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Cognitive bias is a term used by psychologists to describe common errors in judgment. These come in many forms. Confirmation bias is our tendency to interpret new information in a way that conforms with our existing opinions. Hindsight bias, occasionally dubbed the I knew it all along bias, is the predilection for seeing past events as predictable when examined from a future perch. Meanwhile, a fundamental attribution error over-emphasizes personality-based explanations when trying to describe someone’s behavior while underestimating the power of situational-based explanations. Essentially, all of these biases are ways our brain helps us lie to ourselves with impunity.

And all of these biases also have a long evolutionary history, which is a fancy way of saying they all serve a useful survival purpose, even if the means to the end is not exactly truthful. I want to introduce another bias, another not-exactly-truthful skein through which most of us, especially if we are Americans, like to view the world. I call it capitalism bias—the idea that everything that can be sold should be sold—and it plays a critical role in much of what underlies the modern environmental movement.

It might be a little hard to remember now, but America fought a Cold War against the former Soviet Union. Fundamentally, this war should be described as democracy versus totalitarianism (technically any political system where the state regulates every aspect of public and private life), but like all cold wars, this one was fought primarily with propaganda. The propagandists chose different terminology: capitalism versus communism, and that hangover—our bias—has never quite left us.

Communism is a word that owes its existence to another idea—that of “the commons,” which is anything—though these days ‘anything’ usually means a natural resource—that is shared by everyone, in common. In his influential 1968 essay The Tragedy of the Commons, Garth Hardin wrote about a group of farmers who share a piece of grazing land. All of them have cows that need to be fattened up for market. So it is in everybody’s individual best interests to let their cows eat as much grass as possible. But if everyone lets their cows grub with impunity, then over-grazing is the result. The land dies. Everybody loses. Thus the “tragedy of the commons.”

This is no idle analogy. This sort of tragedy is now being witnessed in the massive depletion of global fisheries—a public trust that was mismanaged by those entrusted with it. This is a real tragedy, a real problem. But Americans, still suffering our invisible Cold War hangover, want to believe that capitalism is the answer. We still suffer capitalism bias. But capitalism, when it comes to the question of “the commons,” really means privatization. This is what Hardin called the “Enclosure of the Commons,” and it leads to a whole other type of tragedy.

The World Bank suffers from a horrific case of capitalism bias and thus has been one of the larger institutions pushing for the enclosure of the commons. Take water privatization. In 2000, the World Bank refused to renew a $25M loan to Bolivia unless it sold off its water rights, which then went to the ever-creepy company Bechtel; true to form, they promptly instituted a massive rate hike during their first week of ownership. The minimum wage in Bolivia is less than $70 a month, while Bechtel wanted to charge about $20 for a monthly water supply. The result? Protests that became riots, sparking a 90-day state of emergency that cost lives and started lawsuits, and eventually forced Bechtel out of the region. This is but one example. In truth, almost everywhere water has been privatized (and it’s been privatized in over 100 countries), similar problems have erupted.

The point here is that neither solution works all too well, but Americans still suffering their capitalism bias are much more likely to choose the enclosure route. This is certainly what happened under the Bush administration. And it’s what’s happening again with Obama. The cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions that the Obama administration has put front-and-center for solving climate change is an example, as if ownership is the solution. Come on, really, who owns the climate? The atmosphere, the ionosphere, the stratosphere?

We have a dying globe. So we need global solutions. We need enforceable global carbon-emission caps far sterner than Kyoto, that’s for certain. And to enforce them, we need a worldwide environmental protection agency, not another de-facto trade agreement between nations. Americans have to give up on the idea of an ownership society because that got us in this mess to begin with. Developing nations should want democracy, but unbridled capitalism—as the state of our economy and our environment can attest—is mostly a lousy idea. And so is cap-and-trade. As long as capitalism is our bias and ownership is built into the environmental equation—as both sides of the commons argument show—disaster will be the only result.

This also means that if America really wants to be a global leader in solving ecological problems, we have to put Cold War rhetoric behind us. We need to stop trying to export our capitalism bias (which is really what the last administration meant when they claimed to be “exporting democracy”). Instead, we must export a new global bias in which the worth of the commons is not measured in use value—either public or private. There are words for this bias, too. Biotic egalitarianism is the notion that every living thing has equal value and equal rights regardless of what purpose it serves humankind. It’s truly a radical idea. It means if the commons is a field of grass, then the only real question worth asking is, ‘What’s best for the grass?’, not what’s best for the grazers.

Updated 5/28/10; originally posted 2/9/09.

Steven Kotler is the author of The Angle Quickest for Flight, West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief and the forthcoming A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue, Animal Altruism and the Meaning of Life (Bloomsbury). He is a frequent contributor to anyone who will have him, his non-fiction appearing in more than 50 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, LA Times, Wired, Popular Science, GQ, Outside and National Geographic. He also writes The Playing Field, a blog about the science of sport for PsychologyToday.com and lives with his wife and too many dogs in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico.

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