I'm not sure if it's your intention but this reads as a strong critique of the technolibertarianism world philosophy that dominates our industry. We lose something by replacing high-trust cooperative systems with ones that are mutually antagonistic. We fall into the bad square of the prisoners dilemma by not only not exorcising the defectors but holding them up as the highest moral good and the example to follow.
This is going to sound a little weird, but I think trust is part of the problem.
Canadians have a high-trust culture, but their stock market is historically full of scams[1], and some analysts think its causally related. (It may just be because TSXV is a wild west, or because companies would IPO on NYSE or Nasdaq if they were legit, but it could be the trust thing. Fits my narrative, anyway.)
When I look at politics, crypto rug pulls, meme stocks with P/E ratios over 200, Aum[2] and similar cults, or many other modern problems I don't see negotiations breaking down because of a lack of trust; I see a bunch of people placing far too much trust in sketchy leaders and ideas backed by scant evidence. A little skepticism would go a long way.
That's why I emphasize robust coordination: more due diligence, more transparency, more fraud detection, more skepticism, more financial literacy, more education in general. There's a cost associated with all this, sure, but it still gets you into a situation where the interaction is a coordination game[3] and the Nash equilibrium is Pareto-efficient. Thus, we fall into the "pit of success" and naturally cooperate in our own best interests.
There's nothing wrong with empathy, altruism, or charity, but they are very far from universal. You need to base your society on a firm foundation of robust coordination, and then you can have those things afterwards, as a little treat.
