Rat on Your Neighbor

The divide and conquer strategy has been a staple of government control for centuries. The British and Belgian Empires used this technique very effectively by pitting ethnic groups against one another in India and Rwanda respectively, as well as in many other colonial territories. Creating distrust and conflict takes the heat off the colonial masters and makes ruling the savages much easier.

Of course, fostering distrust in the populace in order to create placid subjects needn’t take place at the level of ethnic or religious groups. Breaking down communities by creating incentives for friends and neighbors to betray one another is a much more effective tool in developed nations with less salient cultural cleavages a ruler can exploit. Creating distrust in society increases the public’s demand for government and reduces our ability to create (market and non-market) voluntary institutions to compete with government. If we think our neighbors are out to get us, we’re less likely to want to deal with them on a voluntary basis and more likely to demand they be controlled by government. Destroying community is good for government.

The Chicago city government seems to have realized this. It is considering a “Tax Whistleblower Program” which would pay people to rat on “tax cheats.” Grassers will most likely be paid a percentage of back taxes collected. The city officials are claiming that it’s “just another way of bringing people into compliance.” No doubt it will be an effective one too, since community can be a fragile thing.

The logic of reciprocal altruism means that a relatively small number of cheaters can undermine cooperation by creating distrust. People generally don’t like screwing each other over. They like being screwed over and not responding in kind even less: nobody wants to be a sucker. If we notice a few people taking the opportunity to enrich themselves by grassing, we may be more likely to grass ourselves. In the worst case, everyone ends up grassing even though everyone would prefer everybody to keep their mouths shut. Thus is a community unravelled and freedom eroded.

Here’s some appropriate music from a now defunct New Zealand band to strengthen your anger at this prospect. This song, if memory serves correctly, was a response to a government campaign encouraging people to rat on people cheating NZ’s no fault accident compensation scheme.