A wink of karma

Despite its standing popularity among the most economically conservative, no modern day economists would be hard-pressed to admit that Adam Smith's concept of the Invisible Hand (presented in his 1759 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments) has now joined the ranks of the elegant ideas that lack any direct applicability to real life. First of all, history has taught us that there are simply too many ways in which an individual acting in self-interest can cause enduring damage to the society. Then the concept does not provide an acceptable response to key economic problems such as the Tragedy of the Commons (what is everybody's is nobody's and therefore prone to over-exploitation) or the Nash Equilibrium (where self-interest leads to bad outcomes). The consequence of these shortcomings is that an absolutely libertarian approach to economy is bound to cause major disruptions or even the collapse of the society, and therefore the society itself has to regulate the freedoms to avoid abuses in the name of self-interest that might be pernicious to all.

However, the reciprocal is in fact correct: it is possible that an action in the interest of society ends up being beneficial to the actor, not just but the general improvement of the society, but also in a more direct way. This is what many Indian religions understand as karma: good intentions and the actions they lead to have a positive influence in your karma and lead to happier rebirths, while bad intentions and actions have a negative influence and worse rebirths. I have mentioned several times that I am a fervent atheist, and do not follow any religious traditions, but I believe in statistics, so I would be ready to re-formulate the principle of karma in probabilistic terms: if someone is repeatedly engaged in pro-social behavior their chances of finding someone ready to help them in a time of need increase dramatically; conversely, if someone lead a turbulent life, taking advantage of everyone around them, it is likely that will eventually find themselves in a situation they cannot deal with (commonly know as "life catches up with them"). This morning I collected an unexpected reward for an absolutely selflessly intended action.

Photo: piqsels.com

The day I decided to start this blog almost one year ago I set for myself the rule that every post should be illustrated with a matching image, regardless of how remote the connection was. Being as it is an absolutely non-profit endeavor and with the clear intent to respect copyright laws to the best of my limited legal knowledge, I also decided to use exclusively images released under a Creative Commons license. These licenses cover four aspects regarding the attribution of the work (BY), sharing of the new work (SA), commercial use (NC) and creation of derivatives (ND). Concerning authorship, I planned to mention the original author of the photos, so besides public domain images (CC0 - No attribution) I could also use the ones under CC-BY license just by citing the author. I also never intended to make any money out of this blog so images for non-commercial use (CC-NC) were also adequate for it. Finally, I did not want to spend even more time modifying the images, so non-derivative licenses (CC-ND) were also acceptable. In the end it turned out that could use even the most restrictive of the creating commons licenses (BY-SA-NC-ND), which gave me a lot of images to pick from, but also required investing some time looking for a suitable image.

Beside several sites who provide incredible amounts of stock-like public-domain images, one recurrent source of interesting images has been Flickr, a photo sharing service which offers the possibility of publishing your work under diverse CC licenses. For months I have been regularly browsing their content and occasionally selecting one of the images for the blog, and I have always scrupulously linked back to the original picture so that the readers of the blog could easily find the original author. Then about a month ago I realized that, in the comments section under one of the images that I had chosen, another user had put a link to their blog so as to let the author know that their image had been used and where. Thinking about it I realized that this notification was probably more rewarding for the author than the link back from the blog: the fact that someone had chosen their photograph to publish it in a blog (regardless, like this one, of how little readership it has) was an unarguable recognition of their work, so I went back through all the posts that included Flickr images and added a comment with a link to the post where the image had been included. It was a bit of work for me, but I understood it as matter of justice, a random act of kindness, so I decided to go through with it. And here is where the karma comes into play.

By the time I started notifying the authors of the photographs I stood at roughly 200 posts with a little over 100 visits. Yes, it is sad that, even in the best possible scenario, at least half of the posts had not been read even a single time, but on the other hand it is also true that I never set up to work up a huge readership. The important part for me was to have a place to write, not pestering my family and friends to invite (a.k.a. coerce) them to visit my blog. It turns out that, since I publish links to my blog under the photographs I use I have received close to another 100 visits in just a month. The grand total now amounts to an average of one visit per post, which is still pathetic but only half as pathetic as it was just one month ago.

It is not like I have hopes of this blog becoming hugely popular, but it is always heartwarming to know that it gets visited every now and then. Several photographs have thanked me for the notification and even a couple of them praised the blog with adjectives such as "thoughtful" and "well-written". I guess this is a little wink of my karma, that is thanking me for being appreciative of everybody else's work. I hope not to let it down. Have a nice evening.