I just watched another excellent “Barry’s Economics” episode from today (31/5/26) — “What Banksy Shows Us About Power”.
Barry has a great gift for making essential “negative insights” (as I insist on calling them) entertaining and clear. Subscribing to his channel is a brilliant idea.
By “negative insights” I mean unlearning the damaging lessons that have led us to this apocalypse.
One of these damaging lessons is “the tragedy of the commons”, which was (as he notes) disproven (negated) by Elinor Ostrom, earning her the Nobel Prize in 2009.
I’m going to assume you’ve watched his episode, so I don’t have to summarize everything he said. I’ll only summarize the lesson the video provides:
Even though the “tragedy” of common ownership of land and resources has been disproven, it’s still being taught widely in schools — particularly in graduate business schools. And this teaching boils down to convincing students that “human nature is selfish.”
The reason I want to call attention to this episode in particular is because he is beautifully illustrating things I keep going on about in my own less entertaining manner. So, in this scribbled note, I just want to say — Looky there! That’s what I mean when I say “everything is a story” — we act according to how we tell the story of ourselves and the “nature” of the world. We can’t hide behind the excuse of nature. Nature is not causing our problems. The way we imagine the world and ourselves is doing that.
The theory that we are selfish teaches us to be selfish. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that benefits a hierarchical system of control. And these “hierarchical systems of control” are also not written into the genes as “human nature.” There have been many cultures that operated without hierarchical control quite beautifully.
This excuse of human nature is an enchantment that numbs us into accepting a yoke and corrals us into behaving in predictable ways, which can be converted into profit-generating algorithms.
This is what my previous essay was also going on about (long and complicated as it was, I apologize, but I needed to dig into this as precisely as possible for my own sanity).
In fact, this entire website has focused on negating the story of natural human selfishness — a story which is like a mental virus that consumes our unfathomable potential; or, a kind of witchery or predatorial trick that dumbs us down and makes us susceptible to manipulation. My general point has been that if we are aware of Thought as a Story — as a helpful fiction, at best — then we can use thought without being blinded by it. Then thought becomes open-ended, metaphoric and prismatic, rather than literal, dogmatic and conclusive. And this would make us immune to positive conclusions, which can only put an end to learning and leave us with a final idea of “human nature”, which is self-fulfillig prophecy.
Or, as Barry said in the video, when referring to the selfish behavior of economics students who are taught the fake “tragedy of the commons” (or the fake (but self-fuilfilling) story of human selfishness): “The theory created the actions, not the other way around. You might think, right? Well, maybe selfish people are just drawn to economics. Maybe it’s just who applies. Well, actually, other researchers have tested that, too. They measured students before and after taking economics classes, right? The same students. And what they found was that taking economics classes, specifically learning that humans are self-interested by nature, made students measurably less generous and less interested in contributing to shared goals. Because the humans are selfish theory, it doesn’t describe them, it infects them.”
Negative Geography 