[rtikulit]

I think being "honest and ethical" is at its heart a useful strategy for organizing the collective work of individuals. It's part of the ethos required for building high-trust groups.

Individuals within a group want to understand the terms under which a group operates, and in particular, how to extract their share of value from the group and how to maintain or enhance their extractable share of value.

The more the rules of a group are perceived to be fair, reciprocal and consistently applied, the more members can trust the group and each other. This relieves the participants of significant cognitive and emotional burden, allows longer-term collective action, and reduces transaction costs dramatically.

But I can intellectually understand the value of opportunistic defection strategies that "cheat" the group, extracting both an unfair share of value (as well as some of the "embodied trust value" resulting in an incremental loss of trust across the group).

I have a personal commitment to honest behavior and I actively avoid low-trust friends, groups and choices. Possibly because I find low-trust situations too stressful and too much work, as well as morally horrifying (whatever that means!) I'd like to believe that I'm fundamentally a "good person" but I acknowledge that it might just be that I'm unwilling to leave the local maximum high-trust situation I've self-selected for throughout my life, or I'm afraid of the risks of defector strategies (or I'm just cognitively and emotionally unsuited to them).

Here's where it gets complicated, because organizations change, trust levels change, the signifiers of trustability change, organizations lie, sometimes organizations are specifically operated to trap and exploit high-honor people, and people have very different ideas about what constitutes "fairness" or "exploitation". I find it hard to criticize someone who chooses to use low-trust tactics against a low-trust or deceptive group.

It seems, looking around different cultures and organizations in the world that there is a huge variation in the principles under which groups function. Apparently "low-trust" is a viable option, although I'm supportive of the idea that high-trust brings a competitive advantage both for groups and individuals, and is worth building and sustaining.

I'm horrified that we seem to have reached some kind of tipping point in the west where a critical mass of elites (who already extract enormous value!) have decided they can extract even more value through high-order defection than by building modern and durable foundations of trust.