The headlines keep flooding in about the hoarding of toilet paper. People are raiding stores, while criminals have resorted to looting supplies from a Michigan state park, and stealing a tractor-trailer full of paper goods in North Carolina.
It's as if people are trying to beat their neighbors and "win the pandemic." Why? What motivates some people to respond to a crisis by amassing more than they need?
As people who study politics and society, we can tell you the answer is not as obvious as it might seem. Many people attribute most of the problems in society, including our response to the coronavirus and our current ugly political climate, to incivility. We just don't like each other anymore.
Here's the problem with that explanation. American public life has always been uncivil. Politics in the 19th century looked a lot like politics now. Political parties ran their own newspapers, lobbing vicious attacks at their opponents. One Federalist newspaper warned that if Thomas Jefferson were elected president, "Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest" would be "openly taught and practiced."
Our problem is not incivility. It's disconnection. Americans today are separated from each other, our communities, and our government more than previous generations. As documented by political scientist Robert Putnam, people in earlier eras felt connected to each other and to society in a way that transcended political differences. They connected their personal interests with the interests of the community. They went to church together, had dinner with their neighbors without much thought to their politics, played baseball together, and joined civic organizations together.
Disconnection is a problem because while uncivil people can be mean and rude, disconnected people behave selfishly. Think about it like this. At Thanksgiving dinner--after your uncivil uncle gets on everyone's nerves--what keeps you from taking all the pumpkin pie for yourself, leaving only a sliver for everyone else? It's your connection. You are part of a family, a group.
Disconnected people don't think that way. They take what they can and don't give much thought to the needs of others. They prefer only the company of people who think like they do, or they become isolated socially and check out altogether.
It might help us understand the problem of disconnection if we thought of our connections to our friends, family, neighbors, community, and government as a game.
There are generally two types of games. The first is called a collective game. You play a collective game as a group. To win, the group must win. An example of a collective game is Dungeons and Dragons, or World of Warcraft.
The second is called a "zero-sum game." You play this game as an individual. To win, everyone else must lose. One example is Monopoly, but there are many more.
So how does this apply to society and politics? People with a connection to society are playing Dungeons and Dragons. They think of society as a team effort to achieve group goals. Disassociated people play Monopoly. They see society not as a win-win situation, but as a war in which it's OK to demonize the opposition, call them "un-American," and limit their friendships only to like-minded others.
Meanwhile, isolated people stop playing either type of game. As public life becomes less appealing, this group of people stops voting, volunteering, and paying attention to the news.
The problem with collective games is that groups fall apart when members start behaving selfishly. The group must get members to behave well in the group. So members have to keep an eye on "bad actors" who are group members but who exploit the group for personal gain.
The NBA season is canceled, March Madness is canceled, public schools are closed, businesses are shuttered. People who stand to lose millions of dollars made these decisions for a collective good. As good actors, they realized that if they played the zero-sum game and made their millions, the harm to society would be catastrophic.
Society stands a better chance of surviving when members define life as a collective effort. We focus on achieving common goals while also identifying and stopping bad actors who are members of the group, not mortal enemies. Society is less likely to survive when members define life as a zero-sum game and everyone is the enemy.
So stop worrying about anger and incivility and start connecting! If we play the collective game, we stand a chance as a group of "winning the pandemic."
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Hans J. Hacker is associate professor of political science at Arkansas State University. He recently gave a TEDx Talk (youtu.be/g0mnFoYm_ek) at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. He can be reached at [email protected]. Adam Key is assistant professor of communication at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, and the organizer of TEDxUAMonticello. He can be reached at [email protected].
Editorial on 04/02/2020