Mutual or collective self-interest is even harder to figure.

Mutual or collective self-interest is even harder to figure.
Determining our self-interest gets all the more complicated when we have to take into account all the people around us, what they want and how they will respond to our own needs. I touched on game theory above. There are plenty more excellent or silly studies of groups and organizations, so here I'll just mention a couple items related to self-interest.

First, it's very hard to keep even two people on the same page for any length of time. Any group effort takes place on the basis of shared interests, but each of us bring our own bundle of interests to the group, and the area of overlap may be relatively small and temporary. That's why we invest a lot in rituals to remind us of common goals: I Pledge Allegiance. The trouble is, our rituals may stress the lowest common denominator interests, that is to say, the ones we share but that are not necessarily any group's top priority. Think about the very great variety of interests that converge to bring people to war. Some folks can make a profit, some see it as a good career move, some want to make their moms proud, others see no other way to act on their fear. The woman soldier famously captured by Iraqis in the oil war of 1991 said she saw the military as a way out of her small town life.

Halliburton had to knit these disparate interests together with slogans that sound grand but have no meaning: Shock and Awe, Operation Freedom, Desert Storm and the like. And as the failures mount, wars undergo a sort of goals inflation. As the chance of achieving the original hodgepodge of objectives recedes farther and farther into the wild blue yonder, the holy warriors have to set ever more exalted and absurd goals to keep their cannon fodder flowing, to keep from having to take responsibility for failure. Thus we get, for example, Democracy in the Middle East, or America's Energy Future, or any variety of seemingly all-or-nothing demands. As the fellow said about Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, "I can't believe that we can't have a ceasefire because it's not in our political interest. It just goes to show how messed up our interests are" (Paul Birney, 7-30-06).

In any case, war or no, even rituals that might once have had a meaning get distorted over time, as elites jockey to control them, and the goal of the common good morphs into obedience to the powerful.

Similarly, organizations --groups with rules and roles-- begin to diverge from their original goals, not that organizations are alive or could have interests above those of the members, but because the individual members have varying stakes in the survival and direction of the organization, and interact to produce outcomes no one planned.

Groups also face the "free rider" problem. Systems in which we share resources --welfare, health care, water, energy, farm subsidies, consumer credit, college scholarships, usw.-- can work well if every individual takes his or her fair share, however that gets defined. But why shouldn't each of us grab for more? It's in my best interest that everyone else follow the rules, so I can get away with stealing a little bit extra. For instance, I try to pile up savings in my retirement fund, but the whole strategy depends on everyone else spending like crazy, to keep up the value of my assetts; in this case the rule is hyperconsumption.

Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" (1968) was a compelling expression of this dilemma. Heylighen uses the example of air pollution:

suppose you want to buy a new car, and you have the choice between a normal model, and a model with a catalyser, that strongly reduces the poisonous substances in the exhaust. The model with catalyser is definitely more expensive, but the advantage for you is minimal since the pollution from your exhaust is diffused in the air and you yourself will never be able to distinguish any effect on your health of pollution coming from your own car. Rational or optimizing decision-making from your part would lead you to buy the car without catalyser. However, if everybody would make that choice, the total amount of pollution produced would have an effect on everybody's health, including your own, that will be very serious, and certainly worthy the relatively small investment of buying a catalyser.

That’s exactly where the libertarian excuse falls apart. Forget environmental controls. Freedom means I can waste and dump as much as I want, whenever I want. If you’re so big on clean air and water, hug trees on your own time. Forget taxes-- I’ll support whatever charities I feel like, I don’t need the government (that is, you and you and you) to tell me what’s a worthy cause. But some problems can’t be tackled one person at a time. On some issues, everyone has to help, or no one does. That’s why we have organizations. That’s why we have governments.

Using systems for purposes for which they weren’t designed can raise similar issues, as when social safety nets encourage some people to indulge in very risky behavior, from stunt sports to reckless lending practices to building in floodplains, confident that the rest of us will bail them out or stitch them back together. Such abuses undercut these programs’ ability to carry out their original goals. Though within corporations and community groups we are somewhat accountable for how we use resources, we haven’t figured out how to extend that accountability to much bigger systems.

Or how about the 14th Amendment? Passed after the Civil War to guarantee all citizens equal protection under the law, it quickly morphed into the license for corporations to assume all the privileges and few of the responsibilities of citizenship, while being gutted of its original purpose by a Supreme Court intent on upholding the system of racist Jim Crow laws (Hammerstrom).

Systems that cope well with the normal range of conditions can usually carry some free riders without damage. In fact, any totally fraud-proof system would be prohibitively expensive, not to mention totalitarian. But under competitive capitalism, free riders become lethal parasites, because there are no limits to how much they can devour, and capitalism penalizes more responsible players. Think about the succession of bank crises since the 1980s. The banks that flourished at first by taking ever increasing risks, were depending on the strength of the system as a whole; but soon drew the big money away from safer institutions, until no one could afford to play by the rules and the whole structure was shot full of holes. Professors praise capitalist “innovation,” but very often that means no more than new ways to seize common resources for private gain, including the safety nets we put together at great cost after every crisis.

Finally, let me mention another type of free rider: those who owe their privilege to both the generations who struggled for democracy and justice, and to the consequent burgeoning market for right-wing saboteurs. We could find good examples among any group. Here’s one Henry mentions (p. 181):

So why are these [professional] women not more distraught, and more willing to fight? The real estate manager summarized their thinking.

When somebody asks me something like that, I go back to my old standby: I’ll fight for something when it suits my purpose. Right now, everything is copacetic. But if anybody crosses me, crosses a barrier, and says, ‘No, you can’t have an abortion,’ or ‘No, you can’t have as big a raise as this person because [he’s] a man, you’re single, he’s got a family to support’ --then watch out, because everything that goes against my grain, I’m going to fight . . . . As [another group member] said, we have our cake and eat it, too, that’s probably how we all operate, or most of us.

So that’s it: She is doing all right. Her battles are won. She is producing an income far beyond her early dreams. She has taken advantage of every opening the women’s movement has made possible, so what more do you want from her? Don’t even think about crossing her, or you’ll have a high noon shootout. But confrontation about the abstract concept of women’s equality is unnecessary and counterproductive --who goes around looking for trouble?

Cheating is in our individual self-interest where systems are freest and most productive (because it's easier to get away with cheating) and also in the harshest circumstances (when the political economy has broken down, and you can't survive just by following the old rules). We depend on a mix of education and coercion --ritual, gossip, retaliatory arson, calling the cops are a few of our tools-- to limit the amount of cheating and keep us focussed on the fact that, in the long run, more people gain more from cooperation.

It's true that the world has suffered long stretches of chaotic violence that no one, including the spit-and-polish guys in their air-conditioned video-game Command & Control centers and the sweaty face-mask set posing with with their semi-automatic penises over terrified captives, seems able to stop. I think of Beirut, Central Africa, Haiti . . . and also the centuries of religious war in Europe and today's drug wars in U.S. cities. But we know that even the genocidal ethnic and sectarian wars, though they may spiral out of the control of the politicians who start them, began as carefully considered campaigns for quite mundane economic and political ends.

Where governments are strong enough to kill off democratic movements and institutions but too weak to govern, we see gangster politicians encouraging violence for their own ends. Very often they lose control of it to bolder entrepreneurs. We’ve seen how quickly jihadists turn from attacking outsiders to killing their own neighbors. When murder is your main credential, it’s much cheaper to blow up children than to shoot at well-armed troops. Parts of the Sadrist movement in Iraq quickly dissolved into loose networks of freelance kidnappers and death squads. In Palestine Al-Fatah lost authority to Hamas and Hamas lost control of some affiliates. The wars in central Africa feature a succession of warlords and massacres. Here at home Halliburton's racist base lost focus on perpetuating a highly profitable war against Muslims, and were instead diverted and dispersed into unprofitable campaigns against local immigrants.

So while it’s in the gangsters’ middle-run interest to apply violence, it’s also in their interest to have a somewhat but not completely corrupt regime to buy into; that is, some authority weak enough to partner with killers, but strong enough to impose some kind of stability. These goals are hard to reconcile. Despite the long-term benefits of cooperation, therefore, sometimes the structures of cooperation have been so battered it takes years or generations, and many many lost lives, to rebuild them.

To our sorrow, cooperation and competition can co-exist very well. Corporations and armies are perfect examples of highly cooperative organizations established to parasitize subordinates and outsiders. We can see very easily that cooperation needn’t mean democracy. There are plenty of coerced cooperations. I’ll cooperate all day long if you point a gun at my head.