In political science, and more specifically in the field of collective action, there is a key concept: the Tragedy of the Commons It is an idea that places the focus of study on the existence of situations in which an agent, in search of a particular interest, can produce a result completely opposite to what the individual expected. And even more so, it is a “tragic” result in the general interest of society.
Michel Foucault and the Tragedy of the Commons: the age of biopower
The classic example that is taught in collective action classes about this concept is that of a town with a fishing tradition in which the problem of the disappearance of fish appears. In this scenario, if fishing is not stopped and there is no agreement between everyone (regularize or seriously control this activity), the fish will disappear and the townspeople will end up dying of hunger. But if fish are not caught, the population can also end up dying.
Faced with this dilemma, a solution: cooperation However, in the absence of cooperation, there are hegemonic forces that can benefit if they monopolize the goods (in this case, the fish) and feed off the misery generated by their own monopoly. For that reason, at hegemonic power It is interested in eliminating any type of political or social culture that favors cooperation. Consequently, it is interested in promoting the culture of individualism Let’s see, then, some examples of how power puts this premise into practice.
Michel Foucault one of the great thinkers on the theory of power, points out that one of the ingredients on which power feeds to exercise control over the population is trying to instill a individualistic consciousness According to this author, the final objective that drives power is to make the individuals of a society as productive as possible, but at the same time, to make them as productive as possible. docile and obedient also. Going down to the realm of concreteness, it can be said that the practice of CrossFit is a good example in which this individualistic consciousness occurs aimed at causing subjects to be docile, obedient and productive.
For those who don’t know, the crossfit It is a sport that has become very fashionable lately, thanks in part to a good dose of marketing. It consists of a kind of multidisciplinary military training (it combines several sports such as strongman, triathlon, weightlifting, sports gymnastics, fitness) that is structured in a good number of different exercises diversified in time, number of repetitions, series, etc.
For there to be individualism there must exist discipline, and CrossFit is the king of sports when it comes to discipline. Discipline pursues the ritualization of attitudes and behaviors, which we could summarize with the term obedience. Obedience can be understood as the absence of searching for alternative options before an authority figure who provides the guidelines to follow. In CrossFit, the discipline of the body allows it to act as a prison for the subjects. Highly mechanized exercises seek aesthetic and functional perfection of the muscle.
The final objective is to progressively become a kind of more productive machine, in which the time factor (time control) also acts as a controller of the subject itself. All of this is based on a meticulous structuring that proposes combinations of series of exercises that are completely predefined and fragmented in time, in turns, like the mimesis of a factory production, only in this case, the factory is the person themselves Thus, we have as a final result a subject whose only objective is to be increasingly productive and who, paradoxically, ends up physically exhausted and mentally immersed in this spiral of productivity and alienation.
The objectification of the subject and the figure of the entrepreneur
A step further for power to achieve its objective (the optimization of productivity) is to create collective consciousness of what interests it, making these individualistic bodies join forces to generate a great collective body that produces for him (power). These are individualistic consciousnesses that eventually come together to better reach their individual goals.
For this reason, power has always sought normalization of society, that is, creating guidelines, routines, norms, praxis on a day-to-day basis that are established as habitual, common, normal and, in the end, acceptable (thus differentiating themselves from attitudes or behaviors that, due to their residual condition, can be be briefly labeled as non-normal, eccentric or dysfunctional). For this reason, they are used laws to define the limits of normal always in conjunction with those behaviors or judgments related to legal logic, which is still an expression of a certain scale of values that is intended to be consolidated.
The system revolves around a key element that defines it, the company If power pursues an objective, the next thing it will do is turn people into that objective, objectify the subjects into the business object, the famous “I am a company ” with the aim that all people in civil society produce in the same sense, in the sense that interests power: that the subjects define themselves as a company, that they are a company.
Let’s go back to the example of the fishermen that we mentioned at the beginning of the text. The process of individualization and the mentality of “I am a company and therefore I have to beat all the competitors in the market” only favors those who want the fish to run out before nature can reproduce the species(1). However, it is appropriate to clarify that in this article we are not arguing at any time that the fishermen in the example or any of us are part of the oligarchy (it would be, in fact, to deny the same term) but we could affirm that we act according to the interests of this oligarchy and against, sooner or later, our own interests, as an integral and unconscious part of a corporatist machinery.
This is why both individualism and non-cooperation (especially in times of crisis like the current one) suppose, in any case, the tragedy of the commons
