Yeah, this sounds much more like the kind of thing that I’d expect to be the cause, as opposed to mutual theft being somehow a beneficial/adaptive response to poverty.
One of the consequences of being in stressful circumstances is that it makes you less open to trying out new things—understandably, given that if resources are sparse, it makes sense for the brain to stick to tried and true behaviors for extracting those resources rather than risk trying a novel behavior that might extract nothing. (And in a village where you’ve grown up treating all social interactions as more or less adversarial, someone suggesting something new is probably just trying to trick you somehow.) So once a culture hits this kind of a situation, it may become stuck there and be incapable of evolving anything better unless the material situation gets somehow drastically better.
Yeah, this sounds much more like the kind of thing that I’d expect to be the cause, as opposed to mutual theft being somehow a beneficial/adaptive response to poverty.
One of the consequences of being in stressful circumstances is that it makes you less open to trying out new things—understandably, given that if resources are sparse, it makes sense for the brain to stick to tried and true behaviors for extracting those resources rather than risk trying a novel behavior that might extract nothing. (And in a village where you’ve grown up treating all social interactions as more or less adversarial, someone suggesting something new is probably just trying to trick you somehow.) So once a culture hits this kind of a situation, it may become stuck there and be incapable of evolving anything better unless the material situation gets somehow drastically better.