48. Immorality of the group

In his Moral man and immoral society, Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out that while for the individual the egotistic instinct for survival may be mitigated by a countervailing instinct for altruism, on the level of groups that largely falls away. A salient case of group egotism is the recent one of bankers.

Niebuhr gives four explanations of group egotism. First, according to him benevolence is a personal, not a collective characteristic. Second, in a group people can mask their personal egotism as a collective interest. The dictator Mubarak was authoritarian, he claimed, not for his personal interest but to protect Egypt from Islamic radicalism. Third, in groups the mediocre person can project and compensate his/her frustrated personal ambitions in the glory of the group, the nation, religion, or a political ideal. Fourth, there is a cognitive effect. After a while, an isolated elite can honestly perceive its perspective as the only viable one, having become blind to the injustice it creates, and sees protest as ungrateful, ignorant, perverse and self-destructive. When political power also generates economic interest, in corruption and appropriation of parts of the economy, this yields increased vulnerability to its loss, and the consequent need for more power to guard it, which further isolates the elite.

I think there are further causes. First, there is the phenomenon of prisoner’s dilemma’s: individually one would want to take a less egotistic course of action, but one cannot afford to as long as others do not go along, and this is what they all think, so that no one takes the step. ‘The others do it as well’, is the excuse. Think again of the bankers. And national governments are themselves involved in a prisoner’s dilemma of keeping an industry (banking) from leaving the country. 

Second, the needs that people have in common in a group are of a ‘lower’, more egotistic nature, of physical needs, money, and security, rather than more individualized needs for social legitimacy, responsibility and ‘higher’ values.

Third, according to my hypothesis, discussed previously in this blog, the good of loyalty within the group was not viable in evolution without the bad of suspicion against outsiders. The demand for in-group loyalty makes it very difficult for a single voice to dissent. 

However, there are also a few rays of light. First, with state power one can help to break through the stalemate of prisoner’s dilemma’s by imposing a solution that participants claim they would favour if only the others went along. Second, there can be countervailing power with organizations that take social responsibility as their goal (such as Amnesty International, Geenpeace, etc.). Third, moral isolation of the group may be lessened by stimulating, or demanding, more diversity within the group, and by shaking it up with a higher turnover of entrance and exit. Think of boards of directors of large firms. That is also one of the virtues of democracy: preventing governments from lasting too long and exposing them to the challenge of outsiders.