Monday, April 27, 2015

Reputation as an antidote to corruption

Our current society is apparently quite stable.

In such a society, individual advancement takes the front seat, to the minor detriment of the society itself.

Eventually it will get so rotten that another society can take it over? Either from inside by an internal revolution or from outside with invasion (economic or military).

Without the external pressure of constantly changing societies, stagnation and collapse seems fairly inevitable.

Old societies had a sort of immune system in the form of "reputation". A person acting to the detriment of a society got a bad reputation and less cooperation, so there was mutual benefit for a person and a society to act in the society's best interests.

With a modern democracy and the lack of critical thinking by media consumers and voters, reputation is a much more manipulable thing, and has lost its effectiveness as a governing force for behaviour.

To stop our country becoming more corrupt, we need to either
  1. Instigate an existential threat of some kind to constantly remind everyone why cooperation is important, and counter the constant desire for individual advancement and greed, OR
  2. Restore the potency of the reputation system
To restore the reputation system, everyone needs to start making decisions based on how others have behaved, and we need a permanent record of such behaviour.