The Brown Paper Bag Brigade

There is a moment in Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson's The Elephant in the Brain, a book about human's deceptive nature that is worthy of pause. Not because it's dramatic, but because it's mundane. Kevin and Robin suggest that people drinking alcohol in public wrapped in a brown paper bag don't do it because it truly dupes us — but because it gives busy police officers plausible deniability to look the other way.

The brown paper bag is possibly a symbol for a much bigger human phenomenon.

Picture a powerful executive, someone who could eat anywhere they like, who arrives at the office holding a brown paper bag. Inside: a modest sandwich, maybe an apple. The message this executive attempts to convey is unmistakable. I'm one of you. I'm humble. I don't throw money around. I'm frugal. I'm grounded.

The bag, of course, is a lie.

Not the sandwich. The sandwich may well be perfectly real. No, the lie is the frame around it. The bag. The performance of ordinariness deployed with extraordinary precision. The executive doesn't bring the bag despite their status. They bring it because of it. It is a prop in a theater of humility, and it works because everyone in the audience wants to believe it.

The executive's salary tells the real story. Modern estimates put CEO pay at roughly 290 times the average worker's — a stark contrast to the 21-to-1 ratio of 1965, representing an increase of over 1,000 percent in six decades.

The thesis Simler and Hanson are building toward is that a vast portion of human behavior is costume. We dress our self-interest in the clothes of virtue so convincingly that we no longer notice we're doing it. Our brains, they argue, are less the seat of honest reason than they are sophisticated concealment machines. The elephant (our actual motive) plods along, and the rider on top (our conscious self) weaves a story about why the direction we're already headed is the noble one.

The brown paper bag is the perfect emblem for this. It is packaging. It is branding. It is the optics of decency wrapped around whatever is actually inside. And in high-trust societies, the method of masking one's true intentions is devastatingly effective.

High-trust societies are, by most measures, miracles of human coordination.

Simler and Hanson spend time with a striking example drawn from the anthropological record: the Maori of New Zealand. Among the Maori, the obligation to feed and shelter travelers was not a courtesy but a norm so deep it was practically law. A stranger arriving at a settlement could expect to be fed, generously, without interrogation of their means or intentions.

This generous norm was an elegant solution for the problems the Maori faced. In a world where food sources were uncertain and terrain was unforgiving, the knowledge that you would be received wherever you went fundamentally changed the calculus of movement. You could explore further, take risks on new fishing grounds, spend longer on a journey without carrying everything you needed. The hospitality norm wasn't charity. It was infrastructure.

The norm also, predictably, attracted people who had no intention of reciprocating. Those who learned to appear like travelers — to perform the posture of the transient and the deserving — could feed themselves indefinitely off the generosity of communities they'd never contribute to. The norm that made the Maori more mobile, more resilient, more interconnected — the same norm created a door that opened from both sides.

While this reaction may appear harsh, the Maori people understood that they could not afford to let parasitic behavior spread. For a society dependent on mutual trust, anything less than a definitive response might have encouraged others to test the limits of communal generosity. The severity of the punishment underscored the vital necessity of upholding the non-exploitation norm.

In modern societies you can largely assume that the food you ordered won't be tampered with, that the medication you were prescribed is what it says on the label, that the colleague across the desk is broadly trying to do the same thing you are.

This ambient good faith is not just pleasant — it is enormously productive. Economists have long observed that trust is a form of social capital, and societies rich in it can accomplish things that low-trust societies simply cannot. The friction cost of verifying everyone, auditing everything, and guarding against constant defection is eliminated, and the freed energy goes into building things.

But this gift comes with a structural vulnerability so obvious it's almost embarrassing. In a society built on the assumption of good faith, a person who quietly abandons good faith while maintaining its appearance is positioned to extract enormous advantage. They are running on stolen rails.

This is where we meet the Brown Paper Bag Brigade.

Robert Kagan, a legal scholar at UC Berkeley, spent a career documenting what he called "adversarial legalism" — the distinctly American tendency to resolve disputes not through negotiation, but through lawyers, lawsuits, and formal legal contestation. Kagan admitted it had real virtues. But when the machinery of legal challenge is available to anyone with sufficient resources and patience, it becomes less a shield for the vulnerable and more a weapon for whoever is most motivated to obstruct. The courtroom, like the brown paper bag, is neutral packaging. What matters is what's inside it.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson arrive at a similar conclusion in Abundance (2025) — a monument to what happens when a society's processes calcify into instruments of permanent delay. California's high-speed rail, originally budgeted at $33 billion and scheduled for completion by 2020, now carries an estimated price tag of $106 billion and may never connect Los Angeles to San Francisco. In the same period, China built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.

The procedural tools built to protect the public are now, in many cases, the primary mechanism by which progress is stopped. Between 1971 and 1973 alone, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund pursued 77 legal actions, with roughly 70 seeking to block or constrain government activity — a pattern that helped establish litigation as the default instrument of opposition.

This is the Brown Paper Bag Brigade at civilizational scale.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented this with clinical precision in Merchants of Doubt (2010). A small network of scientists — credentialed, articulate, and deeply motivated — spent decades manufacturing uncertainty around settled questions: the harms of tobacco, the reality of acid rain, the cause of the ozone hole, the trajectory of climate change. They were never explicitly for cancer or against clean air. They were simply for more research. For rigor. For not rushing to conclusions. The brown paper bag, pressed neatly under one arm, while the other hand scattered doubt like seed.

What Oreskes and Conway showed is that you don't need to win the argument. You only need to make the argument feel unresolved. In a high-trust information environment — where audiences extend good faith to credentialed experts, where balance is treated as a journalistic virtue — the mere performance of legitimate dissent is enough to stall action indefinitely. The Brigade doesn't need a majority. It only needs a procedural foothold and the patience to hold it.

The Brown Paper Bag Brigade is not a secret society. There are no membership cards and no initiation. These individuals can be found in every institution, every office, every community board and neighborhood association and corporate hierarchy, who have mastered the art of wrapping self-serving or obstructive behavior in the packaging of principle.

They are the committee members who bury a project they're threatened by under an avalanche of procedural concerns — always framed as due diligence. They are the colleague who makes every meeting longer and less decisive while never appearing difficult, because their objections are always thoughtful and their questions always reasonable. They are the manager who hoards credit using the language of shared success. They are the neighbor who recruits community opposition to a housing development while speaking entirely in the vocabulary of "community character" — while secretly knowing it was more about property valuation.

None of them is ever against anything. They are simply for being thorough. For being careful. For being fair. The brown paper bag is always in hand.

What makes them difficult to name — and therefore difficult to address — is that their protective coloring is near-perfect. In a high-trust environment, where we extend the benefit of the doubt as a default, a person who talks the right way and shows up to the right meetings with the right expression on their face is, for most practical purposes, indistinguishable from someone acting in genuine good faith. The costs to the organization absorbing this behavior, especially when spread across a whole institution, are immeasurable. It's so diffuse as to almost be invisible.

So the Brigade persists — and the worst part: they are often rewarded for it.

In a sufficiently cooperative environment, being obtuse is surprisingly profitable.

Consider what obtuseness actually does. It slows things down — which, in organizational settings, often means the person who wants things slowed down wins by default. It forces the cooperative actors to spend energy justifying, re-explaining, and building consensus that was never genuinely up for grabs. It raises the cost of collective action without ever appearing to do so deliberately. And because the obstructionist is always operating under the banner of good faith, the people around them are caught in a bind: pushing back directly looks unreasonable; absorbing the behavior means losing ground.

The cooperative person, meanwhile, is quietly punished for their cooperation. They are the one doing the actual work while the Brigade circles with concerns. They are the ones whose time is consumed by the extended process. They are the one who, when the project finally limps across the finish line, shares the credit with the person who nearly prevented it from getting there.

Their finding was striking: this behavior, which they termed "antisocial punishment," was not randomly distributed. It appeared most persistently in societies with weaker civic norms — places where the social contract was already fraying. But crucially, it existed everywhere to some degree. The instinct to sanction the virtuous, to undermine the contributor, to put the cooperative player in their place — this is not a pathology. It appears to be a feature of the competitive social landscape.

The damage is rarely visible in any single interaction. This is what makes it so insidious.

When trust is weaponized — when the ambient good faith of a cooperative society is used as cover for bad-faith behavior — a slow and cumulative deterioration occurs. What erodes first is not productivity or efficiency, though those suffer too. What erodes first is the willingness to be the person who tries.

The high contributor in Herrmann et al.'s game who keeps getting sanctioned doesn't flip to malice; they gradually, rationally, reduce their contribution. Why give generously to a common pool when doing so makes you a target? Why take the reins of a project when the person who does the most work absorbs the most friction? Why be visible, effortful, and cooperative when the people around you are achieving comparable social standing by being none of those things?

This is the true cost of the Brigade: they produce a slow-rolling rationalization of withdrawal. Over time, and in aggregate, they shift the equilibrium of a cooperative society toward something more guarded, more transactional, more exhausting to navigate. The high-trust society that produced the conditions for their success begins, almost imperceptibly, to go extinct.

Francis Fukuyama observed that a small number of genuinely asocial actors, combined with a larger mass of free riders who contribute as little as possible while benefiting fully, represent the inherent vulnerability of any cooperative system. The institutions designed to manage norms — accountability mechanisms, cultural expectations — work only as long as enough people take them seriously. When the Brown Paper Bag Brigade is sufficiently rewarded, those institutions begin to feel naive.

A deeper reality about the Brown Paper Bag Brigade is that all of us have found ourselves among their ranks. It would almost seem impossible to navigate life without at one point or another being confronted with the choice — having made some form of justification for why something that's good for us is really good for the whole, when in reality the benefit is mostly ours.

The implications of The Elephant in the Brain leave us with an uncomfortable truth: you cannot fully trust your own account of your motives, because your brain is running a motivated narrative almost continuously. This is not a comfortable thought. But it is a useful one, because it suggests that the first and most important check on the Brigade is internal.

The brown paper bag, as a symbol, is useful precisely because it focuses attention on the packaging rather than the content. What is actually inside? What is the real effect of my behavior on the people around me and the institutions I'm part of? Am I raising a concern because the concern is genuine, or because raising it benefits me in ways I haven't fully examined?

These are not comfortable questions. These are questions the Brigade actively ignores or suppresses — which is, in part, why they are the Brigade.

The societies that maintain their trust do so not by assuming good faith infinitely, but by cultivating the habit of honest self-examination and the institutional willingness to adapt and change. High trust does not mean blind trust. It means the willingness to extend the benefit of the doubt — paired with the moral courage to withdraw it. Especially when evidence to the contrary is consistent, and a clear pattern of bad faith is readily recognizable.

The brown paper bag can only hold so much.