The Welfare State, Sexual Signaling, + Corruption

The last few days I have been developing some thoughts on the Welfare State and sexual signaling, and how the combination leads to Corruption.

Beyond these, it occurs to me that while viewing human society in evolutionary terms, our species is complicated enough that we can view the whole as a sort of simplified ecosystem, because humanity contains analogues to both prey and predators.

First, what sparked these thoughts is that from time to time I hear men bragging about their ability to cheat the various systems designed as "safety nets" for our society. My first thought was that it is pretty pathetic to brag about being a parasite taking more than their fair share of charity, but then it occurred to me that for the men in question the Welfare State is simply the environment that they live in, and they have adapted to their environment. Within the limits of their community, which subsists on the resources forcibly taken from productive members of society, sexual selection continues to take place. The women within these communities are looking for the best providers available to them, and those men who can most efficiently cheat the system are analogous to the best hunters in a stone age society, the best farmers in an agricultural society, or the best manufacturers in an industrial society.

Within these communities, therefore, welfare benefits and charitable handouts are seen merely as resources to be exploited, much as a rancher exploits cattle or a miner exploits deposits of ore. The most capable providers are therefore those men who can bring home the greatest amount of these resources.

We can ask, then, what skills are most useful in securing these resources? Chiefly, charm and deceit. A successful entrepreneur within this environment must be charming and engaging in order to avoid upsetting the bureaucrats who distribute the wealth, and they must have no qualms about deceiving contributors into providing them with more wealth than is their fair share. Finally, in seeking a mate and establishing their social position within their community, they must advertise these skills to all and sundry. Naturally, they must do this in a way that makes them appear to be providers rather than opportunists, so the charm offensive and extravagant displays of generosity which I have often witnessed from men who could never afford it themselves are exactly the appropriate response, from an evolutionary point of view.

I have seen quite a few men of this type, and I always found the experience distasteful. I never liked the fact that they would throw their theft of my resources in my face. Until now, I could not figure out why they would act this way.

As a feature of natural selection, however, it makes perfect sense: they act this way because it works, and it worked for their father, and their father's father. It will continue to work for future generations, and the numbers of these glad-handing, back-stabbing social entrepreneurs will continue to grow so long as theirs is a winning strategy.

However, such strategies can also be self-destructive. Historically, such qualities had limited appeal because human productivity could only support a limited number of loafers. Their existence demonstrates that cadging could be at least one component of a winning survival strategy, but the numbers of these loafer-predators were kept in check by the limited productivity of those they depended on - the productive human beings whom they treated as their livestock or prey.

Of course, these lower-class loafers are not the only predators in the system. Though they may be the most cunning among their impoverished community, they are pikers compared to the top predators in the human ecosystem. These predators constitute part of the upper classes, especially among politicians and their cronies. They are smoother operators, and do their best to make the productive members of society believe that the leadership is offering some valuable service in exchange for the product of their labor. They play up the working class fears of the non-working poor, and sell "protection" in exchange for a handsome income. They hire the police who in turn support them, they hire bureaucrats, including the bureaucrats who hand out funds - and the bureaucrats in turn support them. They pay off the poor in return for the support of the poor. In short, in the same way that ranchers live well on the productivity of their herds that turn grass into meat, the politicians who play the poor against the working class live well by skimming off the value that is created. They understand their trade quite well, which is why they ensure that a large pool of the poor endures: without large numbers of people living in poverty to threaten the productive classes, they cannot extort their fees. Without the poor, they have less excuse to demand other people's money to hire an army of bureaucrats who will be loyal to them.

Just as predators chase rival predators out of their domain, these politicians do their best to ensure they have no rivals - except insofar as the fear of other predators keeps the public eager to pay for protection. For this purpose, politicians must constantly maintain threats for the public to fear, and their ideal threat would be one that they could easily control. This helps explain why a group such as ourselves, many of whom are constitutionally incapable of harming anyone, would be presented as a serious threat. Neither the politicians who are eager to be seen as (well-paid) saviors nor the enforcers they hire to do their bidding, are eager to face any actual threat. It is far better to face down an illusion.

Politicians, like loafers, were previously held somewhat in check by the limits of human productivity. With higher productivity, however, the resulting wealth can support greater and greater numbers of free riders, which means that a greater and greater proportion of humanity will be of the charming and deceitful sort. This, in turn, puts greater and greater pressure on the productive classes: with fewer people producing wealth, productivity must soar to support the greater number of consumers, and with less wealth for themselves, the productive classes will choose to have fewer children because they cannot afford more, which in turn will mean there will be even fewer producers to the greater number who primarily consume.

To some degree this can work, providing that productivity increases at a sufficient rate. However, this framework also necessarily leads to increased corruption, as corruption becomes the best method for getting ahead. Unfortunately, if the growth in corruption outpaces the growth in productivity a civilization will necessarily be headed towards a die-off. We have similar examples in ecosystems - where an abundance of resources leads to population growth that exceeds the carrying capacity of those resources, especially if that capacity is suddenly decreased.

We might also think of human predators as akin to the non-human analogues in the sense that predators typically prey on the weakest members of the herd, removing them from circulation and thus improving the qualities of the herd as a whole. However, modern humanity in a Welfare State is far more complex in that the top predators do not remove the unfit from circulation, but support them and support an increase in their numbers as part of the process of extracting more value from the productive members of society.

In sum, then, it appears that the Welfare State incentivizes and increases corruption, in part by making corruption a winning strategy in sexual selection at both the high end and low end of society; and though productivity increases may reduce the ill effects of this, we are currently in a race between the makers and the takers, the producers and the parasites, and whether humanity survives or perishes depends on which of these groups prevails.