Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss

I move to the other end of the table, where a man mentions that I might be interested in an essay titled “The Tragedy of the Commons.” I’ve just read that essay, I tell him, yesterday. He hesitates and then explains it to me. The tragedy, he says, is that everyone will always take as much as they can from the commons. This isn’t my sense of the tragedy—the tragedy is that by the time that essay was written the commons had already been lost and the regulations that once prevented everyone from taking as much as they could from the commons had been forgotten. But the idea that the commons cannot be regulated, I know, is the interpretation of that essay favored by free-market capitalists. And that’s what has made it so enduring, despite the fact that it was written as an argument for limiting the “breeding” of the poor and is riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods. Its veracity is less important than its influence, one of my colleagues once said of that essay. Meaning, the lies we want to believe tell us something about ourselves.