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Executive Summary
1. Context and Premise
The article begins with the recognition that modern societies operate as “inverse welfare states,” privileging elites while destabilizing the collective well-being of the majority. Financial institutions, corporate conglomerates, and powerful actors exploit structural asymmetries under the guise of “job creation” and “productivity,” masking extractive practices that siphon wealth and agency away from the public.
2. The Evolutionary Basis of Cooperation and Its Hijacking
Human beings evolved as cooperative, altruistic, and group-optimizing organisms. Evidence from anthropology, evolutionary biology, and affective neuroscience confirms that survival and flourishing across 99% of human history depended on shared responsibility and mutual care.
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Subversion from Within: Richard Dawkins’ critique of group selection introduced the “free-rider” problem—the vulnerability of cooperative groups to exploitation by selfish actors.
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Elite Capture: Political, economic, and cultural institutions have amplified this dynamic, systematically rewarding exploitative behaviors and penalizing cooperation.
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Memetic Dimensions: Using Hamilton’s Rule and memetic theory, the article shows how ideas (“memes”) replicate through cultural systems, shaping collective cognition. Elites manipulate these memetic pathways—education, media, law, and finance—to control assimilation, retention, expression, and transmission of cultural narratives.
3. Mechanisms of Gerrymandering Beyond Politics
Gerrymandering is expanded beyond its electoral meaning to describe a multi-level strategy of elite dominance:
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Economic Capture: Control over credit creation, privatization, and financial speculation entrenches inequality.
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Narrative Manipulation: Through propaganda, marketing, and media, elites frame exploitation as natural, inevitable, or even virtuous.
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Cognitive Colonization: Education systems, religious institutions, and academic paradigms shape thought to favor elite interests.
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Behavioral Engineering: Big Data, AI-driven microtargeting, and surveillance capitalism enable unprecedented influence over collective behavior.
4. The Cultural Reversal of Altruism
The article identifies a systemic inversion of human altruism, producing what it calls “imposed reversed altruism”:
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The many are conditioned to “help” the few grow more powerful and wealthy at the expense of their own well-being.
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Through proactive aggression—wars, occupations, economic predation—elites manufacture scarcity and fear, undermining solidarity and fragmenting communities.
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Narratives of competition and “survival of the fittest” are deliberately constructed to erode cooperative instincts.
5. Implications for Humanity and Planetary Futures
The article argues that systemic crises—economic inequality, ecological collapse, cultural disintegration, and geopolitical instability—are not inevitable outcomes of human nature but manufactured consequences of life-dysfunctional cultural programming. Key implications include:
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Recognizing our true cooperative heritage is essential to rebuilding functional, life-supportive systems.
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Restoring collective agency requires unmasking elite narratives, reclaiming cultural memetics, and resisting predatory gerrymandering at every level.
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Addressing systemic destabilization calls for a great cultural awakening that integrates science, ethics, and community solidarity to foster regenerative pathways for humanity and the planet.
6. Call to Action
The paper concludes with a powerful invitation:
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To rewrite cultural narratives that normalize exploitation.
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To reclaim life-value priorities over profit and power.
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To restore group solidarity and design systems aligned with cooperative human nature.
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To heal systemic fragmentation and address multi-domain destabilizations through collective responsibility and mutual care.
Please stay tune!!
If you have not seen the previous post “George Orwell and 1984: How Freedom Dies”, I highly recommend you do so as it was the inspiration that catalysed the letter and spirit of this post.
Reproduced from: George Orwell and 1984: How Freedom Dies (academyofideas.com)
Also the two videos below use the power of art and storytelling to highlight this subversion from within our popular culture.
Reproduced from: IN-SHADOW – A Modern Odyssey – Animated Short Film – YouTube
Reproduced from: The Case Against The Jedi Order – YouTube
Sent: Wednesday, January 3, 9:58 AM
Subject: RE: SUBVERSION FROM WITHIN: How the Freeloaders Gerrymandered Their Way to the Top
To: Bichara Sahely
Dear Bichara,
Thanks for writing me. This is an interesting application of the subversion from within idea. If I may, I’d like to make a couple of suggestions that I think would strengthen some of the later claims significantly.
First, the second of my three criteria for group selection is that ‘cognitive capacities within the group must be high enough to regulate behaviour within the group’. Meaning that the group must be self-regulating with respect to denying cheating. As a result, I think something more could be said as to why the subversion in this macro sense has been so pervasive and why our normal self-regulating mechanisms have failed.
Second, it seems to me as if you are advocating greater state regulation of the subversive industries, and industry in general. That’s fine, but it is not completely clear to me why. In my view, a far smaller state, in which people held the power could achieve the same result. This is Nozick’s claim in Anarchy, State and Utopia, in which he argues that the elite class corruption is formed by growing states who require huge sums of money to fund their expansive public sector. Consequently, big money/big data are given a pass in terms of their regulation because of the huge sums of money that they bring into the equation. Clearly, our biology demonstrates that there is no need for a state which ‘inculcates good habits in it’s citizens’, to echo Aristotle, but it is still not clear to me how extended the state ought to be in order for the human group to effectively regulate the subversion. In all other instances of subversion from within, there does not need to be a central body which regulates it – the regulation occurs naturally to ensure that altruistic tendencies are propagated in the next generation. Why should there be one in this case? I think if you answered this question, some of your higher level claims would be difficult to refute.
You have certainly gotten me thinking Bichara, thank you for that.
Respectfully yours,
Keyana
Dear Keyana:
The answers to both questions you asked presented themselves yesterday in a book I am currently reading. It has to do with lack of collective intelligence of the group so that to use your words ‘cognitive capacities within the group must be high enough to regulate behaviour within the group.’
With regards to “why the subversion in this macro sense has been so pervasive and why our normal self-regulating mechanisms have failed” is answered by this quote from “Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World” by Geoff Mulgan –
“Perhaps the biggest problem is that highly competitive fields—the military, finance, and to a lesser extent marketing or electoral politics—account for the majority of investment in tools for large-scale intelligence. Their influence has shaped the technologies themselves. Spotting small variances is critical if your main concern is defense or to find comparative advantage in financial markets. So technologies have advanced much further to see, sense, map, and match than to understand. The linear processing logic of the Turing machine is much better at manipulating inputs than it is at creating strong models that can use the inputs and create meanings. In other words, digital technologies have developed to be good at answers and bad at questions, good at serial logic and poor at parallel logic, and good at large-scale processing and bad at spotting nonobvious patterns.
Fields that are less competitive but potentially offer much greater gains to society—such as physical and mental health, environment, and community—have tended to miss out, and have had much less influence on the direction of technological change. 5 The net result is a massive misallocation of brainpower, summed up in the lament of Jeff Hammerbacher, the former head of data at Facebook, that “the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” – http://a.co/4bMoGym
And to answer your question about bigger state regulation, what we need is Big Mind, to act as a check and balance to Big Money/Big Data. So it is not bigger government but smarter government that is needed, one that can grow or shrink certain sectors as the need arises, in the most transparent and accountable way possible to limit corruption and increase trust in their operations.
Here is another insightful quote on the failings of the State and where there is much room for improvement.
“Democratic institutions, where we, together, make some of our most important decisions, have proven even less capable of learning how to learn. Instead, most are frozen in forms and structures that made sense a century or two ago, but are now anachronisms. A few parliaments and cities are trying to harness the collective intelligence of their citizens. But many democratic institutions—parliaments, congresses, and parties—look dumber than the societies they serve. All too often the enemies of collective intelligence are able to capture public discourse, spread misinformation, and fill debates with distractions rather than facts.”- http://a.co/e7ZGjCG
I do think the timing of your article, “Explaining Altruism: A New Defence of Group Selection” – https://bsahely.com/2017/12/10/explaining-altruism-a-new-defence-of-group-selection-by-keyana-c-sapp/, and the inspiration it has given me to writing this article, and confirmation in what I have read so far from “Big Mind” is enough encouragement for me to think that our approach is correct and that collective intelligence is the next stage of cooperative evolution where the accountable and transparent manner of collective intelligence would be part of the social immune system against cheating, and would allow our self-regulating altruistic traits to overcome the pro-active hyper-competitive self-maximizing predatory traits of aggression in all of their manifestations be they at the direct, structural and cultural levels of violence.
I have taken the liberty to post your email in the comments of the article and this response. Hopefully the information presented here and the discussion would be accessible and be part of the knowledge commons as we work together in raising awareness, understanding and appreciation of the Big Issues involved and how we can contribute to the collective intelligence of the group of global humanity and help immunize ourselves and others against the free-loaders/free-riders so that to use your words “the regulation occurs naturally to ensure that altruistic tendencies are propagated in the next generation.”
Peace and love,
Bichara
Sent: Wednesday, January 3, 9:58 AM
Subject: RE: SUBVERSION FROM WITHIN: How the Freeloaders Gerrymandered Their Way to the Top
To: Bichara Sahely
Dear Bichara,
Thanks for writing me. This is an interesting application of the subversion from within idea. If I may, I’d like to make a couple of suggestions that I think would strengthen some of the later claims significantly.
First, the second of my three criteria for group selection is that ‘cognitive capacities within the group must be high enough to regulate behaviour within the group’. Meaning that the group must be self-regulating with respect to denying cheating. As a result, I think something more could be said as to why the subversion in this macro sense has been so pervasive and why our normal self-regulating mechanisms have failed.
Second, it seems to me as if you are advocating greater state regulation of the subversive industries, and industry in general. That’s fine, but it is not completely clear to me why. In my view, a far smaller state, in which people held the power could achieve the same result. This is Nozick’s claim in Anarchy, State and Utopia, in which he argues that the elite class corruption is formed by growing states who require huge sums of money to fund their expansive public sector. Consequently, big money/big data are given a pass in terms of their regulation because of the huge sums of money that they bring into the equation. Clearly, our biology demonstrates that there is no need for a state which ‘inculcates good habits in it’s citizens’, to echo Aristotle, but it is still not clear to me how extended the state ought to be in order for the human group to effectively regulate the subversion. In all other instances of subversion from within, there does not need to be a central body which regulates it – the regulation occurs naturally to ensure that altruistic tendencies are propagated in the next generation. Why should there be one in this case? I think if you answered this question, some of your higher level claims would be difficult to refute.
You have certainly gotten me thinking Bichara, thank you for that.
Respectfully yours,
Keyana
Dear Keyana:
The answers to both questions you asked presented themselves yesterday in a book I am currently reading. It has to do with lack of collective intelligence of the group so that to use your words ‘cognitive capacities within the group must be high enough to regulate behaviour within the group.’
With regards to “why the subversion in this macro sense has been so pervasive and why our normal self-regulating mechanisms have failed” is answered by this quote from “Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World” by Geoff Mulgan –
“Perhaps the biggest problem is that highly competitive fields—the military, finance, and to a lesser extent marketing or electoral politics—account for the majority of investment in tools for large-scale intelligence. Their influence has shaped the technologies themselves. Spotting small variances is critical if your main concern is defense or to find comparative advantage in financial markets. So technologies have advanced much further to see, sense, map, and match than to understand. The linear processing logic of the Turing machine is much better at manipulating inputs than it is at creating strong models that can use the inputs and create meanings. In other words, digital technologies have developed to be good at answers and bad at questions, good at serial logic and poor at parallel logic, and good at large-scale processing and bad at spotting nonobvious patterns.
Fields that are less competitive but potentially offer much greater gains to society—such as physical and mental health, environment, and community—have tended to miss out, and have had much less influence on the direction of technological change. 5 The net result is a massive misallocation of brainpower, summed up in the lament of Jeff Hammerbacher, the former head of data at Facebook, that “the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” – http://a.co/4bMoGym
And to answer your question about bigger state regulation, what we need is Big Mind, to act as a check and balance to Big Money/Big Data. So it is not bigger government but smarter government that is needed, one that can grow or shrink certain sectors as the need arises, in the most transparent and accountable way possible to limit corruption and increase trust in their operations.
Here is another insightful quote on the failings of the State and where there is much room for improvement.
“Democratic institutions, where we, together, make some of our most important decisions, have proven even less capable of learning how to learn. Instead, most are frozen in forms and structures that made sense a century or two ago, but are now anachronisms. A few parliaments and cities are trying to harness the collective intelligence of their citizens. But many democratic institutions—parliaments, congresses, and parties—look dumber than the societies they serve. All too often the enemies of collective intelligence are able to capture public discourse, spread misinformation, and fill debates with distractions rather than facts.”- http://a.co/e7ZGjCG
I do think the timing of your article, “Explaining Altruism: A New Defence of Group Selection” – https://bsahely.com/2017/12/10/explaining-altruism-a-new-defence-of-group-selection-by-keyana-c-sapp/, and the inspiration it has given me to writing this article, and confirmation in what I have read so far from “Big Mind” is enough encouragement for me to think that our approach is correct and that collective intelligence is the next stage of cooperative evolution where the accountable and transparent manner of collective intelligence would be part of the social immune system against cheating, and would allow our self-regulating altruistic traits to overcome the pro-active hyper-competitive self-maximizing predatory traits of aggression in all of their manifestations be they at the direct, structural and cultural levels of violence.
I have taken the liberty to post your email in the comments of the article and this response. Hopefully the information presented here and the discussion would be accessible and be part of the knowledge commons as we work together in raising awareness, understanding and appreciation of the Big Issues involved and how we can contribute to the collective intelligence of the group of global humanity and help immunize ourselves and others against the free-loaders/free-riders so that to use your words “the regulation occurs naturally to ensure that altruistic tendencies are propagated in the next generation.”
Peace and love,
Bichara