Trust is declining worldwide. According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, it is estimated that sixty-one percent of people globally experience a moderate or high sense of grievance. This is based on the belief that governments and businesses make people’s lives harder, and that wealthy people benefit the most from the system. It seems that distrust towards the media, governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and businesses is growing. Meanwhile, four out of ten people worldwide think that hostile activism is justified. Twenty-seven percent of them approve of attacking people online, twenty-five percent are fine with intentionally spreading disinformation for the greater good, twenty-three percent approve of (threatening with) violence as a means for change, and twenty-three percent approve of damaging public or private property. Fifty-three percent of adults aged 18 to 34, forty-one percent of adults aged 35 to 54, and twenty-six percent of adults over 54 support this hostile activism. How did humanity end up in this hostile and unfair world?
What if hostile activism is not any better than failing media, governments, NGOs, and businesses, and from another perspective it is exactly the same kind of act, just reflecting what humanity keeps repeating within this unfair world. What if we all carry the root of unfair behaviour within us?
Theory of moral development
In 1958, American psychologist Alexander Kohlberg came up with the stage theory of moral development. This theory outlines how individuals develop through six stages of moral reasoning, divided into three levels: the preconventional (first), the conventional (second), and the post-conventional (third) level. The first level is all about ‘avoiding punishment’ (stage 1) and ‘getting a reward’ (stage 2). It is estimated that about twenty-five percent of people operate on this preconventional moral level, most of them children. The second level is about ‘wanting to be socially accepted’ (stage 3) and ‘obeying the law’ (stage 4). It is estimated that seventy to eighty percent of adults operate at this conventional moral level. The third level consists of ‘prioritising human rights’ (stage 5) and ‘prioritising universal ethical principles regardless of what others think and what the consequences are’ (stage 6). It is estimated that at most ten to fifteen percent of adults reach stage 5, and stage 6 is rarely reached.
How moral theory explains unfairness in the world
Organisations, institutions, and businesses are cooperations of people. Since in modern world most people do not transcend the moral stage of ‘obeying the law’, these organisational forms are primarily focused on law and order. Law and order’s aim is stability by keeping the status quo. This is enforced mostly by some kind of punishment. What Kohlberg’s theory shows, however, is that law and order are not the same as fairness and justice. That is why people today often experience human rights violations, including those of children, at school, at work, and elsewhere in society. That is why it does not matter if people try to discuss these injustices, because even when this injustice is acknowledged at decision-making tables, the discussion usually ends with people just saying they are following the law. Based on this, you might wonder how fair ‘Lady Justice’ really is?
Evolving through history into an increasingly demoralised society
Until agriculture emerged 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers could not afford to hinder their children’s development because they had to focus on survival. As a small group connected by kinship, they had the best chances of survival when individuals within the group could develop fully and trust each other implicitly. This might explain why they chose egalitarianism, cooperation, attachment-focused parenting, and autonomy over dominating their children. Unlike agricultural societies, hunter-gatherers opted for observation instead of enforced discipline through physical punishment and hierarchical authority and obedience.
Physical punishments are very rare in hunter-gatherer societies and only used to prevent children from hurting themselves. Children’s misbehaviour is looked at in the context of their development. Hunter-gatherer children get a lot of autonomy, which means they also have the space to learn through trial and error. Children are treated within the group with affection, responsiveness, play, social inclusion, and participation. Children develop through observation, exploration, and guided participation.
Humanity’s innate moral compass
Based on this, it may be that Kohlberg’s stage theory of moral development only apply to layered hierarchical societies, which have existed since the agricultural revolution and as we know them today. If children’s development is not primarily guided by punishments and rewards, unlike in modern society, it is not highly likely that children would have thought and acted to avoid punishments or gain rewards. Based on this, it is more likely that moral decisions of hunter-gatherers were solely driven by the urge to survive, encompassing Kohlberg’s moral stages 3, 5, and 6.
Institutional need for control
An increasing stratification of a globalised world means increasingly heterogenous societies, with growing distances, which will likely lead to rising feelings of distance. The distance we see today is an unnatural situation wherein humans lose perspective. This gives rise to feelings of uncertainty and thus fear. It is a natural tendency for humans to want to get rid of feelings of fear. That explains the need for control by institutions, with more and more rules being institutionalised based on punishments and rewards to condition the masses into obedience for the sake of felt stability. This comes at the expense of the natural tendencies toward autonomy, competence, and social connection, which are originally essential for humans to survive.
Modern world mostly based on extrinsic motivation
However, punishments mainly teach to fear the consequences and authority, rather than to be responsible and a good person. Punishments and rewards make humans trade their innate intrinsic motivation for extrinsic motivation. That is the reason why neither punishments nor rewards ever work on the long term, and social unrest increases when social and economic instability grows. Punishment and reward systems are primitive, antisocial systems that turn people’s nervous systems into a primitive, fear-driven survival mode. That is why humanity always ends up in unfair competition, disobedience, rebellion, and eventually people just choose to save themselves: this is how people are conditioned from preschool and school, and institutionalised by law and order, and policy.
Even some of the people who are against coercion, even fanatically, find it normal to occasionally punish and reward their children. While punishing and rewarding are themselves a form of coercion.
A world greatly conditioned by punishment and rewards ends up in conflict
A world where punishments and rewards are institutionalised does not cultivate true autonomy, the feeling of being valued for who you are, and understanding the essential social contract needed to survive as a species in the long run.
The extremely diverse and stratified world we live in today may increasingly feel to governments and other authorities like they always need more law and order. As the distance grows, the chance of punishments also increases, which can eventually lead to revolution and war, whenever a significant number of people no longer truly see the rewards they receive as rewarding and find the punishments completely unfair. The growing distance between power and people, including minorities, reinforces this mechanism. As the distance gets bigger, the rules become more general and are enforced more strictly, causing especially minorities to be overlooked even more and injustice to increase further. Especially even more so, the injustice against minorities who are not even recognised by law as discriminated minorities. Because measuring is usually not necessarily knowing, if you do not measure everything that actually exists. When governments try to fix this injustice, it stirs up unrest among the majority who increasingly experience their privileges are being taken away and costs are rising in all sorts of ways, making the chaos complete.
Cultivating equal value in a world full of uniqueness
So, instead of reacting to circumstances in society with hostile activism towards the majority of people who morally function based on obeying the law, because they are unconsciously conditioned that way, and activism in this way contributes to injustice from another perspective in a similar manner, it is more constructive and effective to lead by example.
As long as modern society does not stop cultivating a culture of punishment and reward that is institutionalised in all sectors and layers of globalist society, humanity is doomed to live in an unfair world. If we want a fair world, autonomy in behaviour and thinking, social cohesion, and ethical thinking needs to be cultivated from birth on in every aspect of people’s lives. This means egalitarianism in how we all treat each other, recognising that we all have equal value exactly because of our uniqueness. This also automatically means that we need to reform the systems we may have been using for too long. It also means we need to cultivate patience, because reforming in a fair way also means doing it step by step, so everyone can keep up and learn to live with that new way of life. The world as it looks today has largely come about in this way through unconscious processes. This means that future generations will be the first to fully experience the consequences of this change in course.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), an influential Swiss-French philosopher, believed that people are born just, but are shaped into unfairness by society. Based on his idea that people are naturally just, and that hunter-gatherers show that humanity can follow a morally sustainable path, this reform is feasible. One way to do that could be by returning to small groups with a certain kinship, where we all (once again) experience that we are valued for who we are, and from there live connected in a globalised world.
Genetical necessity for pluriformity
Restoring, to some extent, the way we live together in the modern society we live in is also a genetic necessity for human survival. The extremely large, heterogenous society we live in today no longer favours the genetically strongest people, but rather the majority. More than one in eight people in the world suffers from a mental illness. In 2021, a third of people aged 16 and older in 29 OECD countries reported living with a chronic disease. The global burden of non-communicable diseases is expected to continue increasing. This means that if humanity as a species wants to survive, we need to start fostering and learning to live in a pluriform society instead of trying to control humanity. This way, even the genetically strongest people have the chance to survive, so humanity keeps a future in mind where it remains a part of it.
©FPM
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