Theme: Incentives

HUMAN “NATURAL TENDENCY” IS TO TAKE RATIONAL ACTION.

We are moral when to our advantage, amoral when to our advantage and immoral when to our advantage.

And while even the most simple of mathematical questions, and the most basic of logical demands can challenge us, we are masters of calculation of social status, and the change in it produced by our moral, amoral, and immoral actions.

As population increases and density increases, our anonymity increases, and therefore our ability to obtain our wants amorally or immorally without costing us social status, increases.

Ergo, In small groups with meaningful competition we see higher morality. As competition decreases we see increases in immorality. As anonymity increases through greater population we see greater increases in immorality.

Hence our universal tendency to develop interpersonal and local reputations, normative habits traditions, and rules, religious habits, traditions, rules and limited records (births, christenings, marriages, deaths; legal habits, traditions rules and more informational records; insurance habits, traditions, rules and much more informational records (titles etc); and, credit habits, traditions, rules and vastly more informational records; and now ‘data’ based methods of incomprehensible records of our behaviors, wants, wishes, and biases.

All of these forms of expectations of one another, and records of our actions function as do the rest of our tools – whether logical, legal, craftsmanly, technological, scientific – to allow us to perceive, remember, compare, and judge, that which we cannot judge without the assistance of those tools alone.

But in the end, the human being does what he must: act rationally in his self interests without imposing such a cost on his social status (reputation) that he either reduces opportunities for cooperation with others, eliminates opportunities for cooperation with others, or is such a threat to the cooperation of others, or a threat to the life property kin, and opportunities of others, that he is ostracized, enslaved, imprisoned, or killed.

Man is a rational actor. His reason may not be evident, because he calculates intuitively his physical, emotional, and intellectual costs, in addition to his costs of opportunity, and his costs of material resources. And unfortunately, physical underdevelopment, emotional underdevelopment, and intellectual underdevelopment for the context in which he lives are high costs for some to bear. And as such they are insufficiently domesticated an animal for participation in society except as ostracized, slave, prisoner – and sometimes his best participation is his death.

Curt Doolittle

The The Propertarian Institute,

Kiev, Ukraine