Basic premise: When presented with the option to cooperate or to not cooperate, I generally observe that people will not cooperate unless forced to.
There’s a line of lessons from economics vaguely related to this, which states that in any single-round interaction, it’s only logical for each actor party to that interaction to act solely in their rational self-interest, because there are no repercussions. On the flip side, a multi-round interaction forces you to consider what comes next, hence incentivising cooperation, etcetera.
This is not about that. Well, not exactly. This is more about recognising the following:
In the real world, save for certain factors it’s often impossible to tell if an interaction is single-round or multi-round. For example, someone applies for the same job as you, and for whatever reason you get asked in the interview room what you think of them;
Even where you’re certain that an interaction will be multi-round, there are a wealth of possible factors incentivising against cooperation;
These factors comprise both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, but regardless, the vast majority of them either constitute what we understand to be personality traits, or interact with said traits in such manner that they effectively characterise them; and
Keeping in mind these points, we can look at any interaction between 2 or more people and arrive at the understanding that cooperation must be a learned behaviour, and that whatever it is that we’re born with, by the time we grow up to become rational beings, we will default to selfishness as an automatic response.
We are all just dumb animals
Let me put you in my shoes on the first day at Army basic training.
It’s night time. The whole day’s been spent rushing from one point to another. Ferry ride to the island, swearing in, saying goodbye to your folks. Then you load up onto the bus and drive into the jungle.
You get your first look at the old concrete buildings set against the wooded hillside. In the field across from the complex, walls and obstacles and the rusting hulk of a training helicopter.
Then you get off. You’re screamed at to move faster, stand straighter, stop moving what the fuck is your problem recruit? Gear check, head shave, get up to bunk to change and run back down you’ve got 3 minutes. Night falls. You don’t even remember all of it. So much of it is a blur.
And then you’re standing in the parade square, sweating in the tropical humidity, bright stadium lights shining down at you as you do a final inspection of all the stuff you’ve been issued. They’re in these heavy duffel bags easily weighing 30kg at least, you don’t even know. And you’re given 60 seconds to haul our things upstairs and get into bed.
So chaos erupts. Everyone’s rushing. And you see one guy, not a big guy by any stretch, struggling with his bag. Everyone’s going past him. No one stops to help, even though it must occur to someone other than you that if this guy doesn’t make it up, then you’re all going to get fucked big time.
What do you do?
Let’s think about everything I just described. It’s a hectic, chaotic day. Everyone’s tired. I must assume that some people are still thinking, even though most have been reduced to automatons by night time. But it’s common knowledge that basic training will last the next 4 months. Everyone will be spending literally all of that time together.
In spite of these factors that would, rationally, incentivise helping the guy, no one does. I say it’s because they haven’t learned to help yet. They haven’t learned to set aside their innate, selfish, rational self-interest, so they’re still stuck with that basal animalistic mode of thinking that we all possess inside us. And it goes like this: because you do not know whether cooperation will yield positive results for you personally, and hence there’s no guarantee of personal gain, you don’t cooperate and instead act selfishly. This, in spite of the fact that the possibility of shared gain may be greater than the guarantee of limited personal gain.
A State of Nature
Quite apart from any sort of discussion on nature versus nurture, I’m just going to say a few things. First, we are all born into a state of nature, which is to say a state of unknowing. We are at that point unaware of most things, including but not limited to the ideas that self-interest and collective interest are often incongruent, that it often behoves others to subordinate your self-interests to theirs, and that sometimes cooperation can mutually advance self-interest.
We are not born good or bad; we are born ignorant. And we go through this world ignorant until we learn its rules.
How old were you when you learned to be selfish? I can tell you. I was 6. I had a rare Pokemon card. Some dickhole lied to me and said that he’d trade me: my card for a different one that I wanted more. I trusted him. He took my card and never came back. That was when I learned the first two lessons.
It is impossible to call the state that I was in prior ‘selfless’ because, arguably, any conception of the self without the accompanying notion of self-interest is gibberish. The self, as a contained unit through which our internal elements interface with the external elements of the world around us, cannot exist unless it recognises that its position is relative. It could be better or worse than it was a second ago, or better or worse than the person next to us, or what have you. I would go so far as to say that by definition, the self can only exist once it becomes aware of everything outside of itself, because how can it be an interface if it does not recognise what it’s meant to interface with?
Anyway, once we learn to be selfish, then we can learn to cooperate. The greatest and most elusive lesson on cooperation is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a zero-sum game. This seems fairly obvious, but I can assure you it isn’t, and that most people will never learn it. I know this because as soon as they fail to see an immediate benefit to themselves, most people will wipe the possibility of cooperation clean from their minds.
I learned to cooperate in the Cadets (JROTC for you Americans), when I’d get screamed at for not helping my platoon mates. It is a terrible mistake giving 15 year-olds absolute power and authority over their juniors, but it makes for a good learning experience. Case-in-point, I had it practically beaten into me the idea that personal sacrifice for a collective good, while not immediately advantageous to me, will in the long-run yield benefits to everyone including me such that the net welfare derived is greater. Or in other words, while it might be physically taxing for me to help my friend now, the utility I’ll derive from not getting punished by the sergeant will outweigh whatever I have to deal with now.
In a way, it’s broadly analogous to learning to aim for delayed gratification. You take a small sacrifice now, in order for a bigger payout later (or at least avoid a greater loss).
Not the kind of learning you do in school
Before I lose the plot, my point is first that this sort of cooperation is a learned behaviour, and second that most people will never get around to learning it. The second point is mostly because there aren’t many opportunities in regular civilian life for that sort of learning. I think it says something about modern society that we generally get ahead when we screw other people over.
We advanced as a species because of our ability to communicate and cooperate. I’m not sure how well it bodes that we’re slowly forgetting one of our primary edges. Now I’m not advocating that we should all join a hippie commune and sing kumbaya or anything, but the fact that the lesson on cooperation is so hard to come by can’t be good. Worse still, I’ve also noticed that we tend to forget that lesson, so refreshers are necessary. Sometimes I feel it too and I have to guard against it.
Not to mention, if you’re the only one adopting a cooperative attitude, you quickly get taken advantage of and perversely you learn to stop cooperating. It’s like some kind of sick game.
So what does the lesson call for? From my experience, some sort of overarching figure to play arbiter it seems. Maybe that’s where religion comes into the picture - the Godhead as the schoolteacher to reprimand all of humanity’s misbehaving brats.
Anyway, I’m sure most well-meaning people would have said that they would help the guy, because we’re all very polite and civilised and blah blah blah. Just stop. I guarantee that if you were there, under those same conditions, you’d be just as selfish as the rest of those animals. But I have good news for you. You can change, just as surely as they changed. All you need is a sergeant constantly screaming at you for being selfish.
This one’s been a bit of a rant but that’s the point of me having a website. Mostly I’m just trying to relate one solitary observation I’ve made, plus all the bits that fed into it. I’ve got others. I’ll dig them up sometime.
And lastly, you might ask, since the story above is based on my experiences, whether I stopped to help the guy.
Figure it out yourself. I’m not telling.