Every time you start a conversation with someone about a voluntary society, you inevitably encounter the trump card of any statist: “But what about the free-rider problem? If people aren’t forced to pay under threat of a club or prison, everyone will just enjoy the benefits, and no one will chip in! Everyone will want to be a free-loader, and society will collapse!” It sounds logical. Yet, an interesting thing happens: in nature, the free-ride problem was solved millions of years ago, and completely voluntarily, without a single tax inspector or ministry of coercion.
Let’s look at an unexpected example—vampire bats. Life for these creatures is certainly not a walk in the park. They feed exclusively on blood, and night hunting for large animals is a highly unpredictable business. About a third of the colony returns home empty-handed every night. This is where the harsh mathematics of survival comes into play: if a bat does not eat for three consecutive nights, it dies of hunger. Individually, this species would simply have been wiped off the face of the earth. This means they needed an insurance system. And they created one.
When a lucky, well-fed bat returns to the cave, it regurgitates part of the obtained blood to feed a hungry neighbor. From the outside, this might look like a socialist’s dream—from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. But there is no need to rush to rejoice for the leftists, because we are talking not about a common pot, but about a system of decentralized mutual aid built on reputation.
And here we return to the argument of the fans of the “strong hand.” What stops some cunning bat from simply sitting in the cave, squeaking pitifully, collecting tribute from neighbors, but never sharing its own prey? How will that end for it?
Bats are far from stupid. They have a disproportionately large neocortex, an excellent memory, and they recognize each other without fail by voice. They practice strictly targeted cooperation. Bats do not dump resources into an abstract fund; they invest in specific social ties. They remember who shared with them and who withheld their prey.
If a bat only takes but does not give, its social rating drops to zero. Neighbors simply stop feeling sympathy toward it. The next night when it is unsuccessful and begs for food, its yesterday’s “friends” will simply turn their backs to the wall. Through its dishonest behavior, this bat will kick the bucket without any coercion, bat courts, or prisons!
Now for the most interesting part. How does this mechanism work at the level of neurobiology? Evolutionary selection was not tasked with inventing this form of cooperation from scratch. There was already a powerful, perfectly tuned chemical circuit—maternal bonding (the mother’s attachment to the child), which forces an adult individual to spend colossal resources on a helpless offspring and derive pleasure from it. Selection simply took and extended this mechanism to non-related individuals.
When a bat shares blood with a neighbor or grooms its fur, its brain is flooded with the same cocktail of oxytocin and dopamine as a mother’s during contact with a child. Oxytocin forms deep attachment and trust, and dopamine reinforces this feeling with powerful pleasure from the very fact of mutual aid.
This is why bats, like you and me, help each other not out of cold calculation, but on emotions, which also serve as a biological detector of cheating. If a partner plays a one-way game, oxytocin simply stops being produced in your brain in their presence. The attachment breaks, and you no longer want to help them.
Of course, you might say now: “But we aren’t bats; we have millions of people in our society!” And you would be absolutely right, because our brain has a biological limit on the number of social ties it can maintain. However, today we have the tools (institutions and technologies) to scale this natural mechanism to all of humanity. Though, that is a completely different story, which we can discuss in future publications.
