Individual serial actions intensify the collective catastrophe they aim to prevent.

Evidence

Indeed, it is important to stress the way in which, in a serial situation, the actions of individuals only serve to intensify their serial helplessness, and, inasmuch as such action is other in its very origin, return against them as an alien force. Think of the man who at the onset of an inflationary spiral begins to hoard his gold: what he is afraid of, in other words, is that thousands of other people in identical situations will in exactly the same way refuse to surrender gold for paper, causing the paper to become worthless. He is thus an other to himself to the very degree that he causes that which he fears in the future, that he himself does what he apprehends from other people. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 499

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense account of how self-fulfilling prophecy operates inside Sartre’s seriality — the agent fears a future he himself produces by his own defensive act, a genuinely dialectical reversal that resists one-sentence summary.
• XREF: This anticipates Jameson’s own account, in Postmodernism, of how financial speculation and commodification work as self-reinforcing serial logics — and echoes the hoarding dynamic against which Keynesian theory is aimed. — connects to: Protracted collective disaster can result from an excess of individual rationality. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2093; Individual rational self-interest can systematically produce collective disaster.; Rational individual self-interest can cumulatively destroy shared collective resources. (+2 more)
• ADDENDUM: Connects to ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ insofar as both deal with how individual acts driven by fear aggregate into alien collective outcomes.

Broader Connections

• Individual rational self-interest can systematically produce collective disaster. #corroborates (0.95)
• Protracted collective disaster can result from an excess of individual rationality. #corroborates (0.92) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2093
• Rational individual self-interest can cumulatively destroy shared collective resources. #corroborates (0.85)
• Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction #exemplifies (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 349
• Interdependent individual actions produce collective outcomes no one deliberately chose #expands (0.78) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 817