benkler: we can do better

After soaking in The Trap for a day or two, these great words from Wealth of Networks author Yochai Benkler caught my eye. From the short essay "Beyond state and markets:
Social cooperation as a new domain of policy" from Demos' collection "The Collaborative State," Benkler weighs in on the selfish, individual view of humanity prevalent in The Trap.

This binary view of policy has its roots in the view that human beings, left with the freedom to act alone or together, are selfish, calculating nasties. They must, so the thought goes, be ruled by government or provided with extrinsic 'incentives' through as near as perfect a market as feasible to get them to act in their own common good.

This is a profoundly distressing and demeaning view of humanity. And it is empirically unwarranted. Over a decade of research in experimental economics and game theory, anthropology and social psychology, neuroscience and human evolutionary biology all persistently point in the same direction.

No, we are not the self-sacrificing angels that utopian anarchists might once have imagined. But neither are we the nasty brutes of rational choice theory, Hobbesian political theory and market-based everything advocates. Some of us are selfish, yes. Others, true altruists. Many of us are reciprocators. We meet kindness with kindness, and meanness with meanness. We cooperate with those who cooperate with us, and seek to punish those who abuse us. Given the opportunity, we can police ourselves and our social relations by finding trustworthy friends and cooperators, and keep wayward members more or less in line.

There is nothing earth shattering about this to anyone who has lived some portion of their lives with eyes open. It should not have taken hundreds of experiments, several competing theoretical frameworks, and thousands of academic papers to make the basic diversity of human motivation and proclivity to cooperate clear. We have too long laboured under a powerful and negative view of humanity as requiring either control or crass incentives in the form of extrinsic rewards and punishments for closely monitored behaviour.

We can do better.