The Fortune of the Commons

Here in Japan people treat the commons, such as their roads, not as something to take advantage of in the most selfish way possible (Hardin, 1968) but as something that they work together to preserve. In the photo above are a group of my neighbours, at least one from each household, including my wife, cleaning and weeding a street on which we live. There is some social pressure to participate, but not all that much. If you don't want to participate you can pay a yearly fee of 1000 yen which goes towards giving a small reward (a bottle of tea and some rubbish bags) to those that do. It seems to me that people just want their street to look good. 

I claim that this is because the Japanese are autoscopic individualists (Takemoto & Iwaizono, 2016) by virtue of the mirror in their mind (Heine et al., 2008). When you see yourself, you are neither encouraged to compare your own utility with those of others (Hardin, 1968), as encouraged the "negativity" (De Saussure, 2011: see Maruyama, et al., 1993) of linguistic self representation and rational thought, nor is it even possible to isolate (think Photoshop) yourself out your environment. The autoscopic Japanese and their environment are one, in the "two shot" selfie (ツーショット・自撮り写真）of their mind. 

I hoping that if AI has the means and desire to kill all the people, due to their tendencies to cause "tragedies," it will spare the Japanese. 

De Saussure, F. (2011). Course in General Linguistics [1916]. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. http://uwch-4.humanities.washington.edu/Tautegory/EBOOKS/SAUSSURE/Gen%20course.doc

Hardin, G. (1968). The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full.

Heine, S. J., Takemoto, T., Moskalenko, S., Lasaleta, J., & Henrich, J. (2008). Mirrors in the Head: Cultural variation in objective self-awareness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(7), 879–887. http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~heine/docs/2008Mirrors.pdf

Takemoto, T., & Iwaizono, M. (2016). Autoscopic Individualism: A Comparison of American and Japanese Women’s Fashion Magazines. 山口経済学雑誌= Yamaguchi Journal of Economics, Business Administrations & Laws, 65(3), 173–205. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/40021076383/

Takemoto, T. R., & Brinthaupt, T. M. (2017). We Imagine Therefore We Think: The Modality of Self and Thought  in Japan and America. 山口経済学雑誌 (Yamaguchi Journal of Economics, Business Administrations & Laws), 65(7・8), 1–29. http://nihonbunka.com/docs/Takemoto_Brinthaupt.pdf

丸山圭三郎, 柄谷行人, 立川健二, 岸田秀, & 竹内芳郎. (1993). 文化記号学の可能性 (増補完全). 夏目書房.