Tyranny of small decisions

Waqt karta hey parwarish barson

Haadisa aik dam nahi hota

 

In my area, 'Dollar Shops' are a growing business. What's their way of trade? At the shop, the price of each commodity is equal to the market value of a dollar, which fluctuates between two and three hundred rupees. The commodities are household goods and stationery. Each item is priced at its perceived worth. However, the value of some is even more than the price. In effect, the buyers are trapped. They buy many items focusing on the price of a single item. But at the bill counter, the cumulative effect shocks them – the 'tyranny of small decisions'. The smallness of individual transactions encourages irrational consumer choice based on reckless instant decision-making.

As a child, I liked travelling by train, not by choice but because of sickness with travelling by bus or van. I remember how the ticketless passengers avoided the ticket checker. Some played possum, some left the seat and moved on to other cabins, and some excused themselves for being ticketless because they had to catch up to the train. Every passenger must have been indifferent about the harmful impact a small act of not buying the ticket would cause to such a big train carrying hundreds of passengers. I used to think about how the fuel cost of such a large train would be met. And now, my children don't know anything about trains and the railway station.

The concept 'tyranny of small decisions' was first discussed in an essay of the same name in 1966 by an American economist Alfred E Kahn. It is a situation where apparently small things are done with the thinking that individually they don't make a big difference, but cumulatively they cause irrevocable damage. By nature, man is more inclined to focus on immediate comfort than distant consequences. This tendency is also called 'present bias' – a predisposition to favour the present moment, with little regard for what follows. The laxity that triggers instantaneous decisions results from cognitive myopia.

In a parable of his Gulistan, Sheikh Saadi relates that once at a banquet for Nushirvan, the King of Persia, a deer was being roasted that salt was found missing in the spices. A slave was hurried to a nearby market to fetch the salt. When the slave brought the salt, the king asked him if he had paid for it. The slave replied in the negative as he deemed it a trifling trade vis-à-vis the king's royalty and grandeur. The king ordered the slave to pay for the salt lest it should become a custom. "The foundation of oppression in the beginning was small in the world," said the king.

We don't want to think how our actions will contribute to the common good or collective harm. Our gradual decline – moral, social or national – is a continuum of psychological adaptability to worsening circumstances. What once pricked our conscience starts appearing normal after repeated compromises. Populist politics hypnotise people to make small instant decisions. The public also makes electoral decisions based on parochial and vested interests. It's to sell one's soul for a mess of pottage. Where we have reached so far is the best manifest of the 'tyranny of small decisions'. Decline often slithers quietly like a serpent because each one-off acquiescence to temptation and compromise appears harmless.

However, the habit of making micro-decisions can be wielded as a constructive strategy. Constructive habits can be formed on the pattern of destructive incrementalism. Excellence is more the result of disciplined consistency rather than sudden inspiration. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, argues for the role of habit in conduct: "Virtue is formed through habit." We are what we do daily.

The incremental approach towards book reading, health care or character building is instrumental when the enormity of the task dampens one's spirits and when consistency is marred by frequent temperamental bursts – the warning signs of lack of grit. When choices are made to avoid the pain caused by the failure to face the long bumpy journey towards a destination with far-reaching benefits, they are destructively near-sighted. To pursue the immediate tempts one to make a Faustian bargain, which focuses on the present gain and ignores the long-term consequences.