t want to be judgmental. But as a leader, even of your own self, the point of such stories and such examples is to draw you into a process that can determine right from wrong or at least better from worse.

What might ‘better’ have looked like?

What would I do if I encountered that circumstance?

What would I see done if I find myself in a position to say what ought to have happened?

That’s the sort of thinking we need to operate as a society. Judgment of this kind is where discernment begins.

So, who was to blame, or if we want to aspire to be ‘more evolved’, what was the root cause?

Greed and Naivety are the results of a more fundamental root cause.

Half of the actors on social media would say it is the Liberal snowflakes who didn’t control the borders. The pro-socialists would say it was the extractive machinations of the Capitalist Witch. The Religious would say it was sin and mysteriously the will of God. If this had happened in Kashmir, the Hindus would suspect it was the Muslims, and the Muslims would suspect it was the Infidels. The Libertarian fools would tell us it was the overreach of large Government, and the Conspiracy Theorists would say it was the Shadowy Milk Cartel. Our models of morality can never solve the problem because they are incompatible amongst themselves, and this missing ‘Alignment of Interests’ is perhaps the very casualty of our tragic story of the cow in the first place.

The engineers would finger the inefficient processes of milking and cow husbandry, and the Marxists would blame the proletariat. Hamas would blame the Jews, and Joe Rogan? Well, he would have someone on his show who knows nothing about either cows, or maids, or milk, or buckets, or witches and still have them talking for three hours, to titillate and pander to the hungry crowd.

We all eat lies when our hearts are hungry.

What is the one answer that would have solved for all of this? We can say that what was missing was Leadership, ownership, moderation, regulation, forethought and appreciation of consequence. And there is one answer that gets us all of that.

I know what it is.

Do You?

Let’s keep reading.

Intermission

The Social Media reality we have today is tragic evidence of our inability to apply wisdom and leadership.

Our Greatest resource, our Commons, is our sheer numbers, the magic of compounding, the possibility of collaboration. We are not outmanned, we are out-organised.

This is a different tragedy, the tragedy of the un-milked cow.

Like the inescapable reality of abundance and renewal that cannot be ignored, there is another inescapable reality of harmony and survival.

We have to live in harmony and cadence with what our environment can sustain, and we have to live in harmony and synchronicity with our neighbours, all of them.

We can only ever survive as a species when we are acting like a team or a family. Instead, we are acting as primitively as ever, believing in primary and unresolvable distinctions between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. And we are bent on reinforcing these distinctions, and the fictions of their unresolvability, and blaming each other for the helplessness and hopelessness this inevitably engenders. We are creating the exact circumstances that will kill the sacred cow.

Ultimately, this mindset, or rather the absence of a better one, is how we squander our greatest Commons. Our greatest shared Commons is our ability to effect great change and shape our reality.

We have these two miraculous budgets of energy and attention we are granted like pocket money, issued to us each day over a long life full of opportunities and invitations to kindness and leadership.

We squander all the inheritance of our species and our future generations, we literally spend those budgets like children or like monkeys chasing trivial things, selfish things, things of no ultimate consequence to our true selves. In this unconscious orgy of deciding what to model yourself as, who to regard as ‘other’. If anthropologists dig up our bones a thousand years from now, we might imagine they will be more evolved in some way. If such people try and make sense of our social operating system and the projects of our lives, they might conclude that our story is a masterclass in how to waste a life.

We unconsciously shape the reality our future selves will inherit as we create a more unpleasant future for ourselves. And then we leave that adolescent mess for the next generations to try and salvage.

The only real innocents are the youth. Because they arrive unformed, and we are supposed to initiate them into the great family of life, and teach them how to spend these budgets wisely and to pay the blessings forward so that they don’t have to settle the debts we laboured to free ourselves from. That’s what we would have wanted, surely?

We have all this collaborative potential and all the noble and interesting and rewarding things we could be contributing towards, steering toward, enjoying and appreciating.

And instead, we have this poly-crisis we are engineering in our ignorance of all that. And then the meta-crisis of destroying the greatest opportunity and empowerment humans have ever had on this planet. We are fucking up a ten thousand year project and all the heritage before that, all the way back the the beginning. And with the same bucket riddled with holes, are poisoning and milking dry our own future and the future of every future human that might still open their eyes on this world. Could either the maid or the witch have ever contemplated the full consequences of the wider arc of the human story they were participating in?

Tragedy is not just when ‘the bad thing’ happened; the definition of Tragedy in the original sense is a drama that occurs where ‘the terrible thing’ happened, and it was at one point avoidable.

That is the shape of our legacy as it stands today.

We are squandering our Commons, the common spirit of humanity that has been at the heart of all our meaning-making, our great endeavours of discovery, of survival, of empire building, of music, of art, of literature—our cultural explosions of daring and ingenuity and adventure and wonder. All of these are the fruits of the human commons.

The Final Act

So what is the root cause? What are we missing? What is the one tide that would raise all the boats?

It cannot be compassion alone, because that alone makes us vulnerable to takers, and narcissists. For reasons we have explored, we cannot rely on morality or ideologies. It cannot just be consciousness either. Consciousness can make us more aware of a tragedy and still fail to understand or appreciate how to avoid one.

We are missing one thing:

Initiation.

Our parable of the maid and the witch speaks precisely to this.

The maid represents innocence without wisdom—abundance without stewardship, naivety and the ignorance of consequence that goes with it.

The witch represents cunning without conscience—exploitation without reverence, and an altogether different form of ignorance consequence, which includes a nihilistic disregard for everything and everyone else.

Both are tragic figures.

Both are uninitiated.

The absence of initiation is the invisible root cause under the surface symptoms of greed, apathy, naïveté, grievance, alienation, and disintegration. It is the root cause of the tragedy of the destruction of the Commons.

Abundance is not possible without renewal. Renewal is not possible without the harmony of intentional restraint. Initiation is the transmission of this knowing. Initiation is what nourishes both our hungry hearts and our minds.

Initiation is what enables our sense of better Judgment and what informs it.

When we say Judgment here, we do not mean the one-dimensional context of condemnation or blame, or moralizing, or rebuking, but the act of discernment between better and worse. This idea of judgement is means to discern between sacred and profane, between what is urgent and what is important, between what is wanted in a moment and what is necessary. And then also to discern what is necessary, not just in the moment, but also to accommodate the arrival of a future we would want to inhabit.

Wonderfully, this is something we can begin to remedy. And even more wonderfully, it is something we can focus on ourselves first before worrying about everything and everybody else.

You can do something! Now you know.

It should be clear that you should do something, and if so-called, this is what you should do: Seek real initiation.

The invitation is open.

With Love,

Rocco.

I don’t just want to speak to an audience, I want to belong to a community.

I don’t just want to express my ideas, I want us to dream new ones together.

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