The Final Link

I went to a social event today, and I was talking to a woman who had spent some time in my hometown of Chicago. One of the things that she found unsettling about the city was the corruption. She related a story of seeing a police cruiser run a stop sign and strike another vehicle; the officer driving the cruiser  confronted the other driver, telling her that she was at fault in the collision.

My interlocutor noted that she felt that she should step in and defend the woman, since she'd witnessed the incident, and the officer was clearly at fault. But she was at home for all of this, and she realized that if she intervened, and the officer understood that she lived there, he would know where to direct retaliation.

"You saw yourself as the last link in the chain," I said. "You could be there to defend her, but if the police came after you, no one would be there to defend you." And I think this outlook on the world, that looking out for others can lead to consequences that one will be left alone to deal with, is common in the United States, even though many people understand that it leads to people feeling isolated, unsupported and, perhaps most importantly, unwilling to take risks on one another's behalf.

This "every man for themselves" mentality figured into a surprising number of the conversations I had with people there, because they centered on the need for collective action to deal with this or that social problem. And it's difficult to rally people to collective action when the majority of their attention is consumed with the individual actions they have to take to look after themselves and those they care about.

It's a thorny problem, given the general difficulties of aligning the incentives of large numbers of people. (And it's made even more thorny by a general reluctance to make the first move.) But it something that I expect we'll have to solve, since I think that if circumstances have to solve it for us, it's going to be very, very messy.