The Basic Social Problem

A few weeks ago, I was at an anarchist/Christmas-oriented event called “Santarchy” in Austin (from which I share a few photos here). Oddly, I was the only speaker who talked about anarchy. Here is some of what I talked about.

1. The Fundamental Social Problem

This is kind of obvious, but most people overlook the blindingly obvious when they think about politics, so I’ll say it anyway. The following is the biggest fundamental problem with society.

1. Humans are selfish.

   • We care vastly more about ourselves than about most other people. Maybe millions of times more. Typical humans, for example, would not spend $50 to save the life of a far-away stranger. (*Note: It actually costs much more than that to save lives via charity, but most people think it’s very cheap, yet they still don’t do it.)

   • Only around 1-3% of the population are actual psychopaths. But the difference between psychopaths and normal people is not that normal people are altruistic. It is that normal people form emotional bonds with specific others, especially family and friends. Also, they can somewhat empathize with strangers, but typically only people they see (hence the shortage of concern about world poverty), and this empathy is unreliable, often short-lived, and weak.

2. Some actions harm others but benefit the agent.

   • Sometimes the ratio of harm to benefit is extreme. The harm might be millions of times greater than the benefit. E.g., a criminal kills someone to steal the victim’s shoes.

3. Prediction from 1+2: There is going to be a lot of extremely net-harmful behavior.

Humans want to live together in a cooperative arrangement, but this problem threatens the viability of such cooperation. If we couldn’t solve this, we’d have to all live as hermits.

2. Solutions

Society exists, so we must have some solution. There are four solutions that I know of.

1. Individual Retaliation: When people do bad things, their victims or the victims’ families retaliate. This makes it no longer in the interests of people, most of the time, to do extremely harmful things.

2. The Fantasy Solution: Let’s just teach people to be nice. Also, if we’re nice to people, then they won’t do bad things.

3. Government: We have one organization that attaches costs to harmful behavior, making it no longer in people’s interests to do extremely harmful things.

4. Anarcho-Capitalism: Similar to #3, except that there are many competing organizations for imposing these costs.

Now, what sucks about the first three solutions?

3. Individual Retaliation

Almost no one likes this one, so we don’t need to say much about it. One problem is that often, criminals or criminal organizations would be able to get away with horrible behavior, because they would be better at violence than their victims. If you have to be good at retaliation in order to be safe or to keep your money, then a huge amount of resources are wasted on building up retaliation abilities. (But note that the advent of modern firearms greatly reduces this.)

Another problem is that you can get strings of mutual retaliation, where A retaliates against B for something, but B doesn’t think he did anything wrong, so B retaliates against A, then A against B again, and so on.

There is a related problem that people may be mistaken about what behavior calls for retaliation, because they are biased when they make judgments about their own situation.

4. The Fantasy Solution

Just treat people nicely and teach them to be nice when they’re kids. This sounds pretty silly, but my sense is that this is basically what anarcho-socialists think about how to prevent crime. They appear to think one of two things:

a. Human beings are naturally pro-social, but they get corrupted by society, especially capitalism and government. So if we eliminate government & capitalism, crime will mostly disappear. Or:

b. Human beings are naturally very malleable, so we can teach children to have whatever character and values we want. So we can just teach them to be pro-social.

Both of these are pretty naïve and foolish.

1. Again, around 1-3% of the population are actual psychopaths. These people are basically congenitally incapable of empathy, or moral emotions, or moral reasoning. It is basically impossible to fix this; telling them how great it is to be nice to people won’t work. They’ll just say, “Oh yes, I completely agree. I love helping people!”, then immediately murder you and grab your wallet as soon as your back is turned. These people just have to be in jail.

2. Anyway, even for normal people, selfishness is mostly natural and genetic. Why do I think this?

   1. Humans evolved by natural selection. Evolution predicts that traits should be selected that lead to maximizing one’s own reproductive success, even at the expense of other people.

   2. We see that kind of “selfishness” in the animal world too.

   3. Everyone knows that children are more selfish than adults. They’re born selfish, and it is society that teaches them to be a little less selfish, or at least to hide it better. (Note: This implies that society can modify and moderate people’s selfishness. Which is true, because the world is complex and people are influenced by multiple factors. But the thing is that we are already doing that, and we still have crime. Of course we are; we’re not idiots. There are limits to how much you can modify people’s responses to their natural impulses.)

   4. Anyway, you can obviously see people explicitly trying to teach kids to be less selfish, not more selfish. It’s kind of the opposite of what the socialists are saying. No parent ever punishes their kid for being too kind.

3. No one has empirically demonstrated the ability to teach people to be highly altruistic, as opposed to merely speculating that somehow this could be done. And by the way, just being nice to people won’t do that. In fact, being too nice to people will just encourage them to take advantage of you. The fundamental reason why we have crime isn’t that society mistreated the criminals or taught them to be criminals. The fundamental reason is as stated above: People are selfish, and crimes are mainly actions that have expected benefits to the agent but larger harms to others.

4. Of course, socialist societies are not devoid of selfishness. And I find the idea of “capitalism causing selfishness” pretty bizarre. Capitalism by and large rewards people for giving other people things that those others want; if anything, that trains people to be pro-social. It is socialism that makes people less pro-social by taking away the rewards for benefitting others.

But I’m sure you weren’t sympathetic to the anarcho-socialist fantasy solution to begin with, so let’s move on to a more popular solution …

5. Government

So we get one organization to identify “bad behavior” and then inflict serious costs on people who engage in said behavior. Then it’s no longer in people’s interests to behave badly.

But now, who is going to staff that organization and decide what it does? I don’t know exactly, but it’s probably going to be some people, since no one seems to have figured out how to get angels or golden retrievers to come down and rule over us. But people, as discussed above, are selfish. Which is why we had a problem in the first place. So … what would we expect the members of that organization to actually do?

The Fundamental Problem of Government is exactly parallel to the original problem of human society:

1. Government officials are selfish.

2. Some government actions harm other people but benefit government officials.

3. Prediction: There is going to be a lot of extremely net-harmful government behavior.

As with the original problem, the ratio of costs to benefits is sometimes extreme.

Example: A leader decides that it would somehow serve his interests if his nation were to go to war. (Which is hardly an outlandish scenario. War can help leaders hold onto power and gain more power.) So he starts a war. The war costs hundreds of thousands of people their lives, while the leader is just made slightly better off. Here, the ratio of costs to benefits is orders of magnitude worse than in the case of ordinary criminals.

Granted, there are far fewer government officials than ordinary people, and thus far fewer total occasions for government officials to profit by inflicting larger harms on others than there are for ordinary people. So the government solution can still come out ahead compared to having no solution to the original problem. But it’s still pretty crappy.

This is a pretty huge, glaring problem, so it’s kind of shocking how few people’s political ideology takes any apparent cognizance of it at all.

Fortunately, at least some people in history have thought about this problem, and they have developed some potential solutions to the fundamental problem of government:

1. Meta-Government: Establish a second-order government, to punish the first government if it behaves badly. There are some real-world things that are like this. E.g., police departments have “internal affairs” departments, which are the police who police the other police.

2. Separation of Powers: Divide the government into separate branches, which can compete with and check each other. If one part of government is abusing its powers, then other parts of the government can hold the bad one in check.

3. Constitution: Write down a list of things the government is and isn’t allowed to do. On that list, include some important rights that the government can’t violate.

4. Democracy: Have government officials selected by a vote of the public. If government officials behave badly, they’ll be voted out in the next election.

Each of these things creates some improvement. But you can probably guess that I don’t think they work very well – nowhere near as well as you would think from listening to a typical high school civics lesson. Next time (in 2 weeks): Why #1-4 are crappy solutions.