A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Saturday, February 7, 2026 06:54
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Thursday, February 5, 2026 5:53 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Donald Trump is president of a United States, but it is too much to say that he is president of the United States

By Jamelle Bouie | Feb. 4, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/opinion/trump-presidential-power-co
mments.html

A hallmark of the president’s language since he stepped onto the national political stage is that some Americans are more American than others, and that this is a function of race and allegiance to Trump.

Trump deployed this idea against Barack Obama when he questioned the former president’s political legitimacy and demanded that he prove his citizenship with the public release of his “long-form” birth certificate. He wielded it during his first campaign for the White House, dismissing critics and opponents as un-American and illegitimate on the basis of their race, nationality and partisan identity. Recall his condemnation of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who, Trump insisted, could not be impartial because he was “Mexican.” And this vision of the supposedly true American public was a rhetorical mainstay of his first term in office. “The Democrats,” Trump said, in a typical formulation during a 2018 rally for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, “have launched an assault on the sovereignty of our country.”

Now, obviously, Trump did not pioneer this distinction between the people who happen to live in a nation and the quasi-mystical, fully legitimate People of the Nation. This construct is a mainstay of right-wing populism. You saw it in the 2008 presidential election, when Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska told audiences that there was a “real” America that truly represented the country. “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, pro-America areas of this great nation,” she said.

You saw it at the 1992 Republican National Convention, when Pat Buchanan, the Nixon speechwriter and political operative turned conservative intellectual and proto-Trumpian provocateur, deployed this herrenvolk notion of the American nation in his infamous (and influential) jeremiad against American liberalism.

“There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America,” Buchanan declared. “We must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” And you cannot understand the nativist “Americanism” of the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1910s and ’20s without reference to a similarly narrow conception of the American people, one tied to sharp anxieties around race, class, religion and masculinity. The Klan “stood for patriotism, ‘old-time religion’ and conventional morality, and pledged to fend off challenges from any quarter to the rights and privileges of men from the stock of the nation’s founders,” the historian Nancy MacLean explains in “Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan.”

What Trump has done is turn this rhetorical distinction into something like the governing philosophy of the federal government. To start, the White House has made clear that a state’s access to either federal aid or federal benefits is a function of its partisan allegiance. During last year’s government shutdown, for example, the administration canceled $8 billion in federal funding for clean energy, affecting 16 states — all of which voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Trump also withheld billions for transit projects in New York and New Jersey. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want,” the president said, commenting on what he thought was the upside of a shutdown, “and they’d be Democrat things.”

It is similarly clear that the president slated the worst of his deportation program for Democratic-led states and cities. Neither Chicago nor Los Angeles nor Washington stands out as particularly dangerous compared with the typical major American city. And if Trump were only targeting undocumented immigrants, he could look to cities in Texas and Florida as well as those in California and Illinois. But Trump targeted them all the same, sending the National Guard to occupy each city and unleashing federal immigration agents to harass and abuse immigrants and citizens alike.

“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” Trump mused on his Truth Social website in September. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” The administration’s attack on Minnesota, and especially on the city of Minneapolis, is more of the same, less law enforcement than a combat operation aimed at a set of Americans whose governor opposed the president in the last election or who belong to a disfavored racial, ethnic and religious minority

At the risk of cliché, most presidents do not speak like this about their fellow Americans. The presidency is a national office, and even the bitterest struggles for this highest prize of American politics tend to end with an appeal to union and common ground from the eventual winner. “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” Thomas Jefferson proclaimed in the wake of an election so hard fought that it nearly turned to violence. “Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own federal and republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government.”

John Quincy Adams won the presidency in what his chief rival, Andrew Jackson, condemned as a “corrupt bargain.” In his Inaugural Address, Adams made it a point to reach out to those Americans who wanted a different man in the White House. “Of the two great political parties which have divided the opinions and feelings of our country,” Adams said, “the candid and the just will now admit that both have contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices to the formation and administration of this Government, and that both have required a liberal indulgence for a portion of human infirmity and error.”

Abraham Lincoln ended his first Inaugural Address with a famous appeal to the common history that tied Americans to one another. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies,” he said. “Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Lincoln’s heartfelt call to his Southern brethren to heed “the mystic chords of memory” fell on deaf ears. Five weeks later, a South Carolina militia fired on Fort Sumter. Not long afterward, Union volunteers met soldiers from the newly formed Confederate States of America in a field just north of Manassas, Va. And so began four years of the worst bloodletting in American history.

Trump rejects this legacy of his predecessors. The rhetorical tools of the presidency are, for him, a means to divide Americans and sort them according to hierarchies of status. Trump sits atop the national government, but not as a national leader. His is the logic of the separatist, even of the secessionist. “There was no privilege without persecution, no winner without a loser,” Michael J. Lee and R. Jarrod Atchison write of the ideology of the Southern “fire-eaters” in “We Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics Since 1776.” In their worldview, “political relationships within nations were always hierarchical; some group was always enslaved by or beholden to some other more dominant group.”

The fire-eaters hoped to instantiate this vision in a new nation founded on a cornerstone of racial subjugation. But what if you could secede without secession? What if you could cleave the nation off from its egalitarian aspirations? What if you could bring the spirit of separatism to bear on a government tasked with representing a single people?

That is the Trump administration. That is the work of a White House that sees vast numbers of Americans not as friends, but as enemies. And that is a work of a president who will destroy as many symbols of national unity as he can to satisfy his bottomless ego, cruel appetites and unquenchable desire to “win” at the expense of the people he purports to lead.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, February 5, 2026 6:19 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Friday, February 6, 2026 8:57 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
New START Treaty expires, freeing Trump from nuclear arms restrictions

"If it expires, it expires," U.S. President Donald Trump said in his interview with The New York Times when asked about his intentions to extend the New START treaty that officially ended on Feb. 5.

https://kyivindependent.com/new-start-expires-releases-us-russia-from-
decades-of-nuclear-arms-restrictions/

We Are Witnessing the Imperial Presidency on Steroids
The founders wouldn’t recognize the executive branch’s monstrous powers

by Dan Carlin | February 5, 2026

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-presi
dential-power-nixon-steroids-1235511366/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/we-are-witnessing-the-imperial-
presidency-on-steroids/ar-AA1VKrjv

While the Watergate scandal was raging, Richard Nixon allegedly told several U.S. representatives that he could get on the telephone, issue an order, and soon after millions of people would be killed. It wasn't hyperbole. There are very few people in human history that have ever had that kind of power, and most have been American presidents. But how does one individual with this sort of authority exist in a system of government designed with a triad of co-equal branches set up specifically to thwart concentrated executive power, a system where starting a war wasn't even an executive-branch power in the constitutional design?

The question of what in our system could have prevented Nixon from causing a nuclear holocaust if he wanted to has been left unanswered. There have been rumors that Cabinet secretaries at the time were telling aides to ignore such a presidential order if it were issued, but that's a stop-gap measure, not a constitutional check. The designers of our republican system never intended their chief executive to have this sort of authority. The fact that presidents do today is the root cause of many of our national problems.

Americans are living though a historic moment right now, one that would be fascinating to watch were it not so insanely important. There is a disaster looming that is becoming more clear every day. The cause is that the office of the president of the United States has far too much power and very few constraints. This combination invites authoritarianism. All it needs to become manifest is someone in the White House who desires such an outcome. It seems we have someone like that now.

While it's both tempting and normal to see current conditions as the result of recent events, the 21st-century American political situation is the culmination of decades of trends involving the ever-increasing power of the presidency. None of this is hidden, and scholars have been writing about it for decades (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s famous book The Imperial Presidency was published in 1973). And while the aggregation of presidential power is often cloaked in rationales and justifications, from anti-communism to anti-drugs, war powers, anti-terrorism, et cetera, sometimes it's simply how things developed and evolved (the nature and challenges associated with nuclear weapons is an example). But there is no denying at this point that we have created a systemic monster that the constitutional framers wouldn't recognize - and one they would fear. The founders believed in diffused power and oversight. They believed in a strong and active legislative branch to counter autocratic mission creep. We have none of those things at the moment. Are any of them recoverable? Is constitutional erosion a one-way street, or can it be reversed with some sort of renaissance? Must we go the way of Rome's Republic?

To rebalance our constitutional portfolio first requires us to want a less powerful executive. This is somewhat counterintuitive. Americans are accustomed to electing leaders who promise to push for outcomes, foster positive change, fix things, and help people. The voters expect the president to use the power of the office to achieve what the people want. The pressure from the winning candidate's supporters is not to restrain power but to use as much of it as possible. We are addicted to the exercise of presidential authority as long as it is being used for ends we desire. The effect this has on the system as a whole is given little attention. Is it even conceivable that we might push for leaders to restrain or roll back whatever power they might claim in order to prevent us from getting a president with too much authority? What if that's the only way to repair things?

If we come out of this current inflection point constitutionally intact - and that's far from guaranteed - we should use any pendulum-swinging momentum for reform the way legislators used the Watergate scandal aftermath to try to rein in the runaway powers of the presidency. There were lots of hearings, investigations, and legal alterations done in the mid-1970s to "fix" things, along with punishments meted out to those in government who knowingly went too far. This seems healthy for any system when its constitutional flaws are exposed. But like a noxious weed, the growth of executive power returned with a vengeance starting in the 1980s. Many of the post-Watergate reforms were challenged, overruled, or functionally eviscerated. The rationale given was that the "legitimate" powers of the presidency had been encroached upon. The formerly fringe concept of the Unitary Executive Theory emerged as a justification for unilateral actions and presidential power consolidation, pushed by think tanks (and the Supreme Court justices they pushed for) and entities who wanted less interference from other branches of government. This is the same rationale Donald Trump and his surrogates cite continually.

Any effort to dial back presidential authority faces strong headwinds in our current political climate. The Supreme Court seems hell-bent on ceding ever more power to the president, one who has far more power now than the "imperial" Nixon did back in the early 1970s. The electorate has demonstrated that it's willing to support chief executives pushing constitutional boundaries if it's done for reasons voters favor. And neither party wants to unilaterally disarm by ceding authority if the other side can't be trusted to do the same. Any salvation coming from the legislative branch seems hopeless. This dynamic is decades in the making; Congress has grown weak, venal, co-opted, and seems happy to relinquish its power to avoid responsibility for anything that might hurt members' reelections. Frustration with Congress leads to even more temptation to use presidents to achieve political goals - often using executive orders - that lawmakers seem unable or unwilling to pursue. The dynamic isn't favorable.

But we have been given another reminder of why any of those good reasons for increasing the power of one human being at the expense of the rest of the government aren't good enough. The executive branch is the one overwhelmingly likely to bring us to a dictatorship, and we can now see how much the vast powers of the office have only been held in check by mere protocol. A president unleashed shows us the power of the modern office uncloaked. And it should scare us all back into the mindset of Ben Franklin when he said that we had "a republic, if you can keep it." Congress, with its many members, isn't likely to be the branch that takes democracy away from us. The danger comes from the executive branch where one person calls the shots. And as it was when Nixon fell, we are being reminded that increasingly powerful presidents are something the system seems to germinate naturally. We need to periodically prune back the executive's powers when the opportunity presents itself. That time must be soon. The weeds have overrun the garden.

Too many forget that the primary goal of the U.S. constitutional design wasn't efficient governing. It was tyrant prevention. We put up with all sorts of impediments to change, reform, and improvement for that one simple goal. Whether this firewall still works is the paramount political question of our age. Will this era turn out to be a blip on the timeline? A warning that prompts reflection, reform, and recalibration akin to the McCarthyistic "Red Scare" era? Or will it be a Caesar crossing the Rubicon moment that forever ends the American experiment?

The more scary aspect of all this is the degree of public support for an uber-powerful leader who champions their views and pushes for what they desire. Often these wishes are unachievable because our constitutional protections stand in the way. This is a problem that will outlive the current president and requires deep national introspection. We could start by reminding ourselves what happens when representative systems go sideways. The outcomes are not recalled fondly by those who lived through them. Better to acquire that lesson from some other nation's tragedy rather than having to learn about the danger of historical hot stoves by touching one ourselves.

We are currently seeing what can happen when the only branch controlled by a single individual decides it wants to flex its vast and awesome powers. It demonstrates to all reasonable people that it's too much power for one person to have. Imagining such authority in the hands of one's worst enemy should be enough to make this concern clear to anyone. The president can pick up the phone and order the deaths of billions and the ruination of the planet's ecosystem. That's clearly too much power for any human being, isn't it?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, February 6, 2026 9:09 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump's push to rename Dulles and Penn Station after himself

Feb 6, 2026

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/06/schumer-trump-penn-station-dulles-gat
eway

President Trump last month offered to drop his hold on billions of dollars for a major infrastructure project in New York, but only if Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed to rename New York's Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after Trump.

• Schumer (D-N.Y.) rejected the offer, a source familiar with the talks told Axios, prolonging the standoff over funding for the Gateway Tunnel Project connecting New York to New Jersey.

Why it matters: Trump, whose allies renamed the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace after him, is continuing his efforts to reshape American institutions in his image.

• The offer did not come up in an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Schumer last month, the source said. Instead, the offer was made to Schumer in subsequent conversations with the administration about the Gateway project.

• The $16 billion project is set to shut down indefinitely on Friday, without the funding from the federal government.

• The offer from Trump was first reported by Punchbowl News.

The big picture: Trump and Schumer have cut high stakes deals for government funding over the last year. They remain at a stalemate over a project critical for Schumer's state.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, February 6, 2026 6:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Widdle dick Second is just jealous that it's not his name that's up on every building.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 6:53 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Widdle dick Second is just jealous that it's not his name that's up on every building.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

Renaming monuments after himself is proof that Trump isn't performing his duties. Same with his self-enrichment schemes. Not paying his income taxes, same. Spending $3,000,000 to fly down to Florida for a weekend round of golf, same old thing.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 6:54 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

How selfish are we? We cooperate to survive, but if no one is looking, we compete.

An age-old debate about human nature is being energised with new findings on the tightrope of cooperation and competition

By Jonathan R Goodman | 6 February 2026

Goodman is a social scientist based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World (2025).
Free download from https://annas-archive.li/search?q=Goodman+Invisible+Rivals

On first acquaintance, Iago could not be more supportive, loyal, and helpful to Othello. But as Shakespeare reveals, Iago is hiding behind outward signs of devotion to pursue his own personal ambitions and destroy Othello. And it is not just fictional men. There also are fictional women: Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is a model of niceness while unscrupulously pursuing her own goals. Literature is replete with such characters: two more are Edmund in King Lear or Uriah Heep in David Copperfield. The list is endless.

And not, of course, just in literature — in the real world, men and women pursue their own selfish goals while hiding under a cloak of cooperation. These are what Jonathan Goodman calls invisible rivals. They are not necessarily the extremes of Iago, but the day-to-day way in which the twin threads of human behavior — selfish competitiveness and altruistic cooperation are intertwined as strongly as a DNA helix.

https://aeon.co/essays/we-cooperate-to-survive-but-if-no-ones-looking-
we-compete

Reading classic works in evolutionary biology is unlikely to make you optimistic about human nature. From Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) onwards, there is a fundamental understanding among biologists that organisms, especially humans, evolved to maximise self-interest. We act to promote our own success or that of our family. Niceness, by contrast, is just a mirage, and morality more broadly is just an illusion. Sociobiology – the infamous movement of the second half of the 20th century – forced us to confront the cold, calculated nature of having evolved biologically.

More recently, however, anthropologists and psychologists have pushed back against this pessimistic view. Dozens of books over the past decade have focused on human cooperation, promoting it as the secret ingredient to our conquest of the planet. We work together, using our intelligence, language and a diverse skillset to build on complex cultures, develop technologies, and solve problems in our societies and environments. We learn at a young age what the rules of our groups are, and those rules, imprinted on us culturally, govern the safe, cohesive units that allowed us to conquer inhospitable parts of the world and out-compete unfriendly groups of people who don’t work well together.

This narrative saves us the embarrassment of accepting that biological selfishness – acting only to maximise our Darwinian success – is the foundation of all behaviour. It also matches some claims by anthropologists that ancient humans were egalitarian, living in small groups with little permanent rank, where leaders (if any) had limited authority and people collectively pushed back against anyone trying to dominate.

Yet, as with sociobiology, it is only half true. Instead, our collective predilection for exploitation, deceit and competition is equally important to cooperation in the story of human evolution. We evolved not to cooperate or compete, but with the capacity for both – and with the intelligence to hide competition when it suits us, or to cheat when we’re likely to get away with it. Cooperation is consequently something we need to promote, not presume.

The modern dispute about whether humans are fundamentally cooperative or competitive dates back to the publication of Mutual Aid (1902) by Pyotr Kropotkin, an anarchist who took his views about human nature from observing animals helping each other in the unhospitable wilds of Siberia. Kropotkin believed that it’s only through interdependence that any species can survive in the struggles against predation, violence and the environment, which characterise the omnipresent dangers individuals face. Like so many other species, fish, flesh and fowl, we work together to survive and reproduce.

On the surface, Kropotkin’s views are at odds with Darwin’s, who championed the individual struggle for survival and mating as the fundamental driver of evolution by natural selection. The twin pillars of competing for survival and competing for mates – natural and sexual selection, respectively – were, for Darwin, the foundations of biological life. For Kropotkin and his colleagues, by contrast, the emphasis was on how individuals acted for the good of the species: mutual aid meant a better, safer life for everyone.

Today, the debate is substantially the same, though the language and tools we use to make our points are different. Experiments conducted by anthropologists and psychologists across the world evaluate how cooperatively people behave in a multitude of conditions, with obvious ideological battle lines between those who espouse a self-interested versus a beneficent model of human nature.

For example, in one famous study from 2001, anthropologists worked with 15 different small-scale societies to see how they behaved in an economic experiment called the ultimatum game. In this game, the researcher gives one player a set amount of money – in this case, the local value of one or two days’ worth of wages. That player then chooses an amount of the money to offer to the second player, who may either accept or decline. In the case of acceptance, the players receive the amounts of money agreed upon; in the case of rejection, both receive nothing.

We are thought to treat each other more fairly than you’d expect using a cold economic calculus

In a calculated world governed only by self-interest, we’d expect the first player to offer the smallest possible amount, and for the second player to accept any offer. Something is better than nothing, no matter whether that something is unfair on either side.

Of course, the participants in the small-scale societies didn’t play the game in this way. The offers were almost never lower than 25 per cent of the overall pot, and in some groups, like with the Aché people of Paraguay and the Lamelara people of Indonesia, the offers were often greater than half the total amount.

Some scientists, notably the economist Ernst Fehr, used this outcome to defend the idea that humans are ‘inequity averse’ – that is, we are a species that almost universally dislikes unfairness. (‘Prosociality’ is also a term you see in the literature a lot.) As a consequence of this alleged collective aversion, we are thought to treat each other more fairly than you’d expect using a cold economic calculus.

These ideas have broadened out into a modern theory of super-cooperation, with a caveat: instead of the ‘good of the species’ view advocated for by Kropotkin, researchers focus on how people behave within groups. We learn to cooperate within groups because we are interdependent on one another for survival: reciprocal relationships are essential when anyone meets with failure in hunting, gathering or agriculture. Need-based transfers – where people ask from others only when they need help, for example when their own crops fail – characterise small-scale societies across the world.

Local norms determining how people cooperate spread through social learning. So, while need-based transfer is a common practice worldwide, its appearance is determined by the culture in question. Osotua (which translates to ‘umbilical cord’) is a bond linking two Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania in lifelong interdependence. Betrayal of osotua is reportedly unheard of, and a person’s descendants can even inherit a family member’s bond with another.

According to this way of thinking, groups that cooperate more effectively out-compete groups that don’t. This is part of a broader process called cultural group selection, the modern-day version of the mutual aid concept that Kropotkin championed more than a century ago. Except, instead of acting for the good of our species, we act for the good of our groups. Interdependence breeds loyalty, the hypothesis holds.

If the notion of cultural group selection bears out, then the problems we see in the world today should be seen as a consequence of friction between groups, not within them. Issues like international conflicts would derive from differences in social norms and values, rather than because of a missing commitment to prosociality shared by all group members. Cultural group selection encourages us to look for problems outside rather than within.

But the idea starts to look shaky upon closer inspection. Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist who has worked with the Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari for decades, described what happened when she ran similar experiments herself. As part of her execution, she made it clear to volunteers that she was acting on behalf of someone else, the well-known economist Ernst Fehr; this was his interest, she emphasised; she did not care at all how they played the game and no matter what they did, there would be no consequence at all. She wrote:

A few asked me once more if it was really true that their identity would not be revealed; with confirmation, they slid more coins, one by one, over to their own sides. Occasionally the subject would hesitate and say: ‘Are you sure you are not deceiving me?’

For Wiessner, the point wasn’t that the Ju/’hoansi were uniquely selfish; it was that the experiment created a social situation unlike everyday life. Put someone in a game where identities are hidden and consequences are explicitly ruled out, and you remove many of the ordinary pressures that govern cooperation – reputation, ongoing relationships, the possibility of retaliation, the cost of being seen to take too much. What you end up measuring, in other words, is not ‘how cooperative this person is’, but how they behave in a stripped-down context where cooperation and betrayal carry very different risks.

Cooperating is not the same thing as being a cooperator

That basic insight runs through decades of work on the biology of cooperation. Even the earliest mathematical models that made reciprocity central to human social life treated betrayal as context-dependent: defection becomes attractive when there’s little chance of future interaction, when the other person can’t meaningfully respond, or when your reputation is unlikely to suffer. Cooperation, from this perspective, isn’t something we can simply assume; it’s something social life must make possible – and worth sustaining.

Over the 1970s, ’80s and arguably ever since, thousands of computer models purporting to explain how and why people cooperate have missed this point. Most often, researchers have explored how cooperation evolves in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the simplest form of this game, two players may choose to cooperate or defect. While mutual cooperation is mutually beneficial, and mutual defection is mutually damaging, defecting against a cooperative partner is the individual optimum – and cooperating against a defector yields the worst possible payoff. (The game is called the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ because the theoretical scenario is one where two criminals are separately asked by the police to inform on one another. If you inform on your partner, you get a much lighter sentence.)

Researchers have developed an astounding number of variations of this dilemma for explaining how cooperation is sustainable more broadly. Some invoke punishing defectors; some just explore the likelihood that one player will meet another again in the future. But, critically, virtually all of them treat ‘cooperators’ and ‘defectors’ as defining individual features. A player is defined by their propensity for cooperation – much as we might say of a criminal who rats on his friend that ‘once a rat, always a rat’.

I have always found this assumption problematic. Much as any person might cheat a partner when the likelihood of being discovered is low, so are we wrong to assume that anyone who cooperates in one game is likely to cooperate in every game. Cooperating is not the same thing as being a cooperator.

Models don’t and can’t know the difference between forced and prosocially motivated cooperation

In my academic work, I’ve explored this distinction, with the aim of determining the importance of what lies beneath appearances in social interactions. A few years ago, I created a computer model to explore how false appearances can affect cooperation. If, for example, an agent – representing a person in the world of the computer model – determines that defection in the Prisoner’s Dilemma is likely to be exposed and punished, the agent cooperates. If, however, defection is likely to go unnoticed, the agent defects.

The model shows that cooperation stays high – at about two-thirds of interactions – even if the vast majority of agents prefer to defect when possible. While older models evaluating cooperation in the dilemma showed that punishment removes defectors from the population altogether – in line with what people defending cultural group selection say – the difference between appearance and motivation makes removal more difficult. You can’t punish defectors if you don’t know who they are.

I’ve called this the problem of opportunity. When anything cooperates – whether computer agent, bacterium, mole rat or person – we have no way of establishing, with certainty, whether cooperation was intended or happened because there wasn’t a good opportunity for defection.

How people use language to talk about cooperation in the real world illustrates the problem in action. Models are, by design and requirement, vague: they don’t tell you anything more about a situation than that some computerised agents cooperated, defected, were punished, and so on. A model can’t tell you whether an agent chose to cooperate or was forced to (the latter case, in everyday language, we call coercion). And too often in everyday life, we’re forced to cooperate with others when we don’t want to – whether that’s paying high prices for food and travel, voting for a politician who seems just a bit less bad than another, or signing a non-disclosure agreement to get a job. (Think about this next time you hear the phrase ‘thank you for your cooperation’.)

Models don’t and can’t know the difference between forced and prosocially motivated cooperation. Yet, sometimes, behavioural experiments can. Far from being a species that dislikes inequity and acts against it, we are more likely to profess a desire for fairness, reserving our singularly self-interested behaviours for when there’s unlikely to be cost for them.

Evidence for a phenomenon called ‘moral credentialing’ supports this. In short, if I believe I’ve acted morally in the past – through making donations, working in a soup kitchen for the homeless, and so on – I’m more likely to justify my unethical actions in the future.

In 2011, researchers showed that participants are more likely to cheat on a mathematics test if they have the opportunity to profess support for moral principles beforehand – but only if they could rationalise about how cheating didn’t violate their moral codes. Notably, in 2024, two researchers showed that businesses voluntarily signing up to the Business Roundtable’s ‘Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation’ (2019) – which promotes the importance of value to everyone, not just shareholders – were more likely to violate both environmental and labour laws.

And more recently still, research into the use of large language models like ChatGPT illustrates just how much opportunity links to dishonesty. In this set of studies, researchers evaluated how participants behave when they can delegate behaviours to AI models. The setting was a die-rolling game, where higher numbers meant a higher financial benefit. While players were broadly honest when reporting their die rolls directly, delegating reporting to an AI agent changed behaviours markedly. When the players could give vague instructions to the AI such as ‘maximise profits’, their honesty decreased enormously, with less than a fifth of rolls reported accurately.

There are plenty of examples of people dodging moral responsibility through credentialing (touting past good deeds), rationalisation, and plain opportunism. In aggregate, the belief that you’re a moral person because of the principles you profess or the good things you’ve done before can make it easier to rationalise seizing the opportunity to act unfairly now.

When cutting corners brings a benefit and no one notices, it’s a winning move almost anywhere

The behavioural scientist Jason Dana and colleagues report that people often seek ‘moral wiggle room’ in economic games – ways to choose unfairly without feeling culpable. What matters most, the team suggests, is often not fairness but insulation from blame, sometimes by claiming ignorance about who is harmed and how:

In the spate of recent [financial] scandals, often high-level figures accused of transgressions must be shown to have known about harms in order to be held liable. We note that this ignores the efforts that executives may take to remain ignorant.

When you see how quickly people reach for loopholes and excuses, it’s tempting to blame the system – to say that Western law, markets or politics teach us to act this way. But I don’t think opportunism starts there. Opportunism is more basic than that: when cutting corners brings a benefit and no one notices – think tax avoidance – it’s a winning move almost anywhere. We can design all sorts of rules that encourage cooperation. But we can’t erase the underlying fact that cheating will often pay when it’s hidden.

Increased group sizes, reflected in the large, stratified societies in which most people live today, create far more opportunities for cheating than encountered over our evolutionary past. The egalitarianism so often noted in small-scale societies, such as the Aché, may then represent a lack of opportunity for free-riding, rather than an evolved propensity for fairness. Knowing everyone in your camp, choosing to live with relatives, and a collective expectation that people will follow local norms, maintains cooperation – though even in small-scale societies people often find ways of exploiting each other. Older men, for example, often dominate their social groups, with exploitation of women and young men reported in the ethnographic literature in nomadic tribes and forager groups across the world.

There are many other examples of exploitation in ethnographic records from across the world. The idea that we lived in a state of equality until the invention of agriculture is mostly a myth that I think helps us feel better about human nature. It fosters the hope that, one day, we’ll overcome the inequality imposed on us by our abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Rather than attributing our problems today to competition between groups and the structure of our societies, the governing rule for any social system is to expect exploitation where it is possible. Every group, society and culture, no matter its size, has weaknesses that some people will try to exploit for personal benefit. The question is how those weaknesses affect culture more broadly, and whether we live in a society that rewards fairmindedness – or cleverness, subtlety and opportunism.

In the modern world, as with our evolutionary past, the answer is the latter. All that’s changed since the advent of agriculture is the number and varieties of opportunities for free-riding and exploitation. Consequently, as technology improves and groups increase in size, we should expect people to develop creative ways for defecting more effectively – with evolution favouring those who do it best.

This proclivity for developing new strategies to compete is part of the social brain hypothesis, originally formulated by the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. In his seminal paper on the topic in 1976, Humphrey argued that the primary function of the human intellect is to navigate the social, rather than the physical, environment.

One implication of the social brain hypothesis is the assumption that every society hosts opportunistic people who may follow local norms for only as long as it is beneficial to do so. Elsewhere, I have called these people ‘invisible rivals’. For example, religious zealots and political adherents across the world may observe all the rules linked with their group – whether ritual or ideological – until they reach a position of power. Thereafter, they can exploit others and act selfishly as it suits them. This may help to explain why studies show that people with psychopathic tendencies are more likely to enter positions of power, for example in corporate or political systems. Following rules without believing in them is an effective strategy for gaining power.

Admittedly, these arguments make our world sound hopeless. It’s tempting to think that, if the story of human evolution isn’t the rosy picture of cooperation, fairmindedness and mutual aid championed by thinkers for more than a century, we can’t expect much from our future. There are just too many problems – from raging inequality and low public trust to a rapidly warming planet and the growing risk of technology like AI – to hope that a species with a dark and ignoble past can overcome itself and create a better future.

I think, however, that this pessimism is misplaced, and that facing ourselves honestly is the first and most important step we can collectively take. This requires adopting a realistic perspective about the kind of animal that Homo sapiens is. First, we are not inherently cooperative but have the capacity for cooperation – just as we have the capacity for exploitation and selfishness. What matters at the individual level is the way we choose to behave towards others.

The real question is what kinds of environments make it easier to do the right thing

Second, just as there is no such thing as a cooperator, there is no such thing as a free-rider. These are behaviours that we apply in models and experiments for convenience. How people behave – and critically, how we describe social behaviours – is a matter of circumstance. The same person who behaves ethically in one circumstance may not do so in another, as research into moral credentialing shows. Our behavioural plasticity, or ability to adapt the way we act to context, is one of our defining features. The evolved psychological processes driving our decisions cannot be captured by simplistic models or games. Anyone can be an invisible rival.

That is precisely why local social norms matter so much. If cooperation isn’t a fixed trait but a fragile, context-dependent outcome, then the real question is what kinds of environments make it easier to do the right thing – and harder to get away with quiet defection. The Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom argued that local social norms are the bedrock of any serious effort to promote cooperation: look at how people behave in their immediate surroundings to understand their methods for restraining unbridled selfishness. Just as organisms evolve immune defences against selfish cells that quietly undermine the whole, societies need norms – and the institutions that uphold them – that can detect and restrain rivalries that flourish out of sight.

Fostering community-level interdependence – and the norms that evolved to help them function cooperatively – is therefore essential for combatting the exploitation that results from invisible rivalry. Never try to enforce cooperation from above. Instead, just as the economist Noreena Hertz argues we should replace ‘greed is good’ maxims in the capitalist framework with a community-oriented, cooperation-promoting mindset, appreciating that we are all better off when we work together is the critical insight needed for building a prosocial and equality-focused environment for the future.

Education is where this begins, not as moral uplift but as collective self-knowledge: it helps us see our own temptations clearly and translate that insight into practical scaffolding – laws, schools and civic rules that reward cooperation and raise the costs of exploitation. Cheating will never vanish, and some people will always look for an edge, but our distinctive intelligence lies as much in recognising exploitation and organising against it as in exploiting in the first place. Invest in that knowledge and in the local institutions that make fairness both appreciated and rewarded, and we will widen the space in which cooperation and equality can endure.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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