THE HUNTER--GATHERERS WOULDN'T TOLERATE
FAILURE TO SHARE
A cave painting from the early Holocene in Spain shows ten figures with bows in their hands and a lone figure prone on the ground with what appear to be ten arrows sticking out of him. The configuration strongly suggests an execution rather than death in combat. Boehm [the super anthropologist] points out that among current-day foraging groups, group execution is one of the most common ways of punishing males who try to claim a disproportionate amount of the group's resources.
It's revealing, then, to look at modern society through the prism of more than a million years of human cooperation and resource sharing. Subsistence-level hunters aren't necessarily more moral than other people ; they just can't get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny. Modern society, on the other hand, is a sprawling and anonymous mess where people can get away with incredible levels of dishonesty without getting caught. What tribal people would consider a profound betrayal of the group, modern society simply dismisses as fraud.
THE BLATANT FRAUD IN MODERN AMERICA
Around 3 percent of people on unemployment assistance intentionally cheat the system, for example, which costs the United States more than $2 billion a year. Such abuse would be immediately punished in a tribal society. Fraud in welfare and other entitlement programs is estimated to be at roughly the same rate, which adds another $1.5 billion in annual losses. That figure, however, is eclipsed by Medicare and Medicaid fraud, which is conservatively estimated at 10 percent of total payments ----or around $100 BILLION A YEAR. Some estimates run to two to three times that figure.
IF YOU THINK MEDICARE / MEDICAID
CHEATERS NEED KILLING, WAIT TILL
YOU SEE THE FIGURES FOR INSURANCE
COMPANY SLUTS WHO UNABASHEDLY
CHEAT CONSUMERS
Fraud in the insurance industry is calculated to be $100 billion to $300 billion a year, a cost that gets passed directly to consumers in the form of higher premiums. All told, combined public-and private-sector fraud costs every household in the United States probably around $5,000 a year --- or roughly the equivalent of working four months at a minimum-wage job. A hunter-gatherer community that lost four months' worth of food would face a serious threat to its survival, and its retribution against the people who caused the hardship would be immediate and probably very violent.
Westerners live in a complex society, and opportunities for scamming relatively small amounts of money off the bottom are almost endless --- and very hard to catch. But scamming large amounts of money off the top seems even harder to catch. Fraud by American DEFENSE CONTRACTORS is estimated at around $100 billion per year, and they are relatively well behaved compared to the FINANCIAL INDUSTRY. The FBI reports that since the economic recession of 2008, securities and commodities fraud in the United States has gone up by more than 50 percent. In the decade prior, almost 90 percent of corporate fraud cases---insider trading, kickbacks and bribes, false accounting --- implicated the company's chief executive officer and/or chief financial officer. The recession, which was triggered by illegal and unwise banking practices, cost American shareholders several trillion dollars in stock value losses and is thought to have set the American economy back by a decade and a half. Total costs for the recession have been estimated to be as high as $14 trillion --- or about $45,000 per citizen.
Most tribal and subsistence-level societies would inflict severe punishments on anyone who caused that kind of damage. Cowardice is another form of community betrayal, and most Indian tribes punished it with immediate death . It can be assumed that hunter-gatherers would treat their version of a welfare cheat or a dishonest banker as decisively as they would a coward. They may not kill him, but he would certainly be banished from the community. The fact that a group of people can cost American society several trillion dollars in losses --- roughly one-quarter of that year's gross domestic product --- and not be tried for high crimes shows how completely de-tribalized the country has become.
MORE TO COME.
A cave painting from the early Holocene in Spain shows ten figures with bows in their hands and a lone figure prone on the ground with what appear to be ten arrows sticking out of him. The configuration strongly suggests an execution rather than death in combat. Boehm [the super anthropologist] points out that among current-day foraging groups, group execution is one of the most common ways of punishing males who try to claim a disproportionate amount of the group's resources.
It's revealing, then, to look at modern society through the prism of more than a million years of human cooperation and resource sharing. Subsistence-level hunters aren't necessarily more moral than other people ; they just can't get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny. Modern society, on the other hand, is a sprawling and anonymous mess where people can get away with incredible levels of dishonesty without getting caught. What tribal people would consider a profound betrayal of the group, modern society simply dismisses as fraud.
THE BLATANT FRAUD IN MODERN AMERICA
Around 3 percent of people on unemployment assistance intentionally cheat the system, for example, which costs the United States more than $2 billion a year. Such abuse would be immediately punished in a tribal society. Fraud in welfare and other entitlement programs is estimated to be at roughly the same rate, which adds another $1.5 billion in annual losses. That figure, however, is eclipsed by Medicare and Medicaid fraud, which is conservatively estimated at 10 percent of total payments ----or around $100 BILLION A YEAR. Some estimates run to two to three times that figure.
IF YOU THINK MEDICARE / MEDICAID
CHEATERS NEED KILLING, WAIT TILL
YOU SEE THE FIGURES FOR INSURANCE
COMPANY SLUTS WHO UNABASHEDLY
CHEAT CONSUMERS
Fraud in the insurance industry is calculated to be $100 billion to $300 billion a year, a cost that gets passed directly to consumers in the form of higher premiums. All told, combined public-and private-sector fraud costs every household in the United States probably around $5,000 a year --- or roughly the equivalent of working four months at a minimum-wage job. A hunter-gatherer community that lost four months' worth of food would face a serious threat to its survival, and its retribution against the people who caused the hardship would be immediate and probably very violent.
Westerners live in a complex society, and opportunities for scamming relatively small amounts of money off the bottom are almost endless --- and very hard to catch. But scamming large amounts of money off the top seems even harder to catch. Fraud by American DEFENSE CONTRACTORS is estimated at around $100 billion per year, and they are relatively well behaved compared to the FINANCIAL INDUSTRY. The FBI reports that since the economic recession of 2008, securities and commodities fraud in the United States has gone up by more than 50 percent. In the decade prior, almost 90 percent of corporate fraud cases---insider trading, kickbacks and bribes, false accounting --- implicated the company's chief executive officer and/or chief financial officer. The recession, which was triggered by illegal and unwise banking practices, cost American shareholders several trillion dollars in stock value losses and is thought to have set the American economy back by a decade and a half. Total costs for the recession have been estimated to be as high as $14 trillion --- or about $45,000 per citizen.
Most tribal and subsistence-level societies would inflict severe punishments on anyone who caused that kind of damage. Cowardice is another form of community betrayal, and most Indian tribes punished it with immediate death . It can be assumed that hunter-gatherers would treat their version of a welfare cheat or a dishonest banker as decisively as they would a coward. They may not kill him, but he would certainly be banished from the community. The fact that a group of people can cost American society several trillion dollars in losses --- roughly one-quarter of that year's gross domestic product --- and not be tried for high crimes shows how completely de-tribalized the country has become.
MORE TO COME.
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