Initial cooperation despite backward induction is what sustains living societies.

Evidence

The backward induction argument recommends initial distrust and, furthermore, continued distrust. This is a recommendation for slow death by abnegation in mimicry of Herman Melville’s (1984) Bartleby, the scrivener, who became so asocial that he died of starvation and whose response to every entreaty was, “I would prefer not to.” Whatever the apparent force of the backward induction argument for rarefied game theorists, it appears that actual people in living societies, including the game theorists who preach against the rationality of doing so, regularly take the risk of initially cooperating to upset that argument. Only for that reason do we have living societies. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 138

Categorization

• XREF: The Bartleby parallel and the claim that societies exist only because people cooperate against the rational prescription reinforces the reader’s thesis that monitoring collapse destroys order while one trusting act can rebuild it. — connects to: Pioneer human communities, like pioneer plants, cannot sustain themselves indefinitely without reciprocal succession. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1049
• SEED: An essay angle: why purely rationalist models of trust cannot explain why social life exists at all — the cost of universal distrust is literal death (Bartleby).