Is Contributism Naive?
Progress comes through cooperation
To some, the ideas that make up contributism arrive simply as a breath of fresh air — the recognition that we are more successful when we work collaboratively, that we find dignity in devotion and care, that giving to is fundamentally different than being taken from, that everyone deserves (and truly desires) to play a meaningful role in community, that it is truly better to give than to receive. To some, it seems obvious that a society that recognizes these truths as self-evident is a more advanced society than one that fails to understand them.
But for others, contributism comes across as interesting, but ultimately naive. They ask: how can a community built on generosity survive in the real world, where generosity is scarce and so many people are selfish? Won’t the takers among us simply exploit the generosity of the givers, filling their own pockets and leaving the rest empty-handed? The picture that they paint is reminiscent of the Ricky Gervais fantasy-comedy film The Invention of Lying, in which the protagonist is the first person to ever discover the ability to lie. Because no one else has ever even conceived of deceiving another, the whole world takes all of his lies at face value, which allows him to quickly develop immense power over everyone else. The unspoken moral of the story is that what lies beneath honesty is naivety and weakness, and what underlies deception is cleverness and strength.
For those who see generosity and selfishness in a way similar to this, it makes sense to be skeptical of contributism. By this logic, efforts requiring large-scale altruistic cooperation are doomed to fail, and the least generous among us are the wisest, because regardless of how good it may feel to give, acting in self-interest is what keeps us safe and builds our personal abundance. After all, one may rightfully ask, isn’t this evident in all areas of our society? Those who become richest and most powerful are often the penny-pinchers and the exploiters. To some, it may seem that Machiavelli was right: shrewd selfishness is a prerequisite to success, and true generosity and cooperation are the domain of the simple and the ignorant.
A Terrible Game
Contributists see the world differently, for a few reasons. First, under the contributist lens, success is not measured in terms of wealth or power, but in terms of human fulfillment. Insofar as we are contributists, we don’t spend our time envying the penny-pinchers and the exploiters for their wealth. Instead we look beyond their wealth and ask the deeper question: are they able to live good lives?
Our society has become so capital-focused that it can almost feel taboo to say it aloud, but we all do still understand deep down that wealth and power can be deceptively poor proxies for quality of life. These things are not bad in themselves — they hold immense value within the right contexts — but when we conflate them with happiness or fulfillment, we often sabotage our own joy. This is because the measures we take to achieve wealth and power can work in opposition to the things that truly make us happy. Selfishness may make us wealthy, but it also makes us lonely. In an interview last year, when asked what it was like to be himself, Elon Musk, then the wealthiest man in the world, described his mind as “a storm.” When later asked if it was a happy storm, Musk spent a few moments in quiet thought, then responded, weary and definitive: No.
As discussed in the piece on the generous tipper, those who give connect themselves to their own humanity and that of those around them, while those who seek instead to protect their wealth become estranged from both. To the contributist, the excessive wealth of the penny-pincher and the exploiter isn’t a sign of their wisdom and success; it’s a sign that they’ve devoted their whole lives to playing a terribly unfulfilling game.
Can We Cooperate?
But still, the skeptic asks, regardless of what you or I believe about personal success, can humans really be expected to cooperate well enough to develop contributist societies? For those deeply embedded within a capitalist perspective, it can feel impossible to imagine a society that cooperates according to different motives than the goal of producing capital. But a simple observation of the course of human history shows that a transition from capitalist society to contributist society is far from infeasible. In fact, the whole history of societal progress (in terms of wealth, technology, and equality) is largely the history of the advancement of new innovations in broad social cooperation. In other words, we have become better peoples over time precisely because we have decided collectively to become better people.
Major books have been written on this subject (Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature are two recent popular examples), and I wouldn’t be able to do it much justice in a few paragraphs, so I’ll instead explain by way of three quick examples.
Democracy. Imagine a world in which political leaders were dictators by default, the wealthy kept many of the poor as slaves or bondservants, women had almost no legal autonomy, and power only changed hands through bloodline or bloodshed. You are, of course, imagining much of human history. Last week, NYC mayor Eric Adams was charged with corruption for accepting gifts from a foreign government, and now many are pushing for him to resign. Throughout most of human history, these calls for resignation would have seemed utterly absurd — the sort of self-serving behavior Adams participated in was not only previously legal, but perfectly common.
Indeed, as late as the 17th century, most of the ideas described in the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution would have sounded hopelessly naive to most ears. And yet, somehow we have transitioned from a world in which the wealthy carried nearly unchecked power over the poor to one in which approximately half of the world’s population lives under a democracy. How did this happen? Through humanity’s surprising ability to design and commit ourselves to new systems of cooperation, even ones that restrict the behavior of the wealthy and powerful.
Science. The advancements we have seen in technology, medicine, and life expectancy over the last few centuries came because of the development of science — a massive, unprecedented effort of cooperation between a diversity of actors across space and time. As Galileo famously discovered, this cooperation did not come easily, because it required impartiality from those in positions of power. At first, those whose businesses were challenged by scientific research (including many religious leaders) attempted to stomp it out. But eventually, they relented and cooperated, when they realized the many shared benefits of inhabiting a more intelligent world.
Capitalism. Yes, even capitalism is the result of a series of once-inconceivable achievements of cooperation. Capitalist systems — in which all parties are bound by strict trade and employment laws and can only compel others to act through willing contracts — have replaced systems like feudalism and slavery, which relied on domination and provided massive advantages to selfish, powerful actors. One of Adam Smith’s primary motivations in writing The Wealth of Nations was to argue against mercantilism, the practice by which strong nations strategically limited their trade with weaker ones, in favor of the more cooperative position of free trade, which created a more balanced playing field between nations. In every case, the creation, maintenance, and protection of capitalist markets has required an enormous amount of cooperation and restraint on the behalf of all parties, including those who would have been more dominant in earlier systems.
Cooperation by Design
In each of these cases, we once had systems which privileged some selfish actors to the detriment of others, but we designed new ones that relied on innovations in cooperation, and we managed to get entire societies on board. How did we accomplish this? There are, of course, many factors involved, but notice two factors that stand out in all three examples: broad social gain, and effective governance. When it became clear that the new cooperative system carried benefits that would accrue to everyone, even those with power chose to participate, and they rewrote the rules in ways that limited their relative strength over others within the society, but increased the overall strength of the entire society.
In this way, the project of building a contributist society is like the project of building a democratic one, a scientific one, or a capitalist one. Each of these systems involved imposing new checks and balances on the powerful, and a contributist system would do the same. A contributist society does not simply arise from good intentions; it is the product of careful thought and policy. But the good intentions do matter — we can’t get anywhere unless we start believing that we can design better systems, and that we can inhabit them.
In a speech given five days before his assassination, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. declared with conviction that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” This is a statement of profound weight. If we agree with it, then we must believe that the future can be more just than the present, and that the social systems that we have now are not our final ones, but ones that will ultimately be improved upon and surpassed. In this way, contributists share the optimism of all those who have ever strived to create a better world. There have always been those who call this optimism naivety, and the cynicism of their perspective has always given it the appearance of wisdom. But humanity has progressed not by way of cynicism and self-doubt, but by the innovations of those among us who have chosen to believe that we can be radically reformed.