THE GOBLIN COMMONS

Public streets are host at dawn to the many cracked windows

& shattered public lamps of night.Goblins have been out and about. Their liberating acts of defilement are valid but tiny, tepid and insignificant.

Truly, it is a meager joy that leaves the world uglier in its wake.

The Insane People's Republic of North Korea (IPR of NK) announced publicly (June 2009) that its anticipated nuclear arsenal will only be used for legitimate national defense and, of course, a totally justified "merciless offensive" against whomever disturbs their "dignity and sovereignty even a bit."

They will massacre everyone if anyone dares to make them feel upset? This sounds almost like they are begging to be destroyed. It will certainly turn the major powers of the world even more strongly against them. Who does that? Probably, despite its better elements, a suicidal state crying out for help...

Systems which diagnose themselves as corrupt will initiate self-abnegation procedures. Consider: Nazi Imperial Germany. You couldn't find a more clear attempt by a people to nullify themselves. Sending all your best and brightest to die in futile, mismanaged wars that even the army opposes, rounding up whole segments of the population and slaughtering them, smearing history, chasing out good business and scientists, destroying cultural vitality everywhere and finally suicide in a bunker after killing your loved ones? These people we not amoral geniuses -- they were a disease attempting to eliminate itself.

In Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons," we are asked to observe the commons-destroying effect of self-interested, rational herdsmen trying to share resources. Yet the problem is not the rational individuals whose self interest, as every ancient Greek philosopher new, was only a incomplete ethical perspective which true rationality would produce. The real trouble is goblins.

Goblins: Biopathic, culturopathic, emotionally and vitally conflicted agents & communities, or quasi-conscious parts thereof.

Although Hardin's insightful subtitle for his essay is, "The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality" he focuses too greatly on the problem of ethical naivete on the part of quasi-rational men instead of the much greater threat posed by willfully, if often unconsciously, destructive individuals (or parts of individuals).

Why did our species not simply learn its lesson from the first wasted commons?

1. Ineffective means of recollecting and collectively interpreting data.

2. The ongoing effect of individuals and masses of individuals who do not realize their own nihilistic and self-destructive instincts.

The problem is not the decision between an unregulated commons and privatized ownership. Huge numbers of people exist who will point out what is obviously wrong with both options. Only a hybrid alternative has any credibility at all.

The Dalai Lama, an open Marxist, has long called for the eco-cultural autonomy of Tibet within the military-political and economic nationhood of China. Whether this can succeed or not we see in it at least an attempted hybrid solution worthy of our interest as we endeavour to define the commons upon which our future thought depends.

The threat, however, lies precisely in the same two factors which have doomed every other Utopian politics --

Poor intelligence exchanging practices

And goblins.