Collective alienation arises when individually rational actions sum to negative outcomes.

Evidence

Sartre’s examples of this process are the deforestation of China and the inflation which took place in Renaissance Europe as a result of the influx of Spanish gold from the New World. In both cases, a host of individually positive actions (each peasant removes trees from his own land in order to make it cultivable; each conquistador enriches himself personally, encouraged in that by the state itself) add up to a negative sum: with the trees gone, the Chinese landscape enters its classic rhythm of devastating floods; and Spanish currency depreciates at a pace terrifying to contemporaries. The basic experience of this kind of alienation for Sartre himself seems to have been the outbreak of World War II, in which a million freedoms seemed to cancel each other out in total helplessness. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 497

Categorization

• XREF: This is hard to read without thinking of Garrett Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’ and contemporary discussion of collective action problems / externalities — the modern economic formalization of the same alienation Sartre describes. — connects to: Interdependent individual actions produce collective outcomes no one deliberately chose — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 817; Rational individual self-interest can cumulatively destroy shared collective resources.; Individual rational self-interest can systematically produce collective disaster. (+2 more)
• SHARE: The deforestation-of-China and Spanish-gold-inflation paired examples, both being negative-sum outcomes of individually positive acts, would land with a friend into ecological economics or historical materialism.

Broader Connections

• Individual rational self-interest can systematically produce collective disaster. #corroborates (0.93)
• Rational individual self-interest can cumulatively destroy shared collective resources. #exemplifies (0.92)
• Protracted collective disaster can result from an excess of individual rationality. #corroborates (0.90) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2093
• Interdependent individual actions produce collective outcomes no one deliberately chose #corroborates (0.88) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 817
• Social outcomes depend on joint causation, making individualist rule-following wrong for policy #expands (0.82)