Cooperative Conservatism: The Path Towards All Answers

Cooperative Conservatism

Biological survival has always relied on the deliberate engineering of our environment. Many animals have worked to improve their surroundings to secure a better baseline, be it in happiness, safety, or comfort, much like beavers engineering dams or elephants digging dry riverbeds for water. We follow this same instinct.

We use our intellect to allow us to be both conservative in our survival and social. By minimizing risk, saving physical energy, and planning for scarcity, we secure our safety; by building communal hearths, dividing labor for projects we couldn’t easily accomplish ourselves, and networking for mutual benefits, we secure our future.

This pairing invites a re-evaluation of what it means to be “conservative,” both biologically and politically. At its core, biological conservatism is the drive to preserve life, secure stability, and protect the conditions that guarantee survival. In chemistry, systems settle into their most stable state when they reach the lowest free energy available to them, and for social animals, cooperation is how we lower the cost of staying alive. Because humans are intrinsically pack animals, our greatest strength, adaptation, runs on our collective intellect: knowledge pooled across many minds and passed down across generations. Our most effective method of conservation is therefore social cooperation.

That alignment holds even if we apply the traditional political definition of conservatism, namely the desire to preserve existing orders, proven traditions, and handed-down values. We must ask ourselves what the most proven tradition of human existence is.

The original “existing order” that guaranteed our survival and mental stability for millennia was the tight-knit, interdependent community. (Detailed explanation: The link between close bonds and survival is still visible today: across 148 studies following more than 300,000 people, those with stronger social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival over the follow-up period (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010). Having few social contacts [social isolation], feeling alone [loneliness] and living alone were each linked to a 26% to 32% higher likelihood of death, comparable to well-established risk factors (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015); a later meta-analysis of 90 cohort studies with over two million adults found a similar 32% higher likelihood for social isolation but a smaller 14% for loneliness (Wang et al., 2023).) Modernity, with its hyper-individualism, digital isolation, and fragmented societies, has largely forgotten or dismantled this ancient tradition. Thus, rather than defend the modern status quo of isolation, one could argue that a conservative who takes these traditions seriously would fight to restore those foundational social bonds, shared infrastructures, and communal responsibilities (such as environmental protection and education).

Even if we look at other definitions, like psychological conservatism (the aversion to unnecessary risk) or fiscal conservatism (the prudent management of resources), they all point toward the same conclusion. No one can sustainably manage resources or mitigate risk if the social fabric supporting them is crumbling. In every sense, the instinct to conserve is inextricably linked to being deeply social, meaning we cannot securely conserve a thriving baseline for ourselves without cultivating the health of the broader ecosystem we inhabit.

A quick warning before this gets political. If you call yourself a conservative, the next pages will probably make you want to stop reading, and if you don’t call yourself one, they might make you want to cheer. Neither reaction tells you whether the argument holds, so I would ask you to judge the reasoning and not the banner attached to it.

Measured against the social baseline laid out above, much of modern political conservatism appears inconsistent with its own root values, preserving the image of stewardship more than its practice. If a political faction opposes the expansion of communal support, the improvement of shared infrastructure, the cultivation of social harmony, and the rigorous care of our natural environment, they are failing to conserve the true foundations of human strength and tradition.

And this isn’t just my standard. Edmund Burke located the root of public affection in loving “the little platoon we belong to in society”; Roger Scruton argued that conservatism and environmental stewardship spring from the same love of home; Russell Kirk, a founding figure of modern American conservatism, never drove and called the automobile a “mechanical Jacobin,” a revolution against settled ways of life; and Wendell Berry, a writer many traditionalists claim as their own, spent a lifetime defending local community against the very extraction described in this chapter. A conservatism that neglects these foundations fails its own forebears long before it fails me. These same thinkers also defended things I wouldn’t, from inherited hierarchy to the wisdom of prejudice, so I am not claiming them as allies; only that on community, they set the very standard I am applying.

To fully understand this betrayal, a critical distinction must first be made between individualism and hyper-individualism. Individualism itself is immensely beneficial, a concept that will be explored in greater depth later. A collective is valuable in the first place precisely because of the individuals within it. A thriving community relies on everyone bringing their own unique perspectives, varied life experiences, and different strengths to the table.

While a hive mind likely possesses greater strength in a static world, it is far less capable of progress and adaptation. Bound to a single, unified consciousness, it cannot simultaneously brainstorm different solutions or easily test multiple paths forward at once. If a collective aims to learn and evolve, it requires distinct individuals, because just as genetic variation is the raw material of biological evolution, the variance of individual thought is the raw material of human progress.

However, hyper-individualism is a toxic distortion of this ideal. It is the modern myth of the entirely self-made, isolated conqueror who extracts from society but believes they owe absolutely nothing to it. It shifts the mindset from “I use my unique strengths to improve my environment” to “I am supreme, and the collective is merely a resource to exploit or an obstacle to ignore.” This embrace of hyper-individualism is a betrayal of ancient human tradition, since humanity’s strength was forged through bonds of mutual interest, shared sacrifice, and interdependent survival rather than total isolation.

Because of this fundamental contradiction, much of modern political conservatism risks no longer conserving what it claims to. Where that happens, it wears the uniform of heritage while neglecting the duties that uniform was intended to carry. If we examine how it engages with the past, we see that it relies on selective nostalgia, detaching traditions from their original context. It treats historical heritage like a buffet, carefully picking and choosing which traditions to enforce and which to ignore. It strips traditions of their heavy moral obligations, reducing them to mere identity markers or cultural weapons used to maintain dominance.

Consider what it chooses to hold versus what it discards. If it fiercely clings to the aesthetics of tradition, order, nationalistic symbols, rigid social hierarchies, and exclusionary boundaries, it tends to neglect, if not entirely erode, the core civic and communal duties embedded within those very traditions. For example, it frequently invokes religious heritage to restrict the social freedoms of others, while systematically ignoring those same religious mandates to welcome the stranger or care for the poor. It may romanticize the robust communities of the past, yet dismantle the public funding and civic duties that made them possible. It may demand the wealth, knowledge, and privileges generated by globalization, yet reject the mutual goals required to sustain them.

The strongest objection I can think of is that community was never built by the state in the first place. Families, churches, local associations, and neighbors carried these communal duties long before any public program existed, and many conservatives oppose public provision because they believe centralized programs crowd out those organic bonds. I take this objection seriously, since it doesn’t question the value of community itself, only the vehicle that should carry it. Fine, but then that route comes with obligations of its own. If one rejects the state in favor of civil society, one must build and sustain it. Otherwise, the objection merely restates the contradiction it was meant to answer. The argument also has to account for its limits. Care that flows through membership tends to stop where the membership ends, leaving the nonbeliever, the newcomer, or the outcast dependent on a goodwill they may never receive. And some foundations, such as infrastructure, ecosystems, and schools, likely demand a degree of coordination that no congregation or neighborhood association could provide on its own.

And the two routes don’t even have to compete. Several societies, the Nordic countries often cited among them, combine extensive public provision with remarkably dense networks of clubs, associations, and volunteer organizations, suggesting that a robust public foundation can support communal life instead of replacing it. (Detailed explanation: Across 23 European countries, higher welfare spending went with more, not less, membership in associations and more trust in institutions, though the data cannot show which causes which [crowding-out hypothesis] (van Oorschot & Arts, 2005), and Scandinavia has kept unusually high and stable levels of volunteering (Henriksen et al., 2019).) Hence, whether a movement prefers the state or the church hall matters far less than whether it actually strengthens either, and who is left standing outside both.

If a movement fails this test, the contradictions outlined above remain intact. Understanding how an ideology can sustain them requires distinguishing between a functional political philosophy and a dogmatic religion, a divide rooted in the difference between values and principles. Values represent what we consider important in life. They are the subjective ideals we cherish or aspire to, such as personal safety, freedom, community, or order. In the simplified neurobiological picture I am using here, values reflect our brain’s associative memory, pairing specific concepts with emotional states and dopamine responses that signal safety, belonging, and identity. By themselves, values are neither rules nor obligations, and because they are tied to our lived experiences, they can and often should evolve as we grow and our environment changes.

While values determine what matters to us, principles provide the structured guidelines on how to act to achieve and protect those values. If values are the destination, principles are the compass. A compass that shifts its magnetic north depending on our current mood or financial convenience is practically useless.

When used appropriately, principles function by design as self-imposed restrictions, which is why people who confuse freedom with the absence of boundaries typically resist them. Yet upholding a suitable principle is a worthwhile trade, as you sacrifice the fleeting freedom to act on convenience in exchange for the lasting strength of conviction, self-esteem, and a self-worth that doesn’t depend on another person’s validation.

Principles are actionable standards and logical frameworks derived from our values that must be applied consistently to function properly. If a society holds freedom as a core emotional value, the logically consistent principle derived from it is the equal application of the law, protecting even those with whom we fiercely disagree. Whenever a political faction abandons consistent principles to restrict rivals or excuse its own camp, it ceases to be a political philosophy and mutates into an ever-moving, unaccountable religion, where shifting (emotional) preferences become the only rule.

Defenders of traditionalism sometimes argue that their resistance to change is not arbitrary preference, but epistemic humility, a trust in historically survived wisdom over the hubris of modern reason. Yet, every revered, ancient tradition was once an innovation in its own time. If the aim is to respect the accumulated wisdom of generational trial and error, the most rigorous continuation of that humility is the scientific method.

When modern conservative movements clash with established science, denying ecological degradation or public health realities simply because they are inconvenient, they freeze the very mechanism of adaptation that built civilization.

Such an anti-evolutionary posture becomes self-destructive when paired with exclusionary nationalism. Even in ancient times, survival relied heavily on trade and cooperation with neighboring groups, and today our supply chains, medical breakthroughs, and achievements like the International Space Station are the product of an interconnected global human tribe.

When regressive rhetoric turns inward to demonize urban, educated, or progressive demographics, and the “experts” and institutions associated with them, it conveniently hides that these are the very places that train and employ the doctors, scientists, engineers, and educators the entire society depends on to function. Alienating the very people who maintain our healthcare, design our technology, and build our infrastructure attacks the tribe’s own organs.

This critique isn’t aimed at the consistent hyper-individualist who walks a path that may suit them best and accepts the consequences without complaint. My observation, however, is that such people are rare. Far more common is the hypocrite whose desire to be “self-reliant” rests entirely on the premise of enjoying benefits they didn’t take part in sustaining. They want to be fiercely egoistic and openly exploitative but are baffled when the system they are draining finally begins to fail. Blind to their own hand in this collapse, their immediate reflex is likely to shift responsibility, frantically blaming others for their loss of gain.

While scapegoating is the most obvious mechanism for deflecting accountability, there is another, far more insidious strategy in pessimism. Optimism is demanding because relying on the belief that action can bring change requires us to take responsibility for our future. Pessimism, by contrast, is a convenient retreat, as it provides an alibi for unrestrained extraction.

If one convinces themselves that the end is near and decline is inevitable, the only logical choice may be to aggressively harvest whatever value is left to make the best out of it. Whether that fatalism stems from calculated greed or a subconscious defense mechanism to shield the ego from disappointment, the external outcome ends up the same.

To understand why we are so susceptible to this short-term thinking, it helps to view humanity strictly as a biological system. We are a species operating on ancient biological hardware while wielding god-level technology. We possess an evolutionary bias toward the immediate. In our early origins, this rapid reaction to localized, visible danger was a key survival mechanism, allowing us to instantly fight or flee a predator. Today, however, that same wiring means we frequently struggle to process more abstract existential threats.

This evolutionary hardware may contribute to the sunk cost fallacy, the tendency to stubbornly continue investing time, energy, or resources into a failing endeavor because we have already invested so much. (Detailed explanation: Mice, rats, and humans tested on matched foraging tasks all became more likely to keep waiting the more time they had already invested (Sweis et al., 2018), though a review found no clear case of the full sunk-cost error in animals and traced the human version to an overextended “don’t waste” rule (Arkes & Ayton, 1999).) In the modern world, this is often a cognitive flaw that keeps people stuck in bad investments, dead-end careers, toxic relationships, or doomed projects.

Yet for our ancestors, that same tendency may have been a useful mechanism for success.

One widely discussed but contested hypothesis holds that some early humans relied on persistence hunting, relentlessly tracking prey across exhausting distances until the animal finally collapsed. (Detailed explanation: The idea was proposed to explain our endurance-running anatomy (Bramble & Lieberman, 2004) and challenged on practical grounds (Pickering & Bunn, 2007), while a 2024 review of about 400 recorded pursuits argued that such hunts can be efficient in the right conditions (Morin & Winterhalder, 2024).) In environments of constant scarcity, walking away empty-handed after expending massive amounts of energy carried a heavy survival cost and might have wired us to push through exhaustion rather than quit.

We can’t just wait for our biology to catch up. Evolution operates on a glacial timeline and relies on differences in who survives and reproduces across many generations. For most of history, early death did much of that sorting, a harsh filter that our modern societies have, fortunately, largely removed. And even if a mass extinction event were to occur today, it would likely sort survivors far more by circumstance than by inherited traits, since access to shelter, supplies, or simply the right location is now distributed by a world we built rather than by our genes. (Detailed explanation: Natural selection still acts in low-mortality societies, because it works through differences in how many children people have: among women in the Framingham Heart Study, it was slowly shifting traits such as height, cholesterol, blood pressure, and the age at first birth (Byars et al., 2010).) After all, humanity’s strength stems from creating the tools and shaping the environment required to bypass our innate biological limits, continuously raising our individual ceiling through collective capability.

Our genetic hardware has changed little over the last few millennia, at least in the ways that shape how we think, yet our general competence and the achievements of our most capable minds have expanded drastically. We have become far more effective at using our potential because each generation builds upon an inherited foundation.

Since it would be impossible for a single individual to construct all our current knowledge from scratch in one lifetime, let alone retain it all, we divide this burden among ourselves, heavily relying on written records and shared infrastructure to maintain a level of precision that memory alone could never sustain with such fidelity. Therefore, rather than filter humanity for better traits, a modern catastrophe would primarily filter for those who currently possess a situational advantage.

Whether we face the gradual collapse of society, ecological degradation, or infrastructural decay, we usually wait until it damages what lies within our perceived proximity, regardless of whether we possess the tools to be wiser and act more proactively. That proximity spans emotional and social closeness just as much as physical distance.

Our capacity for sympathy and the desire to uphold stability likely evolved to protect a smaller, immediate pack, meaning we struggle to scale that compassion to the abstract suffering of a global population, or to measure how their suffering might impact us. (Detailed explanation: Our capacity for empathy likely evolved for small, immediate groups; how small is debated, with the famous estimate of about 150 stable relationships [Dunbar’s number] (Dunbar, 1993) contested by later reanalyses (Lindenfors et al., 2021). Either way, research often finds that our feelings, and our willingness to help, flatten, and can even shrink, as the number of victims grows [psychic numbing and compassion fade] (Slovic, 2007; Västfjäll et al., 2014; Butts et al., 2019).) We might react instantly to a threat facing a loved one across the globe yet remain passive to a systemic crisis unfolding right outside our window. We wait until the threat breaches our perceived personal proximity before we act, at which point the cost of fixing it has often multiplied exponentially, if it hasn’t already become unfeasible.

Once we delay our response due to this lack of broader compassion, we risk becoming an obstacle ourselves. When a crisis finally forces us to react, a belated, self-preserving panic can turn us into a roadblock. Those who do possess the compassion and foresight to build a systemic solution are forced to expend their limited energy working around us, or perhaps even removing our influence entirely, to make progress possible.

Overcoming this shortsightedness requires recognizing what our environment entails. Beyond distant wilderness or global climate, the environment is a nested structure that spans from our own physical body and the solitary room we sit in, to our workplace, our city’s architecture and fellow citizens, all the way to the planetary ecosystem.

So long as we care about ourselves, we ought to care about our environment by extension, because the conditions surrounding us rarely act as simple additions or subtractions. Instead, negative environmental factors, whether a noisy construction site outside our window, polluted air, or forced schedules that induce (chronic) sleep deprivation and social jetlag, function as negative multipliers or dividers that fracture our capability. When we remove small friction points and cultivate healthier, happier people around us, we multiply our own trajectory, as anyone unhappy and exhausted tends to become an unreliable partner in any shared endeavor.

This also changes what we should mean by “normal.” A normal resting heart rate differs from person to person, and so does the amount of pressure or social contact someone can absorb before their capability starts to fracture. Normal, in that sense, is less a population average than the state in which your particular system runs without strain, and a sensitivity can rarely be argued away, much like fair skin can’t be talked out of a sunburn. What we can change is our exposure, by adjusting our surroundings or our methods. That calls for an honest audit, though: if every environment you enter feels wrong, the issue may lie less with the soil than with the plant.

We can visualize this relationship by expanding on our reflection from the previous chapter regarding financial wealth versus self-investment. Accumulated material wealth is much like a fortress or castle that can’t move, whereas refining your own capabilities gives you the power to rebuild that castle anywhere if your surroundings collapse.

Relying on relocation still assumes there is unspoiled ground left to claim, not to mention ground as fertile as what you left behind. Investing in and maintaining the landscape around your castle raises the value and security of even a modest home, sparing you from having to flee a deteriorating environment and rebuild from scratch. Within that balance, a calculated financial or material buffer remains a valid strategic measure that may buy the safety required to stop worrying about immediate survival and start innovating or creating, provided that buffer doesn’t mutate into hoarding that starves those around you.

Our biological bias toward proximity also reveals why focusing on our immediate local and national environment first is not a betrayal of global compassion, but a requirement of strategic leverage. If we pour all of our limited energy into trying to solve crises in distant regions where local institutions and infrastructure are severely compromised, finding powerful, capable allies on the ground who can lock in and scale those improvements is far less likely, as they would have already stabilized their environment if they possessed that leverage.

Once we concentrate on improving the environment within our reach first, we can build a resilient base and surround ourselves with educated, resourceful allies, forging the collective wave required to eventually extend meaningful help across the globe.

Our evolutionary bias toward the immediate still makes a philosophy that prioritizes short-term exploitation hard to resist. An ideology built on the rapid extraction of all kinds of resources, environmental deregulation, and the intentional erosion of public infrastructure is not conserving anything. Instead, it has weaponized the conservative aesthetic to justify harmful greed.

Such erosion of public infrastructure rarely happens by accident. Public infrastructure can be dismantled precisely because it represents a space immune to private profit. By starving shared public goods, this philosophy forces the community into a captive market where its members must purchase necessities from private entities.

Often, this dismantling is marketed under the guise of “freedom”, specifically freedom from government regulation. This claim isn’t entirely false, but it demands we ask a critical question: whose freedom is being prioritized and for what gain? When environmental protections are stripped away to maximize corporate profits, the “freedom” of an isolated entity to extract wealth is purchased at the direct expense of the public.

It is worth remembering where many of these rules came from. The regulations we resent are often formed in response to the recklessness of a past that poisoned rivers or gambled away other people’s savings. Many of today’s crises, likewise, are less sudden aberrations than the delayed harvest of seeds sown during the very “good old days” we feel nostalgic for. Idealizing the era of the spark while condemning the era of the flame ignores that both belong to one continuous chain of cause and effect.

A market can never exist in an unregulated state because it is always governed by its participants. When a neutral authority steps away under the banner of total freedom, regulatory power does not vanish but shifts by default from the public and the consumer to the market victor.

Once a competitor wins the race, their profit-maximizing next step can be to ensure they never have to run it again, diverting vast capital away from innovation and into obstruction by hoarding patents, buying and shelving emerging competitors, or lobbying for convoluted rules that suffocate smaller startups. To prevent winners from using their uninhibited freedom to restrict everyone else from reaching the starting line, a neutral, democratic State held strictly accountable by its citizenry must hold a monopoly on rule-setting and consequences.

For that referee to effectively protect the commons, our social contract ought to ensure that corporate deceit carries existential weight. When corporations knowingly fabricate or conceal truths that affect humanity’s survival, such as the oil and plastics industries promoting the illusion that most plastic is economically recyclable, minor fines are merely priced in as a routine cost of doing business whenever they are smaller than the profit the deception earned. Even without deceit, treating knowledge as property can stall human understanding, as when the state oil company Pemex surveyed the Chicxulub crater in 1978: its data stayed confidential, and although two of its geophysicists presented the structure at a 1981 conference, it went largely unnoticed, and it took until the early 1990s for the crater to be linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs. (Detailed explanation: Two of the Pemex geophysicists who had found the buried ring in 1978 co-authored the 1991 paper that identified it as the impact site (Hildebrand et al., 1991), and a panel of 41 researchers later concluded that the impact triggered the mass extinction (Schulte et al., 2010). On plastics, industry documents show that insiders doubted from the 1970s that recycling could ever be made economic, while the industry kept promoting it (Sullivan, 2020; Center for Climate Integrity, 2024); of all the plastic waste generated up to 2015, only about 9 percent had been recycled (Geyer et al., 2017).)

Whenever an entity deliberately hides important knowledge from the world or poisons the shared environment through deception, the resulting financial penalties ought to be insurmountable enough to threaten corporate bankruptcy, ideally reaching the owners and decision-makers before the workers who had no say in it.

And this exploited community does not necessarily have to be local. The extractivist mindset operates on a global scale. Corporations can sidestep domestic regulations by outsourcing their production to developing nations, often to heavily industrialized regions where weaker labor protections make exploitation easier and environmental rules are often weakly enforced. This arrangement allows the isolated entity to hoard the financial benefits at home while offshoring the costs of toxic air, poisoned water and exploited workers to a distant, vulnerable population. (Detailed explanation: US industries facing the steepest rises in pollution-control costs saw the largest rises in imports from Canada and Mexico [pollution haven effect] (Levinson & Taylor, 2008), although how much environmental rules drive where firms produce remains debated, and India’s air-pollution rules did improve air quality, unlike its water rules (Greenstone & Hanna, 2014).)

Such global offloading shatters the myth of cheap consumer goods. Nothing in this world is free of cost; at best, it is only cheap for the buyer in the present moment, because the actual price is being paid by someone else, somewhere else, whether through exploited labor, environmental destruction, or future generations.

We should also drop the illusion that society afforded the explosive economic abundance of the past few decades. Much of that comfort was financed by taking out massive (invisible) loans against the future, leaving current and upcoming generations to pay off the compounding interest in the form of infrastructural decay and ecological instability, which is why living in harmony with nature and preserving biodiversity is a matter of egoistic pragmatism rather than an aesthetic, taking only what we need now so the system we rely on doesn’t collapse later. Ecosystems can function like an intricate tower of Jenga, where every species, from microscopic soil fungi to the pollinators that three-quarters of our crop types depend on (to some degree), acts as a structural block. (Detailed explanation: Of the 115 leading food crops, 87 depend at least partly on animal pollination, and these crops make up about 35 percent of global crop production by volume (Klein et al., 2007; IPBES, 2016).)

The natural world, beyond the climate regulation, water filtration, and natural disease buffering that humanity cannot replicate at scale, represents more than three and a half billion years of evolutionary engineering and the greatest chemical library on Earth, from which roughly half of the new small-molecule drugs approved since 1981 were taken or modeled. (Detailed explanation: Of the drugs approved worldwide from 1981 to 2019, over half of all small-molecule drugs are based structurally on a natural product, either taken directly or modeled on one (Newman & Cragg, 2020; Stone et al., 2022).) To allow unstudied species to go extinct for short-term profit is akin to burning down an irreplaceable pharmacy and research library before we have even read the books.

We see this pattern repeatedly when public goods are cannibalized for private gain through the privatization of communal utilities that leaves citizens vulnerable to price gouging, or the rollback of labor protections that once ensured a stable, healthy working class.

It is starkly visible in the deliberate neglect or dismantling of public transportation. A robust public transit network is an expression of communal efficiency, providing equitable mobility for the entire society. To the extractivist, however, this shared infrastructure is a missed opportunity for profit. Once they starve public transit, they force the population into a hyper-individualized model of survival, like the mandatory ownership of private vehicles.

This engineered dependency creates a massive, captive market for car manufacturers, fossil fuel industries, and insurance companies, transforming the human need for mobility into what seems like an inescapable, lifelong financial extraction. That same logic applies to our well-being when we build a culture that prioritizes wealth, status, and superficial validation.

Employers benefit immensely when people tie their existential worth to their job title and salary, as it allows companies to buy labor at a steeper discount when employees willingly sacrifice their sleep, health, and family time to maintain or earn their worth, if not “salvation.” Simultaneously, a commercial ecosystem of “hustle” culture profits directly off the anxiety of those who feel they are falling behind, endlessly selling the illusion that the next purchase, promotion, or tier of wealth will bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to be, often with no tools for verifying if that is where they ought to be.

And when a system funnels everyone into these standardized models of working and commuting, that resulting uniformity makes it possible to exploit both our drive for individuality and our neurobiological need for variation. In the simplified picture I am using here, our brains regularly crave novel “sparks” of dopamine to break the monotony of a static routine, a mechanism that beneficially keeps our minds alert and engaged. We can see this when a factory worker subtly alters their rhythm or starts a surface-level conversation just to pass the time, or when an office employee curates a highly personalized desk and unique desktop background simply to introduce a touch of novelty into a repetitive day.

Socially, we also possess a drive to differentiate ourselves. Whether it is adding unique accessories to a standard uniform or buying custom cosmetics in a video game, people generally look for ways to stand out. This individuality serves to make it easier to signal who we are, maybe attract like-minded peers, and disassociate ourselves from groups we don’t wish to be aligned with.

When an entire population is stripped of real options for how to travel, people tend to intuitively channel both of these drives into what they travel in. Of course, this urge for self-expression exists in all forms of transit, as people customize their bicycles or curate their walking attire. Yet a car-dependent system drastically reduces the viability of these cheaper alternatives, if it doesn’t remove them entirely. Without the variation of choosing between different modes of travel, the vehicle ceases to be a mere tool for mobility and is artificially turned into a mandatory, expensive canvas for personal identity and social status.

Trapping everyone in a more limited environment guarantees more competitive consumers. It creates great conditions for upselling, pushing buyers toward luxury or unique models. It also drives brand loyalty, as a manufacturer’s history and cultivated image may become a proxy for more tangible or systemic variation.

Deprived of the ability to find distinct communities based on how they travel, people may substitute car brands for social tribes, using them to signal who they want to align with and who they wish to avoid. They may buy into the heritage of a specific brand, and over time, the very duration of that loyalty, how many years or decades a person has aligned with a specific make, becomes its own variable for individualism. They use this intertwined historical narrative to simulate a sense of uniqueness and bring status by association.

Such a dynamic could become detrimental for innovation. A manufacturer’s focus should remain on offering products that bring different utilities. Instead, because the vehicles themselves can no longer (meaningfully) stand apart or offer standalone value, the industry pivots to manufacturing faith and curating loyalty to compensate for stagnation.

Another important aspect is that public transportation is inherently social. It forces people out of isolated steel boxes and into shared spaces, making it possible to develop humility and a certain familiarity with the diverse realities of the broader population. It creates an environment where one might casually observe, interact with, or find like-minded company.

In many modern societies, admittedly, this romanticized view of transit is tempered by reality. Commuters routinely wear headphones, avoid eye contact, and lack the will to engage proactively with strangers. Such physical proximity without social connection can feed a bystander effect. People may hesitate to confront rule-breakers or intervene in tense situations out of a (valid) fear that they will have to face a potentially dangerous person entirely alone. This would be reduced if the communal fabric were strong enough for people to trust that the crowd would stand with them. (Detailed explanation: Bystanders do make each person less likely to help overall [bystander effect], but the effect weakens in dangerous situations and when bystanders are not strangers, because others can then offer backup (Fischer et al., 2011); in 219 real public conflicts filmed by surveillance cameras in three countries, at least one bystander intervened in about nine of ten (Philpot et al., 2020).)

Yet, even if active conversation is rare and intervention is daunting, the sheer proximity of a shared commute provides a foundation required for social cohesion to eventually improve, as it keeps the public visible and closer to one another. That same proximity also creates a baseline of similarity. The shared environment of the commute itself becomes a universal commonality, a low-friction subject of conversation that can bridge the gap between strangers or be the first alignment necessary for cooperation.

We see this in our youth, where some of our early bonds can form organically simply because our daily routes to school happen to align. When the path we travel is shared, the barrier to human connection is lowered. This shared visibility is precisely what the extractivist mindset may want to dismantle.

This dismantling does not always require outright destruction; often, it is achieved through intentional neglect. When public transit is starved of funding, the infrastructure is allowed to erode until it becomes a space of last resort, used mainly by the most marginalized demographics, such as the impoverished or those struggling with mental health issues. Once the shared commute is successfully stigmatized as unsafe or uncomfortable, anyone with the financial means will eagerly flee.

A population that regularly shares space, recognizes common struggles, and tends to feel connected is more capable of building unified resistance.

As it degrades the public space of the bus or train and drives everyone into isolated, private, depreciating assets, the system produces a fractured society that is vastly easier to exploit. Confined to their own bubbles, citizens lose visibility of the broader social fabric. This blindness allows extractive forces to exploit the most vulnerable demographics first, amassing power unnoticed before eventually targeting the rest of the population, and this isolation leaves the public wide open to propaganda, a vulnerability that is often compounded by broader shifts in human behavior, such as the shrinking attention spans many people report in themselves. (Detailed explanation: In a 2021 survey of 2,093 UK adults, 49 percent said their attention span felt shorter than it used to be, a self-report rather than a measurement (King's College London, 2022).)

It is worth asking who profits when surface-level engagement becomes the cultural norm. The beneficiaries are usually those who rely on quick, unexamined reactions, whether they are populists pushing simplistic narratives or opportunists exploiting impulsive emotions. Once a culture increasingly favors brief, shallow interactions, thoroughly considered ideas begin to recede, as the demand for them diminishes. Deprived of a shared physical community, our ancient drive to belong to a pack fractures into a modernized mentality, one built no longer on geographic necessity or limited availability, but driven almost entirely by curated preference and ideological alignment.

Within these isolated groups, information is routinely used to signal loyalty rather than to discover accuracy. This typically serves as a way to gain reassurance within their pack and secure a sense of validity, whether that validation is craved purely for emotional comfort or prized for its skin-deep reliability.

This tribal fracturing makes it dangerously easy to deceive the public and extract wealth from them. When a population is kept busy fighting against itself, it is more easily distracted from the (systemic) forces exploiting it. Those with concentrated wealth and power can easily afford to spend capital on manufacturing these distractions and lobbying to keep the public unknowledgeable or more inclined towards ignorance.

When they artificially inflate the severity of smaller, divisive topics rooted in personal preference over collective advantage, they keep the public constantly fed on curated disputes and blind to critical vulnerabilities, so the most inconvenient and urgent systemic problems are downgraded into mere competing topics, losing their status as the absolute priorities they ought to be.

These forces aren’t exclusively political. They can range from everyday digital scammers and platforms prioritizing mindless web traffic, to foreign actors trying to destabilize societies to weaken global competitors. Regardless of their scale or motive, their shared effect is the same. Because they intentionally fracture our focus and stoke internal division, they cripple our capacity to take better, more deliberate actions for our own future.

At a broader commercial scale, this exploitation highlights the psychological and structural divide between producing value and extracting it. Earning a living by providing value, whether through hands-on work, refining a craft, or building a service that leaves others (tangibly) better off, seems to offer a self-sustaining satisfaction. Conversely, making money primarily through extraction, where multiplying wealth relies on leaving others worse off, tends to carry a built-in ceiling on fulfillment and fuels what we can call an “economy of misery.” When an environment leaves a population exhausted, isolated, and unfulfilled, extractive markets quickly realize that solving human distress is far less profitable than maintaining and monetizing it.

We see such an incentive at its most extreme in predatory gambling sites, addictive microtransactions, and speculative schemes that harvest financial desperation, yet it seeps into everyday industries as well. Consider modern dating apps built on subscriptions and paid boosts, where a platform’s recurring revenue can come to depend on keeping users frustrated, single, and paying for visibility boosts rather than helping them find a lasting partner and delete the app, or fast-fashion and impulse-shopping ecosystems designed to monetize emotional emptiness through fleeting retail therapy.

Even digital entertainment can be pulled into this dynamic when it shifts from healthy leisure into a parasocial substitute for human connection. Take a huge part of livestreaming, platforms like OnlyFans, or the surge of online reaction content. Watching someone react to a video can be enriching when the creator has a direct connection to the people or subject matter, contributes specialized knowledge, or expands on the topic with relevant experiences of their own.

When millions of viewers, however, reach a point where they feel unable to watch a video alone, or rely on continuous livestreams and paid intimacy just to simulate the feeling of having a friend or partner in the room, the market moves beyond mere entertainment, profiting off their loneliness while dulling the urgency required to change it, and even for those who manage to profit within such an economy, life in an environment dominated by manipulation, hype, and parasitic business models commonly requires more mental energy, forcing everyone to spend their bandwidth on high-alert mistrust and guarding their wallets at the direct expense of innovation, community, and more sustainable enjoyment.

This vulnerability is compounded when a society’s physical vitality erodes, restricting the avenues for communal bonding. Shared physical hobbies, outdoor recreation, and amateur sports can serve as a social anchor, requiring people with vastly different personal values to cooperate toward a mutual goal, work through healthy confrontation, and cultivate respect divorced from workplace hierarchy or financial profit.

Because physical activity demands an upfront cost of effort and delayed gratification, an unconditioned or exhausted body can make that initial friction feel overwhelming, prompting people to default to low-friction, sedentary digital consumption. While a healthy population is more likely to generate its own market, an unhealthy, exhausted public is a far more lucrative, captive market for the extractivist, tethered to rideshare apps for short distances, steep premiums for food delivery, and pharmaceuticals to manage (chronic) lifestyle diseases.

That decline can also serve a political function beyond financial extraction: a population that is physically drained, socially anxious, and chronically isolated tends to be far less confrontational, lacking the stamina to occupy public spaces in protest and the interpersonal trust required to organize a collective defense.

We see this same domestication strategy in the neglect and defunding of public education. Just as in the domestication of animals, the more capable and observant a creature becomes, the harder it is to tame and the more dangerous it proves when cornered.

For an extractive elite, starving public schools of modern curricula and educator incentives while retreating into privatized enclaves can be easily viewed as a strategic advantage, recreating the insulated divide between medieval nobles and peasants, or the medieval Church keeping scripture in Latin and, at times, banning vernacular translations, so that few could check its teachings against the text. (Detailed explanation: In England, for example, Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409 restricted translating scripture into English (Watson, 1995).)

Yet, when they destroy the shared educational spaces where diverse classes organically cross-pollinate, the elite not only blind their own children to the lived reality of the workforce, possibly stripping them of empathy, but also self-destructively shrink the national pool of future innovators their own prosperity usually relies upon.

Above all, this deliberate hoarding of opportunity might just expose a glaring insecurity. If those at the top genuinely believed their status was the natural result of superiority, they wouldn’t fear an even playing field.

To understand the antidote to this isolation, we only need to look at the success of Citizens’ Assemblies, such as those that helped break long political deadlocks in Ireland over same-sex marriage and abortion. (Detailed explanation: Ireland’s Convention on the Constitution (2012 to 2014) and Citizens’ Assembly (2016 to 2018) played a significant role in the referendums on marriage equality in 2015 and abortion in 2018 [citizens’ assembly] (Farrell et al., 2019).) A Citizens’ Assembly operates by gathering a random cross-section of society and taking them out of their disconnected bubbles. By design, the process demands everything the extractivist mindset fears, requiring citizens to work together, talk directly to one another, and inform themselves collectively. Most importantly, they sit face-to-face and listen to each other’s lived experiences. Whether conservative or progressive, when people are given a space built to listen and collaborate, the caricatures fed to them by propaganda tend to soften, and sometimes crack. (Detailed explanation: Across more than 500 studies, contact between groups [intergroup contact] typically reduced prejudice, especially when people met as equals, cooperated toward shared goals and had institutional backing (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006), apparently working partly by easing anxiety and building empathy, with new knowledge playing a smaller role (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008), though a later review of 27 randomized studies with delayed measurements found smaller and more varied effects, weakest for racial and ethnic prejudice (Paluck et al., 2019). In a national field experiment, over 500 American voters who deliberated together for a long weekend [America in One Room] showed large drops in both policy polarization and dislike of the other side [affective polarization] (Fishkin et al., 2021).)

When people are forced out of their silos to share this physical and intellectual space, much of the manufactured animosity dissolves. They find it way harder to view the other side as a faceless enemy, proving, for the people who sat in those rooms, that when the public is given the infrastructure to share a reality, they naturally develop not just sympathy, but empathy for one another.