Musings Report 2022-8  2-19-22  Does Cooperation and Altruism Beat Greed and Selfishness?

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Does Cooperation and Altruism Beat Greed and Selfishness?

As longtime readers know, I think that looking at the structures of human life as systems generates more insights than looking at things through the lens of ideology.

My recent work applies the power of selection to the economy and society: what gets optimized by incentives and processes, how these optimizations generate extremes which become fragile and unstable, and how these instabilities pile up and lead to collapse.

The word Darwinism generates mixed emotions, but the core of Charles Darwin's insight (and and that of Alfred Russel Wallace, who crystalized the process of natural selection at the same time as Darwin) is that nature operates by selective pressure: whatever genetic adaptations aid the species' survival eventually become part of the species' core genetic inheritance.

The three ingredients of this process of natural selection are variation, selection, and replication: mutations generate a palette of variations of which the most beneficial are selected and then replicated by offspring.

These principles apply not just to genetic modifications but to other inheritance mechanisms, including epigenetics (changes in gene expression rather than gene frequency) and cultural behaviors and knowledge.

Which brings us to cooperation and altruism and greed and selfishness. As this essay outlines, human societies reflect an interesting dual dynamic: Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. 

Individual selfishness in groups is called the Free-rider Problem: the individual who slacks off and mooches off the group (via avoidance of contributing, theft, scamming, etc.) is free-riding, contributing little but taking a lot. This benefits the individual at the expense of the group.

In small hunter-gatherer groups, free-riders can be kicked out of the group for a time as a corrective mechanism.  Cooperation is humanity's core survival advantage, as individuals on their own have much lower odds of surviving than do groups of humans who aid each other.

One result of this selective advantage is cooperative, altruistic groups will outcompete groups composed of bullies, free-riders and the self-serving, as these groups of selfish individuals cannot match the selective advantages generated by unified effort that benefits the group and its members.

I discuss these dynamics in my new book Global Crisis, National Renewal.

In effect, financialization--the manipulation of credit, leverage and abstract financial instruments--has optimized greed and selfishness, as those who gain control of the largest sums of money have the power to bully (impose systems that benefit them rather than everyone) everyone else.

While globalization is promoted as beneficial to all participants, the reality is the vast majority of the financial gains have flowed to the few at the top at the expense of the many.

These dynamics have generated a very wide gulf between the haves and the have-nots, with the consequence of higher stress and debilitated health for the have-nots.

These negative consequences of hierarchies have been documented by Robert Sapolsky and others: Dr. Robert Sapolsky - Hierarchy Is Bad for Your Health (9 min)

So how do cooperative, altruistic groups gain ground in a hierarchy dominated by a aggressively selfish, greedy few?

One way is for the selfish, greedy few to die, leaving room for a more socially beneficial dynamic to arise. (Watch the video above to see how this worked in baboon troops.)

Another way is for larger structures to evolve to favor cooperative, altruistic groups over self-serving, selfish, socially toxic groups.

To understand this dynamic, we have to understand two subtle characteristics of natural selection.

1) Variation, selection, and replication at the largest scale, i.e. the forest of mixed species and individual trees rather than just groups of trees.

2) The toxic equilibrium of self-serving, selfish, socially toxic groups must be replaced by a new more expansive equilibrium which escapes the gravitational pull of these selfish, toxic groups.

One example of this is China's history in the 20th century. In broad brush, self-serving, toxic warlords generated localized zones of relative stability (equilibria) amidst the chaos.

The first attempt to evolve a larger structure that could establish a new equilibrium that favored cooperation altruism, Sun Yat-sen's republic, failed.

The second attempt, the Communist Party, succeeded, replacing the localized equilibria of warlords with a much larger scale equilibrium.

Another example is the way in which trees in a forest communicate and share resources via webs of micro-organisms, a system that has only recently been illuminated.  

The forest exerts a subtle selective pressure that benefits those trees that tie into this network, even trees of different species. 

"In 'Finding the Mother Tree,' Suzanne Simard recounts discovering forests' hidden networks.
 
I recently read Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, and was struck by the painstaking, lengthy collection of data required to discover these hidden networks.

Note that the first example, the CCP, established a larger scale equilibrium by crushing the warlords militarily and imposing a larger scale hierarchy.

The forest example exemplifies a self-organizing, non-hierarchical system establishing a large-scale, non-hierarchical equilibrium.

Between the two options, the self-organizing equilibrium has the advantage of dynamic equilibrium, a point I discuss in my new book.  The CCP retains the inherent instabilities of hierarchies, and scales those instabilities to the largest scale, the nation-state.

In terms of reducing the toxic economic, political and social power of financial elites, reducing financialization and globalization is the key to evolving larger, more sustainable, cooperative and altruistic structures of equilibrium.

Rather than eradicate individuals, we need to eradicate the systems of exploitation that enabled the rise of toxic, self-serving groups: financialization and globalization.

Many believe this is impossible. But viewed as systems, these exploitive structures are inherently unstable, essentially optimized to "run to failure."

Up to the moment they destabilize and collapse, they appear immutable and forever. But as each system reaches extremes, the inherent instability increases, and what's optimized ends up eating its own tail. 


Highlights of the Blog 

The Winter of Our Discontent: Hubris Is Ascendent  2/18/22

Juggling Sticks of Dynamite: Our Fatally Distorted Sense of Risk  2/16/22

Let's Talk "Fed Policy Error," Pushers and Addiction  2/14/22


Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week 

We made 49 lau-laus and gave away most of them as reciprocity for gifts of food we'd received. It's a major project that draws heavily on our productive yard: we harvested almost 200 taro leaves and about 100 ti leaves (to wrap the lau-laus).

These photos illustrate some of the many steps in the process, from harvesting, cleaning, preparing, assembling, pressure-cooking, etc. #1: one of our five taro patches: these are the leaves which are wrapped around the meat/fish:



The leaves are washed and wrapped around the filling:


The folded lau-lau is then wrapped in ti leaves, which have to be destemmed; once tied with twine, these leaves hold the lau-lau together as it is pressure-cooked.


The dozens of assembled lau-laus are set aside to be cooked:


The lau-laus are carefully placed in pressure cookers and cooked for about 1.5 hours.


From Left Field

NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.

Sunlight: Optimize Health and Immunity (Light Therapy and Melatonin) (1:56 hrs, via John F.)

The Forecast Project (Tim Morgan) -- explains the dynamic of energy, GDP, disposable income and the future: either degrowth or collapse.

It’s About Time to Think About Saving Your Own Skin

What makes the people of the south of every country poor? An Unexpected Hypothesis

E.O. Wilson Saw the World in a Wholly New Way

Metaverse: Augmented reality pioneer warns it could be far worse than social media

Simon Michaux on limits to growth

Michel Houellebecq : "It is with good feelings that we make good literature" -- select "English" in the Google Translate box...

A Case Study of Fossil-Fuel Depletion-- this is exhaustive and important, impossible to deny or refute with data...

A tech insider skewers the metaverse, Web3's utopian 'propaganda'

Rabobank Warns Coffee Prices May 'Soar Out Of Control' As Stockpiles Plunge

How we Became What we Despised. Turning the West into a New Soviet Union

"You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me." Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Thanks for reading--
 
charles