From the Jerk Blocking the Alley to the Jerk Running the Country

“If I don't do it, someone else will.” That is how a private convenience becomes a public obstruction.

Picture this: parking in the alley is prohibited. Someone tells you "if I don't park here, someone else will." And the alley is always blocked.

This is the kind of inefficiency the price of anarchy studies: for a specified game, how much worse is the worst equilibrium than the best coordinated outcome? The blocked alley is an intuition for the problem; we would need payoffs and rules to calculate its price.

Shared norms may keep the alley open. Sometimes a jerk ignores them and ruins it for everyone. So we reach for enforcement: make blocking the alley costly. Problem solved—or so the neat story goes.

But here's the problem: who decides the punishment? Obviously someone important. But how do we make sure this important person won't prioritize their own interests? So we create democracy to elect and hold this person accountable. Now the alley won't be blocked and they won't exempt their relatives.

But there's a small problem.

The neat story assumes voters can identify and hold the enforcer accountable. But people have limited information, competing interests, and a life outside evaluating candidates. How does the candidate reach them?

With a story called an election platform. A story can explain a policy. It can also hide its costs behind a hero, a villain, and a promise of salvation.

Now the “respectable leader” can campaign on accountability while making themselves harder to hold accountable. The mechanism meant to constrain self-interest has acquired self-interest of its own.

And just like that, we've gone from the jerk blocking the alley to the jerk running the country.

But wait, let's step back

This entire chain—from selfish individual to punishment to democracy to democracy's failure—assumes there's a "naturally selfish individual" who needs a system to control them for collective salvation.

But who said selfishness is natural?

The individual is a product of society. When "the individual chooses themselves because if they don't someone else will," who taught the individual to think this way? Wasn't it society itself? Aren't the dominant narratives what taught us to think in "either me or them" logic?

So you diagnose the problem correctly, but you fall into the same trap: you replace one illusion with another. From the illusion of "individual salvation" to the illusion of "collective salvation." You deconstruct selfishness and conclude it's a failure, but implicitly you're still searching for another solution called collective salvation, which led us to search for a third solution called fixing the system of governance.

And here's the bigger problem

Who decides what "collective salvation" is? Who defines its criteria?

When you invoke “society's interest,” you may be treating a disputed choice as an agreed fact. Who benefits, who pays, and who gets excluded from the definition? A claim to the common good deserves those questions even when the person making it is sincere.

The jerk blocking the alley and the jerk running the country aren't separate problems—they're the result of the same structure that creates the conflict between individual and collective in the first place.

The story, my friend, is a continuous struggle over who defines meaning, who owns the narrative, who labels "good" and "bad."

The question isn't how we achieve individual or collective salvation. The question is: why do we still believe "salvation" is even possible?!

So what's the solution?

I'm not saying nothing matters. But if we forget about salvation and start with practical solutions, we'll be better off.

Uncle Jalal has a practical proposal: “Scratch his car. He'll learn.” Uncle Jalal has never been accused of overcomplicating a governance framework.

The useful thought beneath the joke is local accountability. It is not automatically a Nash equilibrium: that requires each participant to have no profitable unilateral deviation under the specified rules. And Elinor Ostrom's 2009 Nobel was for research on economic governance, especially the commons—not car scratching. Her work gives us a more interesting third possibility: people can build rules, monitoring, and sanctions around a shared resource without waiting for a perfect ruler or a perfectly selfless citizen.

Poor Uncle Jalal. If your father had sent you to school, maybe you would've won a Nobel Prize... or maybe you'd be working at the Water Ministry. God knows.