Beyond Fear
A secular blueprint for incentivizing a universal morality. (How to Replace Religion Part 3)
My thesis in the previous part of this series was that we can build a universal moral compass by acting in ways that improve humanity over the long term. And if we disconnect morality from fiction, we will leave the dogma behind and limit bad actors from manipulating us into committing acts that actually disrupt humanity’s progress.
But knowing what will benefit humanity and what won’t is only half the equation. The other half of the struggle is how to inspire those moral acts and disincentivize bad acts. With God, there is fear. Fear guides you to act benevolently. You want to steal a sandwich from that gas station? Expect to burn in Hell for eternity with Hitler. You want to cheat on your wife with Rebecca from accounting? Sorry, but you’ll be denied entry to the eternal paradise of Heaven. You want to murder-rape that innocent college girl and not repent for it? Hell for you as well. Say hello to Satan for me.
But secular people have no God. They don’t have the fear associated with committing acts that displease Him. We must build an incentive system that reaches these people if we want to have any hope at a universal morality that people actually follow.
One of the best books I’ve read recently is Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game. It was the inspiration for this series on religion because it solved this problem of a moral incentive structure for secular people. And it turns out that most of society already has it. It even has a name: consequences.
When people’s outcomes are tied to their actions (i.e. there are consequences), they will revert to actions that build their reputation and help others in the long term. And they will avoid actions that harm humanity. But when their actions have no consequences, they are willing to act in solely self-serving ways.
When people are responsible for the outcomes of their actions, Nassim Taleb calls this skin in the game. The problem with skin in the game is that it is up to society to enforce the morality of the collective. The collective needs to agree that when a person commits an act it sees as good, that person is rewarded with wealth and good will. And when a person commits an act it sees as bad, that person is penalized by the law, a loss of money, a loss of reputation, or all three.
Skin in the Game Must Be Applied to Our Systems of Law
A good example of where skin in the game applies is crime. It is up to society to agree which things it sees as a punishable offense or not. And then it must decide together what degree of punishment each type of offense deserves.
In America, I think, we often get it right. Theft, violence, fraud, and murder are typically met with steep punishments.
But sometimes, we get it wrong. California, as an example, taught us a fun lesson in how the misallocation of appropriate punishments incentivizes bad behavior with Proposition 47. Proposition 47 is a piece of legislation passed in 2014 that reclassified theft of items under $950 from felonies to misdemeanors. The goal was to reallocate resources to violent and other serious crimes. So, on top of making shoplifting penalized to a lesser extent, the police departments (underfunded after the “defund the police” movement) also began policing these crimes less. This more or less allowed criminals to walk out of stores with $949 worth of merchandise unscathed. As a result, theft greatly increased in the state. This caused many businesses to shut their doors or lock up their deodorant.
Yes, Prop 47 never needed to happen. We have enough history and data to show that when you police crime, crime decreases. History should be our guide when trying to decide how we write laws and ensure their outcomes. Time and time again we have proven that when we let criminals have their way, they will commit crimes. The Baltimore Police Department revealed in 2019 that 81.4% of homicide suspects had prior criminal records. 81.4%!!!!!!!!!!! That’s almost all of them. And that number is so specific that it must be true.
Imagine how peaceful society would be if we universally agreed that the incentives for staying out of jail should be high. There should be skin in the game for being a peaceful and respectful member of society. I’m personally on team Harsh Penalties for Criminals. Theft, murder, and the harming of others should be fiercely prosecuted. And the penalties for such obvious harms to society should be high.
The criminals in Baltimore should have been put away with large prison sentences after their second or third offense. Get these people off the streets with the normal, law-abiding citizenry. Because if you just catch and release these repeat offenders, the BPD data shows that soon their crimes will escalate to the point where people start dying.
Bryan Smith, the drunk driver who hit Steven King, had his license suspended and reinstated three times in 1998 alone, the year before he hit King. He received a 6-month prison sentence and a year suspension on his license for almost killing one of the greatest nonfiction writers the world has ever known. Like, are you fucking kidding me? He should have had his license removed for the rest of his life after his second or third serious offense. He should never have been allowed behind a wheel that day. He was clearly a danger to society. But the lax judges in Maine decided he should be given another chance. Then another. Then another. Then ano… you get my point. But Bryan Smith never made it back on the road. He died of a drug overdose before his license was reinstated. His death was probably the only thing that kept him off the road and those around him safe. Because the judges sure didn’t care about the safety of his fellow motorists and pedestrians.
When will society learn that when you decrease the disincentives for criminals to commit crimes, that they will continue to commit crimes? Imagine how peaceful society would be if we universally agreed that the incentives for staying out of jail should be high. There should be skin in the game for being a peaceful and respectful member of society.
The problem is some people have sympathy for criminals. They believe all criminals can be reformed. This is clearly untrue when you examine history and data. According to a 2018 report by the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), about 68% of released prisoners in the U.S. were rearrested within three years, and 77% were rearrested within five years.
The act of being a repeat criminal offender is called recidivism. Rates of recidivism decrease as a function of age. Younger people, below the age of 25, have higher rates of recidivism compared to older criminals. This data suggests that punishments for criminals below the age of 25 should be higher as you age. However, in modern society, we see the opposite happen.
The reason we provide younger offenders with less harsh punishments is because their brains are literally still forming. A young criminal’s frontal lobe, which is responsible for decision-making and impulse control, is still developing. The frontal lobe continues to form through their mid-twenties. So, juvenile and young adult crime is punished less harshly, in the hope that with age and maturity and brain development, they improve their ways.
I have the same hope for these people. But the insane rates of recidivism among people under 24, which was shown to be 84% in that same BJS study mentioned earlier, suggests that the punishments for younger people should be harsher than for older criminals.
And this might actually be the solution to almost all young criminals being repeat offenders. If you police crime harshly early on, you’ll create a better understanding of the consequences for the people who will most likely become our future murderers. If you can show a 16-year-old that theft and violence are absolutely not tolerated by society, then maybe you’ll stop him from being a criminal in the future. And if their friends see that the outcome of getting caught committing crime is a long and hard prison sentence, then maybe you’ll stop the entire friend group from becoming future criminals. Imagine how sobering it would be to a group of misfit teens to lose one of their friends to a five-year prison sentence because they decided to beat up an old person on the subway.
And some of you criminal sympathizers might be saying that’s going to destroy his ability to live a good life in the future. But I would disagree. Especially when the most likely outcome by far for this young thug is a future of more crime. If you can convince him, while his brain is still forming, that committing crimes will be met with steep negative consequences, maybe you can convince him that a future of abiding by the law is the better outcome. And if you give him access to education while he is in prison, he might just come out better than when he went in.
Sympathy, which can often feel good and moral, can actually be incredibly immoral when misplaced. The video below is a hard watch. Viewer discretion is advised. But it shows how crucial harsh penalties are for young criminals and criminals in general.
In the video, an officer pulls over a couple for driving over 100 miles per hour. The officer gives the driver of the car three minor citations and lets him drive away after the driver put him and his passenger in incredible amounts of danger. Moments later, they both wound up dead after continuing to speed and inevitably crash into a truck and then an overpass.
You might think that the officer was being a nice guy by letting them get off so easily. But he could have easily prevented both of their deaths. The officer is supposed to police the law. In the great state of New Jersey where this event occurred, the rules on excessive speeding are a little laxer. But the officer has the discretion to arrest the driver in situations such as this. And in my opinion, that is what this officer should have done. You have a young 24-year-old on a provisional license driving over 100 miles an hour with a passenger in his car. Get him the fuck off the road. Arrest him. Give him jail time. Save at least two lives in the process. Letting the driver of this vehicle drive away after the initial traffic stop was an immoral act by the officer. As hard as that is to admit.
And what about the judges who try to be nice and let young criminals walk free from crimes because they felt bad for the criminal and their unfortunate upbringings and circumstances? Well, most likely these criminals will be criminals again. There’s an 84% chance, actually. These judges, who want to be nice, are actually being immoral. They are committing acts that most likely will harm humanity in the long term.
The moral thing in society is to prosecute crimes harshly. Limit recidivism. Keep society peaceful. Decrease the steepness of the slippery slope to homicide that criminals seem to go down. Get reckless drivers off the road. Prevent unnecessary death. Give everyone skin in the game.
Skin in the Game Applied to Normal Life
Society doesn’t need to just apply morality to things it deems are bad. It should also apply morality to things it deems are good. There needs to be incentives for being a good person. Not just incentivize people from being bad people.
The incentives derived from skin in the game applies to all of life. Especially one’s career. The easiest to see example is entrepreneurship. I’m a small business owner. I own a gym in Naples, Florida. Over the past two and a half years since owning my gym, I’m happy to say I’ve become a better person. Some important traits of my character that have greatly improved since owning my gym are my patience, capacity for kindness, and capacity for forgiveness. And there are two reasons for that: my client attrition rates and my Google review rating.
I promise I am not joking.
Right now, I have a 4.9-star rating on Google based on 92 reviews. One of these reviews is a one-star review. The review comes from a person who has never been to my gym but bought a program from me online. A year after he bought the program, he was asking me for copious amounts of advice about his back pain. I didn’t want to dedicate time to this. So, I dismissed him by telling him I didn’t have time to help him and directed him to my Instagram videos, most of which were about how to relieve back pain.
He was disgruntled by my dismissive attitude, found my gym’s Google page, and left a one-star review telling the Naples area about how I’m a bad person. I have 91 5-star reviews. And I give none of those any mental attention. This sole 1-star review still consumes my thoughts.
I’m driven by preventing people from giving me one-star reviews far more than I’m motivated by getting good reviews. If I’m seen as a bad person, my reputation suffers. And that means my business suffers. And along with it, my income. I live my life, even outside of my gym, being kind to others because I have skin in the game. There is nothing stopping an ex-friend who feels like I wronged them from pretending they were a former client and bashing my business online. I must be nice at all times. My business relies on it.
I’m not the only one like this. Humans are much more focused on the downside risk than the upside reward of their deeds. A study by the famous authors of Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found that found that people needed approximately $2-$2.50 of gain to make up for the emotional deficit of losing $1. This is called loss aversion. To put it another way, people feel better about not losing money than they feel good about gaining the same amount of money. They feel better about not being punished than they feel good about being rewarded.
But we all aren’t entrepreneurs with our reputations tied so clearly to our actions, right? We don’t all have skin in the game.
Not so fast. If you work in sales and are cruel to all your potential customers, you lose out on money in commissions you never earn. If you’re working in a big corporate job and you make sexually suggestive comments to a coworker, the well-funded HR department will get your ass fired. If you’re a doctor and the care you provided a patient directly resulted in their death, breaking the Hippocratic Oath that you signed, you could lose your medical license.
In the real world, you are policed by punishments placed upon you by society for doing things it thinks are going to harm it in the long term. If you do things society doesn’t like but aren’t criminal, you lose your job, your income, and your reputation. You must commit acts that improve humanity in the long-term to gain societies approval and good will.
And it extends beyond your career, where your actions are so closely tied to your outcomes. Society is constantly imposing its morality upon us. If you see a cat in a tree that needs saving and you save it, society will reward you with a good reputation. Maybe you’ll even get your name in the local newspaper. And if you don’t save the cat and walk away? You better hope nobody sees you. Because you’ll be shunned for your cowardice.
But what happens when there is no skin in the game? What happens when can people get off without harm to themselves while harming society in the meantime? We saw that when people commit crimes and don’t get punished, lives are often lost. But how about when crimes aren’t committed?
In Skin in the Game, Nassim Taleb discusses this with the financial crisis of 2008. The private banking sector bankrupted much of society. They took on high risk loans, multiplied the risk by one-million times by wrapping high-risk loans with perfectly good loans, over levered the whole thing, and then just let it blow up in all our faces. And what did the executives of these banks get as a result of bankrupting millions of Americans? A giant bailout, pay raises, almost no limitations on the practices they were engaging in before, and a whole bunch of regulations that stopped people from creating banks that could disrupt them. They were able to privatize the gains of their behavior while bestowing the losses on the public.
What would have been the better outcome to prevent this in the future? If we gave the executives at these big banks skin in the game by not bailing them out, we could prevent them from doing this in the future. If you make the banks bear the financial outcomes of their misdeeds, they won’t approve so many bad mortgages and loans. They won’t over-leverage the financial system and put their depositors at risk (which is the defense for the bailouts). And if you don’t create a regulatory framework that makes it impossible to start a new bank while protecting the incumbents, the startup ecosystem could create a bank with a whole new operating model that disrupts the legacy system while providing more benefit to the consumer (consumer = society at large).
The government’s job is not only to police crime to stop bad. Its job is also to police the free market to ensure good. It must ensure that when companies harm their customers, they are met with fines and other consequences to prevent them from doing the same thing in the future. And these consequences should show the rest of the market not do it either or face the same fate. In such an environment, companies are encouraged to be moral by improving the lives of their customers (humanity).
When the banking sector was bailed out by the government, almost two decades later, Americans still bear the burden of this immoral decision. And guess what? These politicians who run the American government will still get reelected next term, because there are no term-limits, and the American people have no other choices in candidates. :)
Our politicians have no skin in the game when it comes to how they run the government. They can be immoral, bailout banks, sign bills that result in regulatory capture, and not face any consequences. How can we ensure that politicians, when they act immorally, face consequences?
Warren Buffet has a fun idea. He was quoted as saying “I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there’s a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.”
Incentives, such as the potential to lose the chance of reelection if you improperly spend taxpayer dollars, stop people from committing acts that harm humanity in the long term. Incentives stop people from being immoral. All without the fear of God telling you that you will burn in Hell for eternity. Because, if we are being honest, consequences imposed in the real world are far more motivating than those in the afterlife.
Secular people aren’t default immoral just because they have no God. In most of life, they have skin in the game. They are punished by the law for committing crimes. They are punished by society for doing things that hurt it. They are incentivized to be moral by the outcome of their actions. It is simply the role of society to enforce those outcomes. This will ensure the universal morality we all wish to see in the world.
Morality and community aren’t the only benefits that people derive from religion. There is also purpose. Purpose can come from many sources. But secular people, with their decreased fertility rates, are losing one of the biggest sources of purpose one can find: family.
Part 4 Coming Soon…
Read Next: Create a Life Mission Statement
Oh, hello there, may I ask you a quickie (slang for ‘quick question’)?
Here’s the deal. I might not know you. But you know me. And that’s saying something. That means, in your world, I’m basically famous. But here’s the deal, I’m not famous enough. I want my name in lights. And I need your help to get on one of those screens in Times Square.
If you could share this with a friend you think could use some more morality, I’m sure they would appreciate the subtle hint.
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