Chapter 14
Institutions
In talking about group interests and group norms, I've mostly ignored the question of who determines the interests, sets the norms, and decides what scope of defection is acceptable and how much societal pressure is sufficient. It's easy to say “society decides,” and from a broad enough viewpoint, it does. Society decides on its pair-bonding norms, and what sorts of societal requirements it needs to enforce them. Society decides how property works, and what sorts of societal pressures are required to enforce property rights. Society decides what “fair” means, and what the social norms are regarding taking more or doing less than your fair share. These aren't deliberate decisions; they're evolved social decisions. So just as our immune system “decides” which pathogens to defend the body against, societies decide what the group norms are and what constitutes defecting behavior. And just as our immune system implements defenses against those pathogens, society implements societal pressures against what it deems to be defection.
But many societal pressures are prescribed by those in power,1 and while the informal group-consensus process I just described might explain most moral and reputational pressure, it certainly doesn't explain institutional pressure. Throughout most of our history, we have been ruled by autocrats—leaders of family groups, of tribes, or of people living in geographical boundaries ranging in size from very small to the Mongol Empire. These ...
