Small tyrannies

A couple of days ago, this phrase popped into my head: “small tyrannies.” I was trying to name this idea, the tyranny of small things. I can’t remember where I first came across it. I vaguely recall reading something along these lines in a Substack post. But anyway, it came up in a conversation with a friend.

We were talking about how small acts of ignorance or stupidity ripple outward and create bigger issues. And we ended up in the most obvious place: Indian traffic.

When I was younger, I used to do dumb things: riding on the footpath, going the wrong way down a one-way, stuff like that. I stopped for a simple reason: it only takes one person doing something stupid to give permission to 500 others to do the same thing.

If I drive the wrong way, I’m not just “saving time.” I’m handing someone else a reason to do it too. And before you know it, what was supposed to be a one-way street becomes a two-way street. The situation gets worse for everyone.

And that’s the core of it: these acts of small tyranny can be individually rational. They make sense at an individual level because you get from point A to point B a little faster. But collectively, they make everything worse. A disaster built out of tiny, “reasonable” decisions.

We don’t think about these small tyrannies enough. Me included. But in a country like India, in a massive country where some states are bigger than entire nations, I sometimes feel like a lot of our problems are just the accumulated outcome of these small tyrannies.

We don’t give a shit about traffic rules. We don’t care when roads are dug up endlessly, widened without thought, with no space left for pedestrians. We don’t care when one or two trees are cut down, and then one day you look around and it’s miles of concrete with barely a tree in sight. A man can spit right in front of you while you’re having coffee outside a hotel, and nobody reacts. People honk at signals when it’s clearly a red light, as if their horn might trigger some quantum mechanical reaction and turn the light green.

That’s what it feels like: we’re living under the crushing burden of the collective tyranny of a million small decisions.

And maybe the biggest manifestation of this small tyranny is apathy.

I could be wrong, but my default theory is that a big part of humanity’s problems can be explained by apathy or indifference. We’ve lost the ability to give a shit about a lot of things. We’ve lost the ability to care. And in many cases, we just let things slide.

Why?

Maybe it’s because we’ve become nihilistic. Or cynical. Or skeptical that anything can change. Maybe we’ve given up hope that individual action matters. Or given up hope itself.

Or maybe it’s something else: because of the internet, social media, and 24/7 news, we’re forced to spend our limited emotional budgets on tragedies and causes thousands of miles away. We’re exhausted from having to process everything all the time. And when you’re exhausted long enough, apathy starts to smell like relief.

But to me, apathy has become rank. You can smell it everywhere, especially in countries like India.

And so the problems that directly shape our quality of life, the quality of the air, the water, the neighborhood, the public spaces we inhabit, so much of it is the accumulated outcome of a million little tyrannies that all seemed individually rational, but collectively became a disaster.

I don’t know about other people, but I’ve stopped. Or at least I’ve started being mindful about the small acts of tyranny I commit. I’m not always good at it. I’m not always mindful. But I’m trying to be a little more conscious of the things I do.

There’s always a debate about what an individual can do. But I think small acts by individuals can have bigger ripple effects than most people realize. It reminds me of something Tolstoy wrote: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

I think that’s true.