"…Canada is not immune to the types of terrorist attacks we have seen elsewhere around the world.

We are also reminded that attacks on our security personnel and on our institutions of governance are by their very nature attacks on our country, on our values, on our society, on us Canadians as a free and democratic people who embrace human dignity for all.

But let there be no misunderstanding: we will not be intimidated. Canada will never be intimidated. In fact, this will lead us to strengthen our resolve and redouble our efforts, and those of our national security agencies, to take all necessary steps to identify and counter threats and keep Canada safe here at home. Just as it will lead us to strengthen our resolve and redouble our efforts to work with our allies around the world and fight against the terrorist organizations who brutalize those in other countries with the hope of bringing their savagery to our shores."

Canada and the politics of fear

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Do I contradict myself? 

Very well then I contradict myself, 

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

The ‘I’ in this passage — from section 51 of Song of Myself, by poet Walt Whitman — stands as a reference to the erratic and self-contradictory ways in which people think and act out their lives.

Whitman is drawing attention to an everyday experience that defines the human condition — people do not, and cannot, live pure and ascetic lives. In saying ‘I contain multitudes,’ what Whitman is really highlighting is that we all contain multitudes, a mess of perspectives and sentiments that leave us in a state of perpetual hypocrisy.

So say it with me now — we are all hypocrites.

The way in which we think, act, feel and live is wrought with self-denial, contradiction and inconsistency. In a recent piece, I highlighted how various logical fallacies work as psychological flaws that twist and distort our decision-making abilities, making it virtually impossible for someone to make a truly unbiased and impartial choice about anything.

What’s more, because so much of our thought processes are subconscious, our internal contradictions and irregularities rarely register at a more conscious level. And thus our unwillingness to realize this means we tend to think everyone is a hypocrite but us.

According to Why Everyone (Else) Is A Hypocrite, by evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban, the reason we seem unwilling to make an effort to realize our inherent irrationalities is because in Western society, a flattering self-image is directly correlated with personal rewards such as greater senses of emotional stability, motivation and perseverance.

So instead of a more self-reflexive populace that understands everyone — including oneself — is full of contradictions, and more importantly, that it’s entirely natural to have some analytical imperfections, we’ve become a society of self-denial, where a person’s opinions can be easily discredited unless they practice an impossibly monastic lifestyle.

These beliefs create a delusional world. A world where the status quo can never really change because people are expected to actively practice everything they preach, even though, as Kurzban notes, the human mind — my mind, your mind — is modular, and as such, consists of a large number of specialized parts, each of which, because they are separated from one another, can simultaneously hold mutually contradictory views.

Take environmentalism. Challenging fracking practices, protesting a pipeline, objecting to further developments in the oilsands — like clockwork, activists who take these kinds of actions are immediately levelled with accusations of hypocrisy based on the tenuous notion that an environmentalists’ own reliance on fossil fuels means their protests against the practices of the oil and gas industries are akin to the tired old idiom of the pot calling the kettle black.

After all, as political economist Robert Reich stresses in his book Supercapitalism, trying to live the perfect green lifestyle in an economic system that is structurally designed to produce waste, overconsumption and fossil fuel dependence as predictably as it produces inequality, job insecurity and unrequited exploitation, is an indisputably impossible task.

As such, the notion that environmentalists — such as Neil Young for example — have no right to criticize oilsands developments, pipelines or fracking because they ‘choose’ to heat their homes and drive cars is downright nonsensical. By the empty rhetoric of this argument, not a single Canadian citizen could legitimately engage in any form of critical public discourse because to an extent, we all benefit from the system we are critiquing.

We live in a society where it is impossible to live a functional lifestyle and not consume products made from petro-chemicals every single day — electronics, fabrics, painkillers, food additives, cosmetics, fabrics, cleaning supplies, building materials, the list goes on.

More than ever, it is precisely because it is incredibly difficult to survive outside of our wasteful, exploitative and fossil fuel-obsessed system that we need environmentalists and other activists — yes, even if they own a cellphone and wear cheaply manufactured clothing — advocating for alternative means of production and modes of consumption.

Because if the prerequisite for a legitimate criticism is a complete and utter distancing from the object of which we are critiquing, than fossil fuels, the economy and politics are all off limits. Moreover, students can’t confront the administration of their university because it determines their grades. Workers can’t question the management of their company because it signs their paychecks. Christians can’t challenge interpretations of the Bible because they ascribe to the religion. Married people can’t oppose sexism because marriage was originally an institution of patriarchy and female subordination.

But many of us do these things anyway, don’t we?

Many of us question the very government that provides us with healthcare, the very economic system that fills the supermarket, the companies that pay us, the universities that grade us, the religions that save us, the patriarchies that subjugate us, and yes, the very fossil fuels that provide us with the countless resources society needs to function. 

Due to our very nature and the inescapable realities of the market, our political system and our reliance on fossil fuels, speaking up is always hypocritical. And as such, we need to be mindful of the fact that more often than not, charges of ‘hypocrisy’ brought against those trying to think beyond our current system tend to be nothing but attempts by those in power to keep us from challenging their ascendancy.

If we understand hypocrisy as the inevitable consequence of questioning practices and policies so dominant that it’s nearly impossible to function without participating in them, then hypo-critical thought is vital if society is to move beyond the status quo. After all, how, for instance, can we begin to imagine a future beyond fossil fuels if each attempt to question their primacy invokes cries of hypocrisy from the titans of the resource industry?

The answer is simple: we can’t — and that’s just the way Big Oil wants it to stay.

So the next time someone accuses you of being a hypocrite for criticizing the inescapable structures of society from within, remember every government reformed, social injustice abolished, inequality rebalanced and environmentally destructive practice eradicated has been made possible by people who were willing to act on thoughts that were at one time deemed contradictory to the status quo.

Image: Kinder Morgan pipeline protest, Burnaby 2014. Photo: Mark Klotz via Flickr

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Imagine coming across a piece of reliable information that contradicts everything you’ve ever believed about, say, global warming or the war on terror. It would likely prompt the question: if you were wrong about such an important issue, what else could you be wrong about? What’s more, if you’ve been wrong about a bunch of things, then perhaps you’re not quite as well-informed as you had previously believed.

Thoughts like these are jarring ones because they threaten our sense of self — making us feel stupid, empty, even worthless. Unsurprisingly then, most people’s willingness to open up to new information depends largely on how this information will challenge or coincide with their preconceived notions of what is good or bad, right or wrong, true or false.

According to a study by researchers at the University of Waterloo, called Self-Affirmation and Sensitivity to Argument Strength, when people are presented with corrective information that runs counter to their ideology, those who most strongly identify with the ideology will intensify their incorrect beliefs. And as such, the greater the challenge new information poses to a person’s self-worth, the less likely it is to have any impact at all on them.

If there’s something positive to draw from these uncomfortable realizations of our purposeful ignorance, it’s that if we take the time to better understand why and how people think and feel the way they do, these inherent biases can be successfully mitigated and controlled.

And with this aim in mind, what follows — keeping in mind that I have likely succumb to a few of these during the writing of this piece, as you will during the process of reading it — are eight of the most commonplace logical fallacies that misinform our minds every day.

1. Backfire effect: As mentioned above, the more a piece of information lowers self-worth, the more likely it is to be rejected outright. Therefore, new information can create such ideological insecurity that people will manufacture counterarguments to the point that they overcompensate and become more convinced of their original views. Hence, instead of convincing someone to question an invalidated belief, fresh information can actually ‘backfire’ by strengthening the grasp a refuted opinion has on an individual.

Monkey see, monkey do. Image Credit: danmachold/Flickr

2. Status quo bias: We tend to be apprehensive of change, and this often leads us to make choices motivated by the desire to keep things as familiar as possible. This is because for most people the current baseline is taken as a reference point, and any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss. Needless to say, preference for the status quo represents a core component of conservative ideology – militarism, austerity and environmental exploitation are all-too-familiar attempts to hold on to the status quo.

3. Confirmation fallacy: We love to agree with those who agree with us. We visit websites that re-express our political opinions, re-read literature that reaffirms our cultural upbringings, befriend people with likeminded attitudes and form cohesive social circles based around similar key viewpoints. At the same time, we practice a reactive reasoning in that we undervalue, scrutinise and dismiss arguments, figures, and people that challenge our entrenched worldviews — after all, we are our own biggest censors.

4. In-group fallacy: Similar to the confirmation fallacy, due to our innate desire to be socially accepted, we tend to favour the thoughts, ideals and sentiments of those with whom we racially and culturally identify with most. And conversely, this means we are suspicious, fearful and ignorant of the preferences, wants, needs and values of groups and peoples that we have difficulty identifying with — this goes a long way toward explaining why racism remains so rampant in liberal-democratic countries.

5. False consensus bias: As we cannot really experience anything outside of our own consciousness, we tend to believe most people think like we do. In group settings, false consensus biases cause us to accept that the opinions, preferences and values of our own group reflect the larger population. And since groups tend to reach a consensus and avoid those who dispute it, they believe everyone thinks that way. This is the sort of groupthink that convinces political extremists they have widespread support.

Put a stop to groupthink by jumping off the bandwagon. Image Credit: caffeina/Flickr

6. Bandwagon Effect: Opinions and viewpoints spread infectiously among people, meaning we are very likely to adopt a belief merely because lots of other people believe it too. In other words, people are both socially insecure and cognitively lazy. We don’t want to think for ourselves, and we often assume that if someone else has already adopted something, it can’t be bad. Even though the popularity of an argument has little bearing on its validity, we disregard our own judgements in an attempt to assimilate.

7. Current moment fallacy: A cognitive tragedy of the commons, we have a hard time imagining ourselves in the future and altering our behaviours accordingly. As such, most opt for gratification now, saving discomfort for later. This lack of self-control, where most people would rather exchange serious troubles in the not-to-distant future for more trivial pleasures in the moment, personifies the impulsive decision-making that is responsible for the financial meltdown, political corruption and developments that harm the environment.

8. Blind Spot Bias: Ironically enough, if you read this article thinking that these biases don’t apply to you, you might suffer from this logically fallacy, which makes us think that while biases may apply to others, we are immune to them. This is because when we assess ourselves for irrationality, we look inward, searching through our thoughts and feelings for bias. But biases operate unconsciously, so while we have little trouble pointing out the biases in others, it is exceedingly difficult for us to take note of our own.

But why go through all this trouble to point out the logical fallacies that seem to be driving ignorance and close-mindedness in our society? Well, the political implications of this sort of self-reflexive psychoanalytic exercise should be pretty obvious…

In the past year alone, Canadians have borne witness to half a dozen Senate corruption scandals, a spying agency that’s quietly collecting and sharing our personal information, the actual destruction of priceless scientific archives and a relentless war on science and knowledge — all of which serve to demonstrate just how ideological our government has become.

So as we inch closer to the 2015 federal election, it is our responsibility as democratic citizens to take note of the ways these logical fallacies — and the dozens of others we succumb to — can misinform our minds, and those of our political leaders, each and everyday. For if we work at becoming a more cognizant and well-informed citizenry it will spill over into the polling station, and with any luck, onto Parliament Hill as well.

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1. Bill C-13, ‘Cyberbulling’ Legislation. Introduced under the thinly disguised banner of anti-cyberbulling measures, the new bill will amend key parts of the criminal code in order to extend police power—streamlining the process of obtaining warrants to intercept private communications, enabling the tracking of individuals if a crime is suspected, and expanding wiretapping from telephone data to any digital activity. In short, bullying tragedies are being exploited to push through previously struck down legislation (such as Bill-30), that will force Internet Service Providers to surrender our personal information to government agencies with absolutely no civilian oversight.

2. Bill C-56, The Combating Counterfeit Products Act. Championed as a measure to protect intellectual property, closer scrutiny reveals that the bill is but an attempt to push the extensively discredited Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)—an agreement rejected by EU member countries for its invasiveness—in through the backdoor. Attempting to cover everything from pharmaceuticals to art, the bill would legislate new invasive border measures including seizure powers without court oversight in instances where a government official ‘reasonably’ believes there may be some risk to a dangerously flexible conceptualisation of ‘public safety.’

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Recent Environment Canada reports show that the Harper administration does not have the policies in place necessary to meet Canada’s existing environmental commitments, which have already been criticised as being the feeblest in the industrialised world. For instance, Canada was the only country to weaken its climate target under the Copenhagen Accord, and has since become the only country to formally withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol.  Even more concerning, according to the 2013 Climate Change Performance Index—a look at emissions levels, emissions trends, energy efficiency, efforts at renewable energy, and government climate policies of the world’s 61 highest CO2 emitting nations administered by the Climate Action Network—Canada ranked a dismal 58th, trailed only by Kazakhstan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, it was worst performance of any developed country by a long shot.

“At a time when institutions such as the World Bank and the International Energy Agency are calling for more climate action it is disappointing to have so many countries still being reluctant to move forward,” said Wendel Trio, Director of the European-based Climate Action Network and lead investigator for the 2013 Climate Change Performance Index, “Canada is a strong example of this lack of willingness to improve climate policies.”

“Canada has become the poster child for climate inaction, which represents a really long fall from where we were less than a decade ago,” added Patrick Bonin, Lead Climate-Energy and Arctic Campaigner at Greenpeace Canada. “It has been hard to watch the unraveling of a rational and reasonable approach to science, while at the same time seeing more devastating extreme weather impacts all around us, it just makes you wonder what it is going to take for this government to get it.”

“The world has had enough of Canada’s inaction on climate change," concluded Steven Guilbeault, Co-Founder and Senior Director of the Montreal-based NGO Equiterre, “It is clear that this government’s reckless fixation on the tar sands is going to cost us not only a safe and healthy future and economy for our children, but also our international credibility.”

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Last month’s PRISM revelations are a disconcerting reminder that even here in Canada, paranoid fantasies about mass government surveillance are more than a work of fiction. Listening to our phone calls, monitoring our Internet searches, reading our emails, trawling our social media accounts. These things are not only possible, but thanks to government fear mongering feeding our increased tolerance for supervision in a post-9/11 world, they’re also entirely legal.   In Canada, government data mining is administered by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC)—a top-secret federal agency that reports directly to the Minister of Defence, employs over 2,000 people, and operates with an annual taxpayer-funded budget of nearly half-a-billion dollars.   Armed with enough raw computing power to process boundless amounts of information, this “NSA-North” is free to intercept and cultivate all metadata—essentially a record of who we know, and how well—coming through the country in order to map out our social networks, patterns of mobility, professional relationships, and even our personal interests.

“Security and police agencies have been increasingly conflating terrorism and extremism with peaceful citizens exercising their democratic rights to organise petitions, protest and question government policies,” said Dr. Jeffery Monaghan of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University. “Canada is at very low risk from foreign terrorists but like the U.S. it has built a large security apparatus following 9/11. The resources and costs are wildly out of proportion to the risk.”

“[Domestic issue-based] extremism,” maintains Canada’s Counter-terrorism Strategy, “tends to be based on grievances—real or perceived—revolving around the promotion of various causes such as animal rights, white supremacy, environmentalism and anti-capitalism.”

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It’s no secret that the province of Alberta, the government Canada, and the titans of the fossil fuel industry pride themselves on robust regulatory and oversight structures when it comes to the extraction of natural resources.

"Environmental protection is a priority for our government and Canada is a global environmental leader," said Canada’s Natural Resources Minister, Joe Oliver. "This is why Canada's oil sands are subject to some of the most stringent environmental regulations and monitoring in the world."

"The regulations that are in place are very stringent, the most stringent in North America and certainly around the world," added Alberta’s Minister of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development, Diana McQueen. "We have a lot of development in this province, but we also have very tough regulations with regards to any spills that happen."

"The system is working," continued Alberta Energy Regulator CEO Jim Ellis. "We have the resources we need now to properly regulate it. And that includes compliance, on the ground inspections, regulations… They are capably handling the workload right now."

"It was extremely frustrating. I just reached a point where I was so frustrated I said, 'I'm going to do whatever it takes to extract this information' because I just felt wronged by the whole process," said Timoney. "It just seems like it’s a process that’s designed not to release information but rather to appear to release information."

"When you've looked at thousands of these records, what we're seeing is the tip of the iceberg," added Timoney. "It was evident that there were thousands of incidents the public didn't know anything about."

"Not every incident is going to result in a compliance action," responded Alberta Environment spokesperson Jessica Potter when asked about such a low rate of enforcement. "The determination as to whether or not we move forward with an enforcement action entirely depends on what we find in that investigation."

In short, as both Timoney and the study are at pains to point out, the governments of Alberta and Canada are "absolutely not" doing enough to enforce regulations. "There is this disconnect between the statement from the government that we have these great regulations and we’re strictly enforcing them, and the reality, which is that there are thousands of violations about which they do nothing."

"I feel very strongly that the public has a right to know what’s happening," concluded Timoney. "In this situation, what we’re trying to do is say, 'Decide for yourself. Here’s the information that we gathered. If you wish to decide that environmental management in the bitumen sands region is good or bad, here's a set of information that you can look at to decide for yourself.'"

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Big Industry has committed some of the most atrocious crimes against the environment in Canada and around the world with little fear of reprisal. This is Part Two of a two–part series highlighting some small and large-scale instances of industrial–environmental greenwashing and misdirection in an attempt to better hold conglomerates accountable to the Canadian public. The Industrial Bait and Pollute   Like an environmental fairy tale, it has been thrust into our consciousness for more than a generation — carpool, recycle, take shorter showers, unplug electronics, and shop green, we’ve all got a part to play in conserving the planet for future generations.   The Citizen’s Guide to Pollution Prevention — a report from the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy published in collaboration with the federal government, is a perfect example of this institutionalised emphasis on the role individuals are to play if the devastating effects of climate change are to be mediated.

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The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Big Industry has committed some of the most atrocious crimes against the environment in Canada and around the world with little fear of reprisal. This is Part One of a two–part series highlighting some small and large-scale instances of industrial–environmental greenwashing and misdirection in an attempt to better hold conglomerates accountable to the Canadian public. Read Part 2 here. Greenwashing the Canadian Consumer   The deplorable act of greenwashing — constructing the misleading perception that a company’s policies, practices, products, or services are environmentally responsible and sustainable, is becoming common practice amongst titans of industry in Canada.   It should come as little shock to acute Canadians that fossil fuels and the tar sands — more genially referred to as the “oil sands” by energy multinationals and the Harper Government, are being linguistically and rhetorically greenwashed — my colleague Jeff Gailus has an insightful three-part series exploring this very issue.

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“A wish list of the 1%, a worldwide corporate power grab of enormous proportions,” “undemocratic and patently unfair,” “the biggest global threat to the Internet.”

These are just a few of the disconcerting phrases legal experts and digital rights advocates are employing to describe the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — a highly secretive, contentious, and perpetually undemocratic multinational trade agreement currently being negotiated between 600-plus industry advisors and unelected trade representatives on behalf of 11 different national governments including Canada.   While the devious, closed-room nature of the discussions have made it difficult to determine how exactly the TPP will infringe on freedoms of speech, rights to privacy, and peoples’ abilities to innovate on the Internet, a leaked draft from February of 2011 reveals that concerned citizens have every reason to be alarmed by the many copyright enforcement provisions buried deep within this trade deal.

    As the above introductory video emphasises, what we do know for certain is this — thanks largely to relentless lobbying on the part of multinational telecom giants, the TPP endeavours to turn the Internet into a highly regulated and increasingly scrutinised digital environment through the reconfiguring of international rules concerning the enforcement of intellectual property (IP) laws in a way that favours profit-focused private interests and state-focused surveillance over public and shared information.   If established — ratification is scheduled for October of this year — the TPP will effectively create what amounts to a secretive and criminalising “Internet Trap” that will challenge digital freedom as we know it in 4 particularly distressing ways.   First, the TPP will dramatically regulate the sharing of digital content on social and search platforms by prohibiting the use of temporary copies — files automatically copied by computers into their random access memory (RAM). According to experts at InternetNZ, these temporary copies are critical for the routine operation of social media platforms because they allow videos to be smoothly buffered in memory, browser cache files to be stored on servers to speed up the loading of websites, and copies of visited pages to be stored in a temporary Internet files folder on your hard drive.   Second, the TPP will eradicate privacy safeguards by requiring all Internet service providers (ISPs) to systematically filter, collect, and surrender customer information to government monitors and corporate regulators upon request — eradicating any remaining vestiges of the online anonymity that once protected digital interactions.   Third, the TPP will allow media conglomerates to circumvent national legal systems by unilaterally fining users, removing undesirable content, deleting entire websites, and terminating Internet access under the guise of vague and inauspicious “three-strikes” mechanisms which would heavily favour media firms over individual users.   Fourth, the TPP will force all signatories to harmonise their domestic policies and laws with the restrictive US-directed provisions of the agreement. This means all parties would have to abandon any efforts to learn from the mistakes of notoriously stifling US copyright laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and instead adopt even the most controversial aspects of US legislation in their entirety.   In Canada alone, the forceful adaptation of coercive US-based TPP regulations would mean a ban on unlocking private digital devices such as mobile phones, 20-year increases to posthumous patents for written and recorded works, the criminalising of all petty copyright infringement for non-profit, non-commercial and educational purposes, the disclosure of personal information without privacy safeguards, and harsher criminal penalties for instances of non-compliance on takedown orders.   In short, the TPP in Canada would make already repressive and controversial domestic copyright legislations such as Bill C-11 seem light-hearted in comparison.   What’s more, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) — one of the principle architects of the TPP’s authoritarian IP chapter, has recently released a report directly criticising Canada for its data security policies. Arguing that the government’s strategy of protecting private data from being subjected to often-invasive surveillance and retention regimes offshore puts our economy at risk of being “left behind” in today’s private-interest-first, public-interest-second system.   If only we could be so lucky.   Perhaps even more disturbing than the TPP’s relentless pressure to conform relatively lenient Canadian IP standards to exploitative and manipulative US-inspired policies — contradicting nearly every principle on which the Internet was founded — is the fact that the negotiations are being completed by unelected trade representatives in utter secrecy without any public or journalistic consultation.   And make no mistake — this closed-door approach is a dangerous new trend. Before 2006, most international IP negotiations were conducted through a multilateral process that publicised all proposals and let NGOs, intellectuals, and public interest groups weigh in. But due to high-profile defeats like Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and increased public outcry, the emphasis has shifted to clandestine bi-lateral talks in the hopes that confidentiality will deter concerned citizens from asking questions.   Ironically, all this confidentiality only serves to further highlight the fact that all parties involved know just how much public recoil they would face if the TPP’s policies — which put at risk some of the most fundamental rights that enable access to knowledge for the world’s citizens — were to be exposed before they are finalised.   Even though concerned citizens, public interest groups, academics, and NGOs alike are forbidden from taking part in a process that will drastically restrict the way Canadians — and millions of other peoples — access, share, and communicate online, the very Internet that the TPP seeks to regulate is a powerful tool to fight back with.   So email, post, call, or tweet at your MP or local media outlet voicing your discontent regarding the TPP’s Internet-muzzling vision, sign OpenMedia.ca’s “Stop the Trap” petition currently being circulated to key government leaders and corporate trade representatives on Parliament Hill, and most of all, talk openly about the TPP.   Talk about it with your family, your friends, your co-workers, and with strangers in public spaces on and off the Web. By confronting secrecy with awareness we can shift the TPP into the public square and restore accountability to Internet policies.   Image Credit: Wonderlane/Flickr

 

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“The Tragedy of the Commons” is like a desolate nursery rhyme, dogmatic economic fallacy, and apathetic environmental apology all bounded into one twisted fable. Titans of industry and government policymakers alike have invoked its “insights” as vindication for a whole laundry list of derogatory actions. In Canada alone, the commons myth has been employed to rationalise everything from granting private enterprises purchasable “permits” to pollute our precious air and water supplies, to invalidating Indigenous land claims and privatising even the most basic of social services.   Originating from an infamous 1968 essay by American ecologist Dr. Garrett Hardin in the prestigious journal Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons” has been quoted or cited in hundreds of books and thousands of articles, making the seminal work a “dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues.” In essence, Hardin’s thesis can be stripped down to a singular notion — the pursuit of self-interest in an open-access commons leads to ruin. Thus while people know that depleting a common resource can hinder societal wellbeing, without controls on access and use of the underlying resource, a tragedy of the commons is inescapable.  

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