For civilization to hold together, we need to make coordinated steps away from Nash equilibria in lockstep. This requires general rules that are allowed to impose penalties on people we like or reward people we don’t like. When people stop believing the general rules are being evaluated sufficiently fairly, they go back to the Nash equilibrium and civilization falls.
Two similar ideas:
There is a group evolutionary advantage for a society to support punishing those who defect from the social contract.
We get the worst democracy that we’re willing to put up with. If you are not prepared to vote against ‘your own side’ when they bend the rules, that level of rule bending becomes the new norm. If you accept the excuse “the other side did it first”, then the system becomes unstable because there are various baises (both cognitive, and deliberately induced by external spin) that make people more harshly evaluate the transgressions of other, than they evaluate those of their own side.
This is one reason why a thriving civil society (organisations, whether charities or newspapers, minimally under or influenced by the state) promotes stability—because they provide a yardstick to measure how vital it is to electorally punish a particular transgression that is external to the political process.
A game of soccer in which referee decisions are taken by a vote of the players turns into a mob.
For civilization to hold together, we need to make coordinated steps away from Nash equilibria in lockstep. This requires general rules that are allowed to impose penalties on people we like or reward people we don’t like. When people stop believing the general rules are being evaluated sufficiently fairly, they go back to the Nash equilibrium and civilization falls.
Two similar ideas:
There is a group evolutionary advantage for a society to support punishing those who defect from the social contract.
We get the worst democracy that we’re willing to put up with. If you are not prepared to vote against ‘your own side’ when they bend the rules, that level of rule bending becomes the new norm. If you accept the excuse “the other side did it first”, then the system becomes unstable because there are various baises (both cognitive, and deliberately induced by external spin) that make people more harshly evaluate the transgressions of other, than they evaluate those of their own side.
This is one reason why a thriving civil society (organisations, whether charities or newspapers, minimally under or influenced by the state) promotes stability—because they provide a yardstick to measure how vital it is to electorally punish a particular transgression that is external to the political process.
A game of soccer in which referee decisions are taken by a vote of the players turns into a mob.