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

When individual interest conflicts with society's interest, the individual chooses themselves—because if they don't, someone else will.

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.

In economics, this is called the price of anarchy. The solution? Create incentives that align individual interest with collective interest.

Usually morality and religious values work. But sometimes a jerk emerges who ruins it for everyone. In that case, you need punishment—punishment is what makes people act for society's benefit instead of their own. That's the optimal solution.

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.

Democracy assumes society is rational. But in any human society, collective thinking is limited—people can't properly evaluate leaders. So how do you convince them to elect the right person?

The candidate has to tell them a fairytale called an election platform. And stories, as we know, make humans think irrationally—this is documented in psychology.

So the "respectable leader" lies to get elected, and we can't hold them accountable because we don't understand and we believe the story they're telling us.

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 talk about "society's interest," you assume there's one agreed-upon interest. But the truth is that every discourse about "public interest" or "collective salvation" is a discourse of power—whoever decides what the "real" interest is, is someone imposing a certain ideology and excluding everyone who disagrees to produce a particular interest.

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.

If the jerk blocks the alley, scratch their car—Uncle Jalal style. They'll never do it again.

This method is actually scientific and proven—it achieves what's called Nash Equilibrium. There's even an economist named Elinor Ostrom who won the Nobel Prize in 2009 for this idea.

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.