In recent weeks, I have had the good fortune to be involved in a conversation with others more intelligent than myself which culminated in a solution to one of the most crucial problems in civilisation and our human history; situations where our input is crucial to the eventual outcome, but is seemingly marginalized by its dependence on the input of others. The human response is to disclaim the importance of our decisions due to our insignificance and lack of binary influence upon the outcome; however, our decisions are equally, if not singularly, important. This notion is designated best by game theory as a socially disoptimal Nash equilibrium; where each player would not change their strategy with full cognisance of the strategies of others, yet the outcome is still not Kaldor-Hicks, or even Pareto, optimal. The answer is simple, yet not manifest; easy to comprehend, yet hard to fathom. It rests on two basic axioms of our humanity. The insignificance of humans is self-evident. We are motes in the comprehensible universe, and even those who have achieved the most in our society will be completely inconsequential in aeternum. The individual alone is nothing; Borges put it best, as is his wont, when he said ‘I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist’. The insignificance of the individual is evidenced in the evolutionally-bred social stigma in most known societies of hubris; the greatest crime in ancient Greek society was atë, while Buddhism denies nibbana to those bound by mana. Literature throughout history affirms this same condemnation of individual self-worth, from Aeschylus’ Prometheus to Shelley’s Victor, from Milton’s Lucifer to Marlowe’s Faustus; the reason that the feeling of significance is condemned by history is that feigning significance offers no solution to problem, and instead exacerbates the extant problem.
It is, however, more difficult to concede our own insignificance. Indeed, historiography provides an intriguing reading of this; the attempts of the Imperium Romanum (the Empire), itself a Hegelian synthesis of the conflict of the Res-publica Romanum (the Republic) with the precedent Regnum Romanum (the Kingdom), to conquer all that they knew, culminating predictably in Flavius Odoacer’s deposition of Romulus Augustulus and the subsequent collapse; the ecclesiastical suppression of Galileo’s Copernican heliocentrism in favour of the Aristotelian geocentric model, which, as may be expected, favours our significance; Napoleon’s march from Moscow after the discomfiture of the Campagne de Russie, and his fall from grace; history is our struggle with our own insignificance. Many theories have been constructed in order to asseverate the power of the individual - Carlyle’s Great Man Theory is a shining exemplar of how individuals who were catalysts, or merely products of social movements, were heralded as prime movers and tutelaries of civilisation. We do not negate our insignificance by denying it - we are not elevating ourselves to significance. We are merely being obstinate in repudiating our insignificance, the facticity of which is further illustrated by the habitual failure of our attempts to prove otherwise. Our importance, to the contrary, is irrefutable. As individual parts of a holistic group, we have almost unlimited power over ourselves, others, and our world. We all make our own decisions, but these individual decisions all have absolutely equipotent influence upon the collective outcome. As such, the individual, when part of a group, tends towards omnipotence, and incontrovertible importance. The rise of totalitarianism, along with its subsequent atrophy and collapse, is evidence enough of this on a global scale; it rose with the assent of the people in Germany and similarly imploded when the populace abjured their allegiance and rebelled against it; it was established with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and collapsed when the people rejected even perestroika and glasnost eight decades later. The proliferation of democracy, in the same vein, evidences the importance of the individual in a group-based society, and also the insignificance of the individual without inclusion in a group, being the human propensity to serve in heaven rather than reign in hell. This is by no means to subsume and subordinate the individual into the group, but rather to capacitate the individual through this means. The group is a manifestation of the power of the individual, including the power to countervail other individuals. The importance of the individual can never be proven by the power of one individual over many others, and so, paradoxical as it sounds, the power of the individual is evidenced in history by the new social movements. The huge power of individuals forming into groups to influence the established status quo is betokened by: the feminist movement and its achievements in discrimination and suffrage; the French Revolution, and the Tennis Court Oath sworn by the Third Estate of the États-Généraux; the Polish Constitution of 1791, devolving disproportionate powers from the szlachta under the rzeczpospolita szlachecka. Similarly, the myriad insurrections against maleficent governments - Mohandas Gandhi’s noncooperation movement to resist British occupation and especially in response to the Rowlatt Act, the National Resistance Movement’s deposition of Idi Amin, the ‘cursed soldiers’ of the Polish resistance to Nazi occupation - are capsulised in Aung San Suu Kyi’s proclamation that fear is not the natural state of man. History is saturated with the power of the individual over any structural authority, but there is much more that hasn’t yet reached the realms of history; Avaaz, who describe themselves as ‘the world in action,’ are currently striving to consolidate opposition to Bashar Assad in Syria, and have previously fought successfully against censorship laws in Italy, twice repudiated bills threatening to sentence homosexuals to death in Uganda, forced the South African government to act against corrective rape rituals, and mobilised half a million people to repeal a proposal to construct a highway through the Amazon rainforest. We now live in a world where even autocracy is mediated democratically; in our interconnected society, the importance of the individual has never been more clear. Others have suggested alternate solutions. Religion, for one, denies the contradiction and tells us that we are significant, that we have an omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient deity with whom we share a personal relationship, a logical contradiction with love, caprice and personal preferences - neatly anthropomorphised like many other deities of our early human history, and then corporeally manifested, to further simplify the idea, in the Jesus of Nazareth. There is not a single shred of evidence which serves to uphold this, though many would have us to believe that the failure of science to know and explain everything (as yet, though it is ever-advancing) serves as proof for whichever alternate theory they propose. It is further appended at a later date that we do not depend to such an extent on the decisions of others, as the truth dictates, but rather we are provided with an eternal posthumous fate which is determined by the accordance of our actions with scripture, not with those of others, to grant us seemingly more control over the outcomes of our decisions (conveniently, this occurs in a domain in which verification of these assertions is, obviously, infeasible). There is no logical or empirical reason to believe this, but we choose to because it soothes and comforts us. Our failure to acknowledge this apparent contradiction is the one true tragedy of humanity; at the very least it is responsible for our destruction of our natural environment, the perpetuation of the poverty and suffering of our fellow beings; it is the crux of the inefficient efficacy of humanity in knowledge, in charity, in ameliorative benignity. Environmental destruction is perpetuated by a society which marginalises the individual due to an overly facile and casuistic understanding of the logic of group decision-making, with individuals who are capable of, but not aware of their capability of, influencing the outcome through their own decision, ending up in a tragedy of the commons situation where what is beneficent for all is abandoned. Charitable giving would also most likely increase exponentially, resulting in development which would build exponentially, and therefore untold mitigation of the suffering of others, who would then also be able to help (ergo, again, exponentially increasing the previous exponential increases of our propensity to improve the world), QED. It is palpable that acknowledging our insignificant importance will lead to unspeakable tangible benefit - the Pareto improvement mentioned in the opening paragraph does not sufficiently convey the magnitude of this improvement. It is evident, therefore, that, having proven the blatant nature of both of these attributes of ours, and the benefit accrued to us by acknowledging these, there is some reason why we fail to. Indeed, the human fear of this individual power stems from our fear of ultimate responsibility over others, combined with the fear of other individuals having ultimate power over ourselves. We prefer our decisions to be clearcut, simplistic and easily attributable, but reality begs to differ - all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone, as Borges again wrote aptly, and we will only truly empower ourselves when we do, as self-awareness is at the core of human endeavour. Some may ask who I am to propound such an unsettling yet beneficent philosophy, but in this post I only serve to draw attention to the axiomatic conclusion of two self-evident premises - it is, of course, theirs to reason why (a principle sacrosanct to me above all else) but the logic involved in this preposition is inerrant in its simplicity and transparency. The solution to socially disoptimal Nash equilibria is acknowledging that we are insignificant in what we are, but we are important in what we do; history notes the hurricane, not the butterfly.