Scaling the Boundaries of Human Cooperation

Collective action theory typically frames cooperation failures as information or incentive problems, solvable through better signaling, monitoring, or institutional design. This perspective challenges that framing at its root. The historical mechanism that has actually scaled human cooperation is not informational but identificatory: the expansion of in-group boundaries. Humans appear to have culturally co-opted kin-selection psychology — the deep preferential care evolved for genetic relatives — and extended it to progressively larger social units through symbolic and narrative means.

The French Revolution offers a canonical illustration. The address 'citoyen frère' and 'citoyenne sœur' was not mere rhetoric; it was a deliberate activation of kinship affect at national scale, enabling the levée en masse — a conscript army of unprecedented size drawn from a peasantry newly constituted as citizens rather than subjects. The same logic underwrites democratic legitimacy more broadly: the demos is precisely the group whose members count each other as 'us.'

The trajectory — band, tribe, polis, nation-state — suggests a directional logic, and the next required threshold is planetary. Here the argument confronts a structural problem: intergroup competition has historically been the engine of intragroup solidarity, a dynamic that cannot be reproduced at global scale without catastrophic cost. The one unsettling possibility is that artificial general intelligence, as a genuinely exogenous 'other,' could function as the kind of shared threat that has previously catalyzed identity expansion. The sobering conclusion, however, is that no shortcut exists. Cultural evolution toward a wider circle of moral concern is slow, contingent, and dependent on the slow accumulation of new stories about who belongs.