Overcoming evil, Part 8: How we killed trust and turned emotions into a threat

This is part 8 of a series of blog posts. Please start with part 1 first. Our modern world was created by standardizing countless processes. This allowed us to build machines for many of the resulting simple and clearly defined tasks. By structuring our society with a rigid set of simple behavioral rules („the law“) we could reduce friction between individuals and groups enormously and limit the need for communication to a minimum: today, I can order a t-shirt with 2-3 clicks of my computer mouse, without talking to anybody. But what happens exactly if we do this? Let’s look at a classic example from game theory: the iterated prisoner’s dilemma „game“ (it’s in fact rather a gedankenexperiment). Interestingly, the optimal strategy to play the game depends critically on how many times the game is played (by the same 2 players): If we play it only once, non-cooperative behavior is always optimal. If we play it an unknown number of times, a strategy which tries to achieve a state of…