Liberty, Dicta & Force: Why Liberty Brings Out the Best in People and How Government Brings Out the Worst

The notion that animal behavior evolved for the good of the species was a longstanding myth that met its demise as a result of the work of several biologists. In the mid-1960s, George Williams1 and William Hamilton2 first proposed the idea that animal behavior evolved for the good of the gene, which Richard Dawkins later called “the selfish gene.” When Dawkins came to this conclusion, he was stunned: “We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” He added: “This is a truth that fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never get fully used to it.”3

Today, literature abounds in support of their findings, showing indeed that all animals — including humans — act individually to replicate their genes. However, the idea of genetic individualism did not comport with the agendas of certain political groups; as a result, several university lectures in support of these findings were disrupted by student protesters.

As a target of such disruption, Edward O. Wilson notes:

But as we shall see as the new IQ wars develop over the coming months [they have since proved virulent on the anti-genetic side], as ideologues on both sides spring into their accustomed positions, feeling good is not what science is all about. Getting it right, and then basing social decisions on tested and carefully weighed objective knowledge, is what science is all about.4

Disruptive tactics of this sort are common in the political world, where prohibition replaces reason and persuasion. Nevertheless, the study of sociobiology, which expanded into evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, continues to gain acceptance, with ever more studies showing why we — along with other animals — act the way we do, based on the metaphorical “selfish gene” model.

Helping others based on their degrees of relatedness is a well-established behavior observed in all animals, where, for example, an individual’s genes are, on average, equivalent to the genes carried by two siblings or eight cousins. As such, helping kin makes good evolutionary sense based on that model since the actors are more or less helping themselves (i.e., their own genes).

It also makes evolutionary sense to help those from whom we receive or expect reciprocity. Cooperation evolved in many animals when sharing food became essential, whenever a find was rare or sporadic, or when a group effort improved the chances of catching prey. Of course, one of the most ubiquitous cooperative ways to copy genes is mating.

Humans are by far the most cooperative of all animals. Social exchange is a human universal that is expressed in all cultures.5 Elaborate social networks have evolved wherein individuals cooperate in the exchange of goods and services with trading counterparts they do not even know.6 Selfishness is the bilateral driving force behind markets, where people satisfy their own selfish preferences by satisfying the selfish, but different, preferences of others. Mating and markets have the same fundamentals: “I have this to make you happy, and you have that to make me happy.”

One’s reputational trademark is the catalyst that nurtures cooperative behavior. A reputation can expedite new relationships when good and impede them when bad, giving each of us a powerful incentive to acquire one and avoid the other. Furthermore, the sensitivity of an ongoing assessment of our behavior warns us that, while a good reputation takes time to build, it can disappear in an instant following a single breach.

To build trust and cooperation in the marketplace with traders who are unrelated to us requires an effective “cheater detection” trait.7 As H. Clark Barrett explains: “Evolutionary analyses have shown that social exchange cannot evolve unless individuals are able to detect those who cheat. Therefore, from an evolutionary standpoint, the function of detecting acts of cheating is to connect them to an identity — to deduce character.”8 Robert Trivers, William Hamilton, Robert Axelrod, and other evolutionary researchers use game theory to understand the conditions under which social exchange can and cannot evolve. For adaptations causing this form of cooperation to evolve and persist (i.e., to embody what evolutionary game theorists call an evolutionarily stable strategy [ESS]), cooperators must have mechanisms that perform specific tasks. For example, reciprocation cannot evolve if the organism lacks reasoning procedures that can effectively detect cheaters (i.e., those who take conditionally offered benefits without providing the promised return). Such individuals would be open to exploitation and selected out.9

We are fairly good at picking up on someone’s character; even their most insignificant mannerisms can signal “I can trust this person” or “I can’t trust this person.” Such a knack for detection also selects for cheaters capable of putting up a better deceptive front.

Noted evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby hypothesize that the human neurocognitive architecture includes social contract algorithms: a set of programs (neural circuits) that natural selection specialized for solving the intricate computational problems inherent in adaptively engaging in social-exchange behavior, including a subroutine for cheater detection.10

Because cheaters (free riders) gain a benefit without a cost, they depend on the resourcefulness of those who do bear the cost.11 In the upside-down political world, individuals are not only incentivized to cheat, they are defended against those who detect them as cheaters and who would otherwise ostracize them. In that world, cheaters gain entitlement to that which they did not work to produce, while those who would ostracize them as cheaters are disentitled to that which they have worked to produce. It is natural to ostracize able-bodied slackers who do not pull their weight in hunts, the workplace, or wherever joint work is customary, yet still expect to share in the goods that are produced. Even those with a strong political bent have a sense of repugnancy toward able-bodied slackers encountered in their personal affairs but will, however, endorse entitlement programs that encourage slacking in the public arena.

Although there is a clear adaptive value in helping those who are genetically related or who reciprocate benefits in a cooperative exchange, why would there be adaptive value for what appears to be altruistic behavior (bearing a cost without gaining an offsetting benefit) where kinship and reciprocity are lacking? Not only are humans the most cooperative beings, they may be alone or in rare company when it comes to helping those where kinship and reciprocity are absent. In humans, there is a natural moral sentiment that engenders empathy and drives us to want to do good for others. We sense both the pain and the pleasure that others feel. Caring about others may seem to conflict with our innate selfish nature, but deeper within us is the long-range, personal benefit we gain from it.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments, written by Adam Smith in 1759, begins with the following assertion:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.12

In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Smith asserts:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.13  

These two seemingly divergent assertions are quite compatible in light of twentieth-century studies in evolutionary psychology.

When we donate to charitable causes, help strangers, adopt abandoned children, assist the unfortunate, defend the defenseless, comfort the ill, or even care for an injured bird, we experience a sense of euphoria — that warm, feel-good sensation that drives us to such behavior. Paul Zak and others claim that oxytocin gives us that feel-good sensation we experience when we connect with the feelings of others. In game theory sessions, participants who received a nasal infusion of oxytocin showed improved cooperation and increased generosity. Generosity may be part of the human repertoire to sustain cooperative relationships. Oxytocin has also been shown to increase the ability to intuit people’s intentions from their facial expressions.14 In a 2012 article, Songfa Zhong and coauthors state:

It is difficult to overstate the role of trust in facilitating the smooth functioning of social and market institutions in modern societies. Trust can provide the basis for reducing social complexity, enhancing social order and social capital, as well as overcoming the inherent risk involved in economic exchange and social interaction.15

This do-good, feel-good scenario must have adaptive value for it to exist in almost everyone, irrespective of their culture. It likely served our ancestors, as it does us, as an effective signaling mechanism to inform others that we are trustworthy and cooperative members of the group. Although these sentiments are genuine, they nevertheless remain self-serving, with the resulting adaptive advantages of increased resource acquisition and mating opportunities. Yes, in the long run, nice guys do finish first!

However, people can deceptively display that same signaling behavior to gain acceptance when actual empathy is lacking and trust is unjustified. Politicians are adept at manipulating their way to power by stroking people’s heartstrings, pretending to be charitable when, in fact, they are only offering to share that which the state has plundered from others. Such gestures are not charitable, because charity implies a cost to the donor. Politicians who use such deception to win the votes of recipients of this “generosity” can also gain support from those who ride their coattails as an indirect way of signaling their own charitable nature. Being charitable and considerate of others are good-natured acts, but only when the actor is being charitable and considerate with that which is his or hers.

There are few who are not touched when they learn about the gracious behavior of one person toward another when they sense it to be a sincere act of moral sentiment. Books and movies captivate us with such scenes that trigger those tear-jerking neurotransmitters that make us feel good and eager to come back for more. Helping the helpless triggers a warm sensation in all of us, but when we are forced to help, those sensations are not only lost, they are replaced with feelings of resentment and anger toward those who plunder us while claiming charitable credit and, to some degree, toward those who receive the help, especially when those persons are not truly helpless.

To further their deceptive signaling of compassion to garner votes, politicians are adept at riling up their supporters by making them the victims of a targeted culprit. This divisive tactic of pitting one group against another in a culprit-victim scenario is further evidence of how government brings out the worst in people. Targeting the rich as the “greedy culprit” of the “victimized poor,” men as the “ungracious culprit” of “victimized women,” and whites as the “oppressive culprit” of “victimized blacks” has become a common political practice. In fact, pitting neighbor against neighbor is so common in a political democracy that we find ourselves desensitized to the brutality of such conduct in which people are tricked and sacrificed for the sake of someone’s desire to gain political power and prestige.

In The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek states: “The contrast between the ‘we’ and the ‘they’ is consequently always employed by those who seek the allegiance of the masses.”16 These divisive tactics drive people to take sides, foster adversarial political parties, and launch campaigns to commandeer the masses to join the fray.

Caring about others is not synonymous with helping them. Within a society, those seeking to benefit themselves, who produce and provide goods and services others find beneficial, offer the greatest help to others. These benefactors may not even know or care about those they are helping. All they know is that by benefiting some people with their goods and services, they will in turn become beneficiaries of the goods and services other people provide.

A desire for people to live longer is not a requirement for discovering better medicines any more than producing food requires a desire to prevent famine. Scientists discover medicines because people prefer wellness to illness, and farmers produce food because people prefer full bellies to empty ones, thus giving each of them the opportunity to prosper by satisfying those preferences.

When we hear via the political network that the wealthy should sacrifice and give back to society, common sense is all we need to tell us that such talk is nothing but political balderdash. Sacrifice is genetically nonsensical because our “selfish” genes are not inclined to allow such destructive behavior. Our unrelenting genetic selfishness produces all the goods and services that bring about a prosperous society. The volitional transfer of goods and services is a mutually self-serving act in which each party takes advantage of the other — with a mutual invitation to be taken advantage of. Since a mutual exchange of advantages is voluntary, neither party has anything to give back. Only those who take advantage of others absent their volition owe anything back.

So-called charitable help is negligible in comparison to routine, 24/7 commercial help. Moreover, charity as an entitlement has the inherent risk of destructive dependency that precludes personal achievement and gaining meaning to one’s life.

Thomas Sowell argues:

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequence to them and society at large. Nonjudgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state and yet expecting them to develop as human beings.17  

Those entrenched within the political box are often unable to distinguish between that which is called help and that which is truly helpful to others. Political programs in the name of welfare are human tragedies that display the act of caring but ignore the damaging effect upon the very people the endorsers claim to be helping. One of the most inhumane concepts promulgated by those of the political world is that by making goods and services “free” we can improve human welfare. When “welfare” and “entitlement” programs are shown to be destructive and inhumane, the standard political retort is to disparage the messenger, accusing him of being uncaring, cold-hearted, and greedy.

Some may find personal gratification in taking from some to give to others, but such predatory conduct cannot be admired as humanitarian, given that it reduces social welfare by diminishing productivity, engendering discord, and demeaning the lives of recipients. Furthermore, the predatory conduct by some will cause others to do the same, since no one wants to be taken for a sucker.

Myriad government welfare programs have been devised, each with a common thread of predation as the means to improve human welfare. Yet, despite the negative consequences of such programs, politicians remain convinced that predation — taking from some to give to others — if done their way, can avoid the negative results of prior attempts and, instead, actually improve social welfare. The negative social results from such predatory policies can easily be predicted with only a rudimentary understanding of human nature. The Pilgrims of Plymouth learned about human nature firsthand by observing their own behavior when governed by two dramatically different policies that were employed during separate time periods. The distinct contrast of their behavior during the run of one period to that of the other is extensively documented in the diary of Governor William Bradford which will be discussed in chapter 6, The Tragedy of the Commons and Human Behavior.

People may claim nature to be too harsh — arguing that good intentions should be rewarded, or that the feedback is more favorable to some but less to others and thus unfair — but nature’s laws are unyielding to human hope, wishes, and beliefs. Simply believing in the unnatural is not harmful, but when those holding such beliefs gain political power and use humans as laboratory animals to impose their beliefs, their acts are inhumane, irrespective of their intent.

Such is the theater of politics, a dreadful scene in which humanity is up for public sacrifice.

• 1George C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
• 2W. J. Hamilton, “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 2 (1964): 17–52.
• 3Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
• 4Edward O. Wilson, “Science and Ideology,” Academic Questions 8 (1995), http://hiram-caton.com/documents/Evolution/Science%20and%20ideology.pdf.
• 5Wikipedia, s.v., “Cultural universal,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal.
• 6I refer to cooperation here and elsewhere as a voluntary act but do acknowledge that it can also occur if the participant is forced or threatened to cooperate when the perceived cost of being cooperative (obedient) is less than that of being uncooperative (disobedient).
• 7Leda Cosmides, H. Clark Barrett, and John Tooby, “Adaptive Specializations, Social Exchange, and the Evolution of Human Intelligence,” PNAS 107, Suppl. 2 (2010): 9007–9014.
• 8Andrea Estrada, “Brain Mechanism Evolved to Identify Those With a Propensity to Cheat, According to UCSB Scientists,” May 11, 2010, http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=2243.
• 9Center for Evolutionary Psychology, New Page 1, https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/socex/sugiyama.html.
• 10Ibid.
• 11Getting a benefit without bearing a cost is not cheating if that benefit is an externality, such as that deriving from a neighbor’s streetlight or his beautiful yard, which someone other than the owner can enjoy without diminishing its benefits or increasing its cost for the owner.
• 12Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Digireads.com 2010), 1.
• 13Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 6th ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1994), p. 15.
• 14Paul J. Zak, Angela A. Stanton, and Sheila Ahmadi, “Oxytocin Increases Generosity in Humans,” Nature 435 (2005): 673–76.
• 15Songfa Zhong, Mikhail Monakhov, Helen P. Mok, Terry Tong, Poh San Lai, Soo Hong Chew, Richard P. Ebstin,  “U-Shaped Relation between Plasma Oxytocin Levels and Behavior in the Trust Game,” PLoS One 7, 12 (2012): e51095.
• 16F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 139.
• 17Thomas Sowell, “Race, Politics and Lies,” RealClearPolitics.com, May 5, 2015, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/05/05/race_politics_and_lies_126484.html.