You have to carry the fire.
I don’t know how to.
Yes, you do.
Is the fire real? The fire?
Yes it is.
Where is it? I don’t know where it is.
Yes you do. It’s inside you. It always was there. I can see it.
Thank you for reading the four previous articles in the We series – if you missed any, you can follow the link back to the first one here. This is the final article, that deals with the idea of externality – which is pivotal to an understanding of We and I thinking.
Introducing externalities
‘Externality’ was originally an economic term – an externality occurs “when producing or consuming goods has an impact on third parties not directly related to the transaction. These externalities can either be positive or negative”. Put simply, externalities are anything that happens because of something we do – with no (immediate) effect on us, as the doer.
‘Out of sight, out of mind’ sums up externalities well. As does ‘it’ll come back to bite you’ or (more positively, and as we’ll see it is perfectly possible for externalities to be positive – indeed, they can be designed to be so) ‘oh, that’s good – never expected that’.
Let’s look at the We and I approaches to externalities in more detail …
I – excluding or abusing the externalities
Let’s say an I individual wants to buy a pair of shoes. There will be certain factors that they might consider – price, style, material, quality, delivery time. For an I thinker, that will be pretty much it – some people might not even consider everything in this short list – price, style and delivery date might be enough.
We can imagine a similar thought(lessness?) process for the processes that go into making the shoes. The I-manufacturer considers labour costs, cost of sourcing materials, energy costs, rents, rates, packaging, taxation, transport, marketing (and more). Some of these costs are regulated by law, but an I-manufacturer works within (or sometimes just outside) legal frameworks to maximise profits. Externalities (such as worker poverty, pollution, packaging waste) are of no concern, and if they are made worse in order to increase profits – so what?
We – positively including the externalities
A We shopper or manufacturer attempts to take externalities into account in a positive way. So if I shoppers and manufacturers cause negative impacts through pollution during manufacture and transport, packaging waste, habitat loss (where did the leather come from?), poor working conditions, human rights violations, etc., the We shopper and manufacturer hunts these possible impacts out and looks for ways to ameliorate them.
Externalities don’t just disappear because they are not considered. Someone (or something) is still picking up the tab – only it’s ‘someone else’, maybe someone you don’t deal with much, or who lives far away, or who hasn’t even been born yet. It might be the environment itself – through a pollution event or loss of habitat. It can also fall on another living species, from Amazon River dolphins to honeybees, to earthworms, to lichen. Either now or in the future.
A We thinker will try (try!) to make their choices so as to minimise the negative effects and maximise the positives, on externalities, and will even try to influence policy-makers to make this kind of choice easier. They will take off their blinkers and make choices based on packaging, air-miles, fair trade certification, labour conditions at potential business partners – the list is enormous.
This is hard work – but if some of these externalities can be taken on by policy-makers (as is already the case with child labour, lead in petrol, sex discrimination, and FSC timber certification) the task of spreading benefits through positive choices becomes more straightforward – and more people start to do it.
Beyond shopping and manufacturing
I introduced externalities through the example of the shopper/manufacturer interaction because it is simple and widely understood – not because it is the only area where externalities exist. There is scarcely an area of human experience that cannot be put under an I/We microscope and analysed for the effect of our actions on externalities. Some areas have externalities similar to those discussed above, in others they are very different – just think of the impact on the education system, and children’s mental health.
I used to teach biology, and to my mind externalities work much like ecosystems. These consist not only of the I-like (‘it’s all that matters’) food chains, e.g. grass > sheep > human, but also include the other factors at play, such as other living things, their interactions, temperature, day length, pH, soil chemistry, pollutants, and more. If you wish to understand how an ecosystem works, you need to take all of these into account as much as possible and be aware of all the interactions.
Of course, this is impossible – even in the simplest of ecosystems – as there are just too many components and links. But the more that are taken into account, the better the understanding of the ecosystem will be. So it is with all our interactions – either with each other, or with the planet. Ignore nothing.
Externalities matter—for fairness, safety, and sustainability
Think of Grenfell where the financial cost alone is now more than 4,000 times the amount ‘saved’ by fitting the original cheap cladding, Hillsborough, sewage pollution, NHS waiting times, thalidomide, lead in petrol, plastic pollution, rainforest destruction (and so on, and so forth). These are all tragic outcomes resulting from an institutional (I) failure to properly consider externalities – and each comes with a heavy human, environmental and financial toll.
Cheaper, quicker, more convenient – again and again these three sirens, so sweet-sounding at first, lure us (or someone/thing else) onto the rocks later. A cheap plastic toy from abroad is not just a cheap plastic toy from abroad – it is also … (I’m sure that you can make the list of externalities).
Over to you …
I’d encourage readers to think about their choices in daily life from a We/I perspective; to think about the externalities involved and how their choices affect them – for better or for worse.
You might want to consider how We/I thinking affects areas as diverse as history, parenting, the future, inequality, truth and lies, the natural world, localism, economics (free market or doughnut), tax, the law, race, English and Scottish land ownership and use – the list is almost endless. On all these and more, there are huge gaps (externalities) in what is usually taken into account when formulating policy or forming public attitudes. What are these externalities and how would taking them into account change things for the better?
You might also want to think about how contemporary power structures (largely I thinking) disrupt moves towards a more positive We-based future – through mechanisms such as media control, hegemony, the Overton window, lies, fake news, obfuscation and simply flooding the zone with shit. We need to be constantly aware of how progress, real progress, is being stifled deliberately.
As David Graeber says in The Utopia of Rules:
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make. And could just as easily make differently.”
He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!Outwitted by Edwin Markham (1854 – 1940)
