Humans are good (except for that one guy)

And he’s why we create all the rules and regulations.

The problem with humanity is that guy—the one who ruins it for everyone. 

He’s the guy who vandalizes a national monument.

He’s the guy who, during a crisis, buys up all the water and gasoline so he can sell them at a premium.

He’s the guy who sexually abuses children or shoots up schools.

He’s the guy who beats his wife or commits murder.

He’s the guy who pays employees cents so he can earn millions.

He’s the guy who over-prescribes fentanyl so he can get a cut.

He’s the guy who pollutes waterways because he wants bigger profits.

He’s the guy who consolidates power for himself and makes himself a totalitarian leader.

He’s the guy who launches genocides.

That guy is not all people. There are people who will clean up parks in their free time so that that space remains beautiful for everyone. There are people who share their resources with their neighbors when they don’t have enough. There are people who run their businesses ethically and for the best benefit of our natural environment. There are people who work hard and help others with their work. There are people who truly want the best for their communities, and provide relief and aid to other ones. 

When I think of humanity, that’s who I think of. I think of all of the wonderful people who are looking out for one another and who might be able to coexist peacefully if it weren’t for that guy. But because that guy exists (and can exist within each of us from time-to-time), we need to protect ourselves from him. We come up with rules and regulations like: you can’t vandalize, you have to pay your employees well, you can’t pollute the environment we live in. And we enforce those rules so that guy is less liable to do those things.

Sometimes that results in too many rules.

Charles C. Mann

gives the FDA as one example, which has made it incredibly expensive and time-consuming to get good medicines to the market:

“You have this problem with the government which is that people occasionally do things that you would never imagine… So you put in regulatory mechanisms to stop them from doing that and that impedes everybody else. In the case of the FDA, it was founded in the 30s when some person produced this thing called elixir sulfonamides. They killed hundreds of people! It was a flat-out poison!...

“You think, like who would do that? But somebody did that. So they created this entire review mechanism to make sure it never happened again, which introduced delay… I'm sympathetic to the dilemma faced by the government here in which you either let through really bad things done by occasional people, or you screw up everything for everybody else.”

Maybe if we didn’t have that guy, the one who literally starts selling poison for money, we wouldn’t need rules and regulations and governments. Maybe we wouldn’t have created all the bureaucratic hurdles we now need to deal with and all the messy organizational structures that were created to protect cities and states and nations. But unfortunately, that guy very much exists.

In small groups, we can handle that guy. In our families, among our neighbors, and in our local communities we can decide together what to do about him—we can take on his extra work, clean up after him, and protect those around him. But there are more of him the more we increase our sample size. Just think about how many bad actors there are in your immediate community, vs. your larger town, vs. your larger state, vs. your larger nation, vs. the whole world? And that requires larger systems that can effectively deal with that guy at scale. 

Burning Man is an interesting case study of this effect. The multi-day camping festival in the California desert began as a kind of anarchist utopia, where small groups could self-govern and share resources. When it was small, communities could easily self-manage. But as it grew to 20,000 people, then 40,000, then 80,000, the organization was forced to add rules and regulations and infrastructure that would protect the larger wellbeing of participants and the land they were sharing. 

Participants can no longer bring pets, drive scooters or gas-powered bikes, or blast music from 2am-10am. People giving out food or setting up art displays have to apply for permits. The event had to add a lot of infrastructure like porta potties to keep people from pooping on the ground, a radio station that could report problems, and “blackrock rangers” that can help end disputes and keep the peace. A group of volunteers now comb the land afterward, cleaning up after everyone who didn’t clean up after themselves. 

All of these infrastructures exist because, every year, that guy steals the street signs put up to help people navigate the event, making it difficult for emergency or medical personnel to get around. Theft has always been a big problem, in 2007 20 percent of the event’s community bikes were stolen from the event. Though campers are supposed to “leave no trace,” in 2022, so many people left trash in the desert that they almost didn’t pass the Bureau of Land Management’s annual inspection. 

A map of all the trash found after everyone left Burning Man in 2022 (in yellow and red).

Even worse, when, in 2023, a rainstorm meant everyone had to stay a day or two longer than they had anticipated and had to conserve their resources a little longer, that guy started tipping over porta-potties. 

The incidence of bad actors is not high, but the problems they can cause everyone else are massive. Even if most of the people are good, sharing their water and food, playing their music at appropriate times in consideration of their neighbors, resolving disputes on their own, and containing their own mess, there will always be that guy who doesn’t.

Some of it is just carelessness—tent stakes are the most common trash item left at Burning Man and most people probably just struggle to get them out of the desert ground and then give up, leaving them for the volunteers to dig out with shovels. But some of it is also sheer chaoticness—there’s no good reason to poop on the ground, steal the street signs, or start tipping over porta-potties when you know everyone around you will need to use them, but for whatever reason some people are just wildcards who thrive on that kind of chaos.

It’s like Timothy Treadwell’s “25th Grizzly” effect. For the most part, he said, grizzly bears don’t kill and eat people, but every 25th bear does and that’s where they get their reputation. Treadwell spent much of his life living with grizzlies and advocating for their gentler natures, but he was ultimately killed by that one in 25. 

And Burning Man is still a very small and contained case study. Most of our cities and nations are much larger than that, and much more complex, and contain many more people who do many more careless and chaotic things that harm everyone else and the environment we live in. That guy leaves toilet paper on the floor in public restrooms, lies on his resume to get the job, drives a car when he’s too tipsy. That guy doesn’t clean up after his pet, gets violent when he drinks, kidnaps children, breaks into homes, pushes people onto the subway tracks. He starts corporations that steal money and take advantage of the environment.

The anarchist ideal seems to imagine that that guy doesn’t exist or that if we just didn’t have all these class structures he wouldn’t exist any longer—that we could live in peace and harmony with one another without needing any of the rules, regulations, governments and infrastructures we currently have because people are generally good without them. It’s an extreme faith in humanity.

I have extreme faith in humanity too—but not all of it. I think people are generally good and want the best for one another, but for whatever reason, every 1,000th or 100,000th person isn’t. And most of the structures we put into place are meant to protect the rest of us from whatever careless and chaotic things that person might do. 

It’s a bummer because those rules then apply to the rest of us too, even if we aren’t the sort to poison people for fun. As Mann says, “This is a problem sort of inherent to government. They're always protecting us against the edge case. The edge case sets the rules, and that ends up, unless you're very careful, making it very difficult for everybody else.”

That’s why I think the “libertarian” ideal of less government is interesting, but also impossible to achieve in practice. Even if we start a community from scratch with no rules or regulations or bureaucracy or infrastructure, the second that guy does something that harms everyone else, we will add a rule to prevent it from happening again. And then we’ll keep on doing it forever until eventually everyone hates those rules and calls themselves libertarian to try and get rid of them. 

Don’t get me wrong: We can and should come up with better rules that specifically deter the bad actors without negatively affecting the good ones. Just because one kid breaks his leg at recess doesn’t mean we need to outlaw playground equipment. Just because one person isn’t working at home, doesn’t mean everyone needs to come back to the office. Just because one guy tried to poison us, doesn’t mean we should prevent good medicines from getting to the market. Just because one nuclear plant melts down doesn’t mean we should get rid of nuclear energy altogether. 

We can and should work to fix the specific incidents without making those fixes apply to everyone. We can and should make it much easier to undo rules and regulations that ended up causing more harm than good. But as much as I think people are good, sometimes they aren’t. And that’s why we’ll always have to have rules and regulations and infrastructure to protect us from them. For better and for worse. 

But I’d love to know your thoughts. Join us in the comments for further discussion. 👇🏻

Thanks for reading!

Elle Griffin

Marginalia

Here are a few notes from the margins of my research:

Great example of that guy and the rest of us from

Taylor Foreman

: 

The standup comedian Mike Birbiglia satirized our tendency to create too many rules. His comedy act goes through each of the rules posted at swimming pools and why they were added to the list. “Don’t get in the water within 14 days of experiencing diarrhea,” obviously stemmed from one particularly bad day in the water. But he was confused when his pool added a new rule: “don’t hold your breath underwater.” When he asked, he was told one guy held his breath underwater until he died. But the rule obviously shouldn’t apply to everyone: maybe some people can still hold their breath underwater if they are smart enough not to die doing it???

Étienne Fortier-Dubois

calls our tendency to hate all of the rules and systems we create the “ugly problem fallacy.” 

Because war is ugly, we might incorrectly conclude that we should get rid of standing armies and nuclear weapons. But if we did, it would open the door for any semi-ambitious thug to form a private army, or obtain private nuclear weapons, and become a terror-inspiring warlord. What could possibly stop him, if there is no military and no police?

Government and bureaucracies are quite often unpleasant! So it can be tempting to get rid of them altogether — even though it seems likely that the coordination failures this would cause would make everything much worse. (Specifically, it might increase the number of sex offenders and murder rates, and attract aggressive bears because no one is collecting waste anymore.)