Socialism, self-deception, and spontaneous order

In 'Why Not Socialism?', G.A. Cohen mistakes our self-deceptive fairytales about cooperation for the real motives that underlie it.

Campsite Socialism

G.A. Cohen (1941-2009) is one of the most influential Marxist philosophers of the past century. In “Why not socialism?”, he invites the reader to imagine a camping trip:

“You and I and a whole bunch of other people go on a camping trip. There is no hierarchy among us; our common aim is that each of us should have a good time, doing, so far as possible, the things that he or she likes best (some of those things we do together; others we do separately).”

On such camping trips, “most people would strongly favour a socialist form of life over feasible alternatives”. For example, things (pots, oil, fishing rods, decks of cards, etc.) would be collectively owned, and “mutual understandings, and the spirit of the enterprise, [would] ensure that there are no inequalities to which anyone could mount a principled objection.” If anyone tried to assert ownership of equipment or charge others for their labour, “most people would hate that,” which shows that “most people are drawn to the socialist ideal, at least in certain restricted settings.”

Cohen claims that ideal camping trips embody two core socialist principles:

1. A radical principle of equality of opportunity prohibits inequalities that result from social circumstances or natural luck (e.g., superior inborn talents).

2. A principle of community prohibits any inequalities that might undermine a shared sense of community. It also involves a socialist norm of reciprocity whereby “I serve you not because of what I can get in return for doing so, but because you need or want my service, and you, for the same reason, serve me.”

According to Cohen, reflecting on camping trips demonstrates that socialism is both desirable and feasible on small social scales. “Isn’t this, the socialist way, with collective property and planned mutual giving, rather obviously the best way to run a camping trip?” When extending socialist principles to modern economies, he thinks they remain desirable but might not be feasible given the challenges of achieving large-scale economic coordination without market prices.

Why not socialism

The book has many problems. As Jason Brennan points out, it commits perhaps the most common fallacy among socialists: by inviting readers to imagine altruistic socialist campers and selfish capitalist ones, it contrasts utopian socialism with real-world capitalism.

Further, thinkers like Mill and Hayek have rightly observed that moral intuitions applicable at small scales are inappropriate in large, complex societies. The issue here is not merely one of feasibility; as Joseph Heath argues, moral intuitions themselves should be scale-relative. Hrishikesh Joshi goes further and argues that organising a modern economy around the principles of a camping trip runs into coordination problems so intractable that the idea is simply incoherent.

I agree with these and many more critiques. In this essay, I will make a point I have not seen other critics make. It concerns a popular self-deceptive understanding of human cooperation that underlies Cohen’s political worldview.

Wonderful theory, wrong species

My point is connected to a classic objection to socialism: human self-interest. As the biologist E.O. Wilson remarked of Marxism, “Wonderful theory, wrong species.” On this view, capitalist markets channel private vices into public benefits, guiding (as if by an invisible hand) self-interested firms and consumers to act in the public interest. Lacking such incentives, socialist economies languish in poverty and dysfunction, replacing productive economic competition with political competition among extractive elites.

Cohen disagrees. He claims that people have both selfish and generous propensities. Whereas capitalism depends on the former, the only challenge for socialism is to design “suitable organisational technology” that builds on the latter. This is culpably naive. Human self-interest, nepotism, and moral limitations are not propensities that can be overcome by institutional design; they are ineradicable constraints on institutional design. There are many causes of the repeated catastrophes associated with communism, but the failure of utopian left-wing intellectuals to acknowledge this is one of them.

However, this invites an obvious question: Why are so many people like Cohen drawn to idealistic views about human nature and society? After reading “Why not socialism?”, I now understand at least part of the answer: self-deception. Cohen’s vision of socialism mistakes the self-deceptive stories we tell about cooperation for the motives that actually generate and sustain it.

Plan

A brief roadmap:

• S1 explains why the importance of reputation management in human social life drives people to deceive themselves about their motives.

• S2 explores how this interaction between human sociality and self-deception applies to cooperation.

• S3 draws on these lessons to show why Cohen’s description of human cooperation is so misleading.

The main lesson is this: Like many others, Cohen assumes that capitalism is unusual and objectionable because it relies on human self-interest to sustain cooperation. However, this is the default mode of human cooperation, including cooperation that sustains highly egalitarian social worlds. Spontaneous order—forms of social organisation that result not from intentional design but from strategic interactions among self-interested individuals—is unavoidable. Capitalism is not unusual in featuring this incentive structure; it is unusual in making it undeniable.

1. Sociality and self-deception

Humans are apes that evolved through natural selection. Given this, our fundamental goals track the kinds of outcomes that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. This includes obvious things like food, sex, resources, security, and health, as well as the ability of close genetic relatives to achieve such goals. It also includes power and prestige.

At the same time, humans navigate intensely cooperative environments. In these social ecologies, achieving fitness-relevant goals depends on cultivating a good reputation. To survive and thrive, we must be welcomed into cooperative communities, make friends and allies within them, and win the respect and admiration of others. This was true of the small-scale hunter-gatherer bands in which our ancestors evolved. It is equally true of life within complex, modern societies.

Given this, the motives that guide people’s behaviour often diverge from the ways in which they present their behaviour to others. Although people benefit from acting on self-interested motives, others typically disapprove of such motives. Given this, people downplay or deny their ugly motives and exaggerate and invent more flattering ones. As it is often said, we are instinctive press secretaries skilled at interpreting and rationalising our behaviours in ways that make us look good.

To be clear, the point is not that people are Machiavellian psychopaths underneath the confabulations and self-narratives they develop. Humans have prosocial instincts, empathy, and an intuitive sense of fairness. The point is rather that these likeable features are inevitably limited, and self-serving motives—for prestige, power, and resources—often play a bigger role in our behaviour than we are eager to admit.

Further, our spin doctoring rarely involves intentional deception. It is more akin to self-deception. Although reputation management is sometimes conscious and deliberate, it usually occurs automatically. For the most part, people sincerely believe their self-serving propaganda. That is, there is an uncomfortable sense in which the press secretary inside your brain is you.

2. Cooperation and Confabulation

The interaction between human sociality and self-deception applies to human cooperation itself. There is a mismatch between the reasons we cooperate and the self-serving stories we tell about the reasons we cooperate.

The reasons we cooperate

Humans are intensely cooperative. Why? What motivates individuals to help and assist others? Why are people often so friendly, generous, and fair-minded?

Genuine altruism plays an important role among close family members. For well-known evolutionary reasons, organisms can propagate their genes by helping relatives who share copies of those genes. This is why the most intense cooperation typically occurs among relatives, and extended kinship networks are such a common form of social organisation.

However, most human cooperation is not altruistic; it is mutualistic. Outside the family, people cooperate for mutual benefit—to achieve fitness-relevant goals they could not achieve independently.

For example, we cooperate for reasons of interdependence. In many contexts, we depend on—that is, have a self-interested stake in the survival and success of—others, so we benefit ourselves by helping them. Although the concept of interdependence makes many people feel warm and fuzzy, it has a harsh logic: if we do not depend on others—e.g., because they are a rival, outsider, or burden—motives to help them often disappear.

We also cooperate so that others might return the favour. This includes long-term reciprocal relationships between spouses and friends, as well as community-wide (“indirect”) reciprocity whereby people aid others so that someone (not necessarily the specific person they helped) will return the favour. Such community-wide cooperation is typically scaffolded by social norms and gossip, which emerge because people personally benefit from designing, enforcing, and conforming to norms and from spreading and consuming juicy tittle-tattle about people’s behaviours and misdeeds.

Relatedly, we cooperate to improve our reputations and win esteem. People benefit from being seen as virtuous, norm-abiding community members. A good reputation is socially rewarded, protects people against collective punishment, and makes them more attractive mates, friends, and allies. Given this, self-sacrifice, benevolence, and generosity are often reputationally lucrative, which explains why—paradoxically—people sometimes compete to be more cooperative than others.

The reasons we think we cooperate

A striking feature of research on the evolution of human cooperation is that the explanations it identifies—for example, mutual benefit, interdependence, reciprocity, reputation, and prestige—often bear little resemblance to people’s own understanding of their cooperative behaviour.

I am not making the trivial point that people are oblivious to the evolutionary reasons for their actions. Even if people’s prosocial instincts are ultimately rooted in the fitness benefits of cooperation, such Darwinian rationales are always distinct from people’s proximate motives. For example, people typically have sex not to reproduce but because sex feels good, even though the Darwinian reason sex feels good is to encourage reproduction. Likewise, people care for their children not to propagate their genes but because they love their children, even though the Darwinian reason for parental love is that it helps people propagate their genes.

Mutualistic cooperation is different: it is not just the Darwinian rationale for cooperation that clashes with our self-understanding but the proximate motives driving our behaviour. Because mutualistic cooperation functions to promote individual self-interest, people are generally motivated to cooperate only when doing so is personally advantageous. That is, unlike sex or the well-being of their children, people do not place a non-instrumental value on mutualistic cooperation; it must be incentivised.

This is why cooperation is so fragile and challenging. For people to be motivated to help others, they must, at some level, view it as promoting their interests—for example, because it will be reciprocated or improve their reputation or because failing to help will be punished. Without such incentives, cooperation evaporates.

You simply cannot understand human societies or history—the wars, the raids, the slavery, the genocides, the hierarchy, the oppression, the exploitation, the free riding, and so on—without grasping this basic feature of human psychology.

Nevertheless, when people describe their cooperative behaviour, they almost never acknowledge this situation. They depict self-interest as irrelevant to their friendliness, fair-mindedness, and generosity. The help others because others need help, because they care about the “common good”, because it is “the right thing to do”, and so on. They value cooperation not because it constitutes a personally advantageous strategy; they value it as an end in itself.

Once again, the point is not that this self-conception is a lie. People sincerely—indeed, passionately—believe such stories. Moreover, we have evolved to cultivate prosocial traits and dispositions that make such stories plausible. Because it is costly to appear like calculating and selective cooperators, we often cultivate robust prosocial instincts designed to appear uncalculating and unselective. Nevertheless, just like press secretaries are highly skilled at painting their client’s behaviour in the most attractive light, the stories we tell—and believe—about our motives for cooperation are designed not for accuracy but to paint our behaviour in ways that make us look good.

This subtle interaction between human self-interest, sociality, and self-deception creates a choice for those attempting to understand human societies. You can either engage with the real reasons people cooperate, as uncomfortable as they might be, or you can engage with the self-deceptive fairytales people are motivated to tell about the reasons they cooperate.

If you embrace the former option, you get a tragic but realistic view of the human condition. If you embrace the latter, you get the political worldview underlying G.A. Cohen’s “Why not socialism?”

3. Cooperation for realists

In political philosophy, Cohen is well-known for arguing that our understanding of justice should not be constrained by trifling things like human nature. Unlike John Rawls, who thought that our conception of a just society should make certain concessions to our moral limitations, Cohen argues that it should not. If humans are too selfish for socialism, that would be a criticism of humans, not socialism.

Nevertheless, in “Why not socialism?”, Cohen claims that humans are not too self-interested for socialism. More generally, the book is shot through with factual claims and assumptions about human motivations and cooperation, which shape Cohen’s understanding of small-scale egalitarianism and its contrast with capitalism.

For example, when it comes to understanding camping trips, Cohen argues—in fact, simply asserts—that the norms of equality and community they embody arise because people intrinsically value them and so aim at them directly. In such settings, “People cooperate with a common concern that, so far as is possible, everybody has a roughly similar opportunity to flourish."

According to Cohen, this sharply distinguishes camping trips—and egalitarian modes of social organisation more generally—from capitalism. Although he concedes that capitalism has some beneficial social consequences (e.g., in generating wealth and efficiently coordinating large-scale human activity), he bemoans the fact that these consequences are ultimately rooted in self-interested motives.

This fundamentally misunderstands the nature of mutualistic cooperation. The feature of capitalism that Cohen dislikes so much—the fact that it achieves social cooperation through an incentive structure ultimately rooted in individual self-interest—is a universal feature of human social organisation outside the family, including in highly egalitarian social environments of the sort that Cohen endorses.

Egalitarianism for realists

For most of human history (i.e., all history prior to the Neolithic Revolution), humans were on a kind of lifelong camping trip, living primarily in small-scale, nomadic hunter-gatherer groups.¹ In this sense, Cohen’s decision to frame his discussion of socialism around a camping trip is interesting because there is lots of anthropological research on how hunter-gatherer groups achieve social cooperation and organise their societies.

Importantly, this research appears to vindicate Cohen’s intuition that small-scale camping trips tend to be highly egalitarian. Especially when contrasted with the steep social inequalities that characterise human societies since the emergence of agriculture, small-scale hunter-gatherer communities generally seem to achieve a high degree of equality and collective sharing.

However, like Marx’s mistaken speculations about “primitive communism”, Cohen misunderstands how egalitarian cooperation is achieved. At least in hunter-gatherer groups, it does not seem to arise because people value equality intrinsically or set aside self-interest; it emerges because of how self-interest and social competition play out in contexts in which people depend on social approval and strongly resist being dominated (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

As Paul Bloom puts it (see also),

“Egalitarian lifestyles of the hunter-gatherers exist because the individuals care a lot about status. Individuals in these societies end up roughly equal because everyone is struggling to ensure that nobody gets too much power over him or her”)

More generally, norms favouring equality arise as equilibria among people with similar enforcement capacities, especially in social worlds characterised by a high degree of interdependence. The cooperation sustained in such contexts is, therefore, not the result of valuing cooperation for the sake of cooperation; it emerges from informal but intense—and often highly oppressive—mechanisms of social control, including nosiness, gossip, reputation, and group punishment, as well as various forms of ostracism, mockery, and humiliation inflicted on anyone who exhibits signs of “big shot” behaviour.

In other words, norms of fairness and equality do not arise because unconditional altruists value them intrinsically; they emerge as a form of spontaneous order in highly specific social conditions where enforcing and conforming to such norms constitutes the best strategy for self-interested individuals.

Of course, for reasons already explained, this is not how members of such egalitarian groups consciously understand their behaviour. According to their self-presentation, they do not aid others for personal benefit but because others need aid; they do not conform to social norms to maintain a good reputation but because it is the right thing to do; and they do not favour equal outcomes because it is their best option given the bargaining power and enforcement capacities of others but because of the inherent value of equality.

Nevertheless, such self-understandings are, in a deep sense, self-deceptive. We know this because of extensive sociological and anthropological research on the complex and fragile forms of social control necessary to sustain such cooperation. We know it because simple evolutionary reasoning shows that it could not be otherwise. And most importantly, we know it because human history provides countless examples of what happens when the incentives that sustain egalitarianism break down.

Like many utopian left-wing intellectuals, Cohen misunderstands all this. Instead of engaging with the complex incentives that underlie and sustain social equality, he indulges in self-deceptive fairytales about it instead.

This is especially clear in Cohen’s treatment of reciprocity.

Reciprocity for realists

Cohen appreciates that all human societies must involve forms of reciprocity. In modern capitalist economies, this reciprocity takes a very specific form—for example, firms provide goods and services in exchange for money—but even primitive, non-market-forms of economic organisation involve pooling resources, exchanging goods and services, and dividing up labour.

However, reciprocity is awkward. “You scratch my back, I scratch yours” seems calculating and mercenary, a form of cooperation in which cooperators treat others merely as a means to their own gratification and not as an end in themselves. Given this, reciprocity is usually accompanied by a large amount of denial and self-deception. People bend over backwards to obscure that they expect to be compensated for their generosity even while implicitly keeping track of the costs and benefits of their interactions and relationships.

Given Cohen’s distaste for self-interested forms of cooperation, reciprocity is especially awkward for him. Therefore, he goes to great lengths to argue that the kind of reciprocity he endorses is the good kind of reciprocity, the socialist kind, in contrast with a bad, capitalist, “market form of reciprocity.”

Market reciprocity, Cohen argues, “motivates productive contribution not on the basis of commitment to one’s fellow human beings and a desire to serve them while being served by them, but on the basis of cash reward.” It is motivated by “some mixture of greed and fear”: greed to make money or get a good bargain and fear of poverty and other losses if one does not do one’s job or serve other people.

With communal reciprocity, in contrast, “I produce in a spirit of commitment to my fellow human beings: I desire to serve them while being served by them.” Although this involves “an expectation of reciprocation,” this “nonmarket cooperation relishes cooperation itself”:

“The relationship between us under communal reciprocity is not the market-instrumental one in which I give because I get, but the noninstrumental one in which I give because you need, or want, and in which I expect a comparable generosity from you.”

In other words, socialism depends on reciprocity, but it is a lovely, cuddly kind of reciprocity that results not from anything so mercenary and unappealing as a desire to cooperate for mutual gain; rather, it emerges as a fortunate byproduct of people’s abstract commitment to serving each other and relishing cooperation itself.

This is a naive and fundamentally unserious attempt to understand reciprocity, one which is focused more on how social cooperation is framed and described than on how it is achieved.

4. The lesson

Like many others, Cohen objects to capitalism on the grounds that it achieves large-scale social cooperation on the basis of self-interested (“repugnant”) motives. Although he acknowledges that capitalism channels self-interest into certain desirable ends (e.g., wealth and innovation), he asks, “Who would propose running a society on the basis of such motives… if they were not known to be effective?”

The idea that capitalism achieves desirable outcomes from self-serving motives is often considered a great theoretical insight of figures like Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith. As Smith wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love.”

However, this insight can mislead as much as it illuminates. It encourages the view that achieving cooperation via self-interest is a peculiarity of capitalism, or at least an unusual characteristic of it. And it suggests that whereas capitalism produces desirable consequences that nobody directly aims at, the desirable characteristics of more “natural” forms of social organisation—for example, the equality and community that often characterise small groups—are the outcome of intentional design.

This is mistaken. Smith’s insight about capitalism's incentive structure generalises to all modes of social organisation and most collective achievements outside the immediate family. From the equality of hunter-gatherer bands to the unprecedented intellectual advances of modern science, such outcomes result not from people’s “humanity” but from fragile incentives that exploit and constrain self-love and the pursuit of status.

From this perspective, capitalism's unusual feature is not its reliance on self-interest and social competition. Its unusual feature is that such motives exist out in the open. Although even profit-seeking firms try to obscure their self-interest—for example, Starbucks’ stated mission is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup, one neighborhood at a time”—everyone sees through the bullshit. With most other forms of cooperation, self-interest is easier to deny, downplay, and obfuscate. Like Starbucks, people try to paint their motives in the most attractive light possible. Unlike Starbucks, however, they are often more likely to get away with it.

None of this means that capitalism is optimal or that socialism is impossible. What is impossible, however, is dispensing with the role of self-love and status competition in understanding—and attempting to improve—human societies.

1. This is a bit of a simplification. For example, small hunter-gatherer groups were embedded in large and often fluid social networks, and there is scholarly controversy over the degree of social complexity and diversity among our ancestors. Nevertheless, there seems to be a broad consensus that the modal form of social organisation throughout most of human history involved relatively small-scale, nomadic hunter-gatherer groups.