After looking at some of the Epstein emails I'm considering replacing the term "elites" with "the parasite class."
From the University of Cambridge: Research, June 17, 2025:
To save democracy and solve the world's biggest challenges, we need to get better at spotting and exposing people who exploit human cooperation for personal gain, argues Cambridge social scientist Dr Jonathan Goodman.
In Invisible Rivals, published by Yale University Press on 17 June, Dr Goodman argues that throughout human history we have tried to rid our social groups of free-riders, people who take from others without giving anything back. But instead of eliminating free-riders, human evolution has just made them better at hiding their deception.
Goodman explains that humans have evolved to use language to disguise selfish acts and exploit our cooperative systems. He links this ‘invisible rivalry’ to the collapse of trust and consequent success of political strongmen today.
Goodman says: “We see this happening today, as evidenced by the rise of the Julius Caesar of our time—Donald Trump— but it is a situation that evolution has predicted since the origins of life and later, language, and which will only change form again even if the current crises are overcome.”
Goodman argues that over the course of human evolution “When we rid ourselves of ancient, dominant alphas, we traded overt selfishness for something perhaps even darker: the ability to move through society while planning and coordinating.”
“As much as we evolved to use language effectively to work together, to overthrow those brutish and nasty dominants that pervaded ancient society, we also (and do) use language to create opportunities that benefit us … We use language to keep our plans invisible. Humans, more than other known organisms, can cooperate until we imagine a way to compete, exploit, or coerce, and almost always rely on language to do so.”
Goodman, an expert on human social evolution at the University of Cambridge, identifies free-riding behaviour in everything from benefits cheating and tax evasion, to countries dodging action on climate change, and the actions of business leaders and politicians.
Goodman warns that “We can’t stop people free-riding, it’s part of our nature, the incurable syndrome… Free riders are among us at every level of society and pretending otherwise can make our own goals unrealistic, and worse, appear hopeless. But if we accept that we all have this ancient flaw, this ability to deceive ourselves and others, we can design policies around that and change our societies for the better.”
Lessons from our ancestors
Goodman points out that humans evolved in small groups meaning that over many generations we managed to design social norms to govern the distribution of food, water and other vital resources.“People vied for power but these social norms helped to maintain a trend toward equality, balancing out our more selfish dispositions. Nevertheless, the free-rider problem persisted and using language we got better at hiding our cheating.”
One academic camp has argued that ancient humans used language to work together to overthrow and eject “brutish dominants”. The opposing view claims that this never happened and that humans are inherently selfish and tribal. Goodman rejects both extremes.
“If we accept the view that humans are fundamentally cooperative, we risk trusting blindly. If we believe everyone is selfish, we won’t trust anyone. We need to be realistic about human nature. We’re a bit of both so we need to learn how to place our trust discerningly.”
Goodman points out that our distant ancestors benefitted from risk-pooling systems, whereby all group members contributed labour and shared resources, but this only worked because it is difficult to hide tangible assets such as tools and food. While some hunter-gatherer societies continue to rely on these systems, they are ineffective in most modern societies in our globalized economy.
“Today most of us rely largely on intangible assets for monetary exchange so people can easily hide resources, misrepresent their means and invalidate the effectiveness of social norms around risk pooling,” Goodman says.
“We are flawed animals capable of deception, cruelty, and selfishness. The truth is hard to live with but confronting it through honest reflection about our evolutionary past gives us the tools to teach ourselves and others about how we can improve the future.”
Taking action: self-knowledge, education and policy
Goodman, who teaches students at Cambridge about the evolution of cooperation, argues that we reward liars from a young age and that this reinforces bad behaviour into adulthood.“People tell children that cheaters don’t prosper, but in fact cheats who don’t get caught can do very well for themselves.”....
....MUCH MORE
Bolded paragraph: mine; because that bit is not a new observation:
"Ils ne se servent de la pensée que pour autoriser leurs injustices, et emploient les paroles que pour déguiser leurs pensées"—François-Marie Arouet--'Voltaire', Dialogue xiv. Le Chapon et la Poularde (1766).
"Men use thought only to justify their wrong doings, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts"
At least three other commentators expressed similar conclusions before Voltaire. Here are a couple that were close to hand:
"Speech was given to the ordinary sort of men whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men, whereby to conceal it."—Robert South: Sermon, April 30, 1676.
"The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them."—Oliver Goldsmith: The Bee, No. 3. (Oct. 20, 1759.)
And secondly:
January 2022 - "The role of verbal intelligence in becoming a successful criminal..."
