How high-trust societies quietly reward the people slowly hollowing them out.
There is a moment in Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson's book about human's deceptive nature "The Elephant in the Brain" , that is worthy of pause. 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 a form of plausible deniability. The ability to look the other way and focus on more important matters. Plausible deniability appears to be a much bigger human phenomenon than is widely acknowledged. And the brown paper bag is the perfect symbol of behaviorial friction as a natural human strategy.
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 the executive is attempting to convey: 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. Heck the guy eating this lunch is obviously to some extent frugal. Or maybe they just don't value food. 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 symbollically this works. It creates just enough social friction to hopefully be ignored.
The executives' 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. (Economic Policy Institute, "CEO Pay in 2023," September 2024.)
The thesis Simler and Hanson are building toward in the "Elephant in the Brain" 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.
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 quite an elegant solution for the problems the Maori faced. In a world where food sources were uncertain and terrain was often 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.
This hospitality norm wasn't charity. It was almost infrastructure.
The liberal way in which these societies provide food especially to travelers made the possibility of relocation or even searching for new food sources a much less risky endeavor. These freedoms mitigated risk and encouraged what could be perceived as potential communally profitable ventures. However as the story foretells these norms were easily exploitable.
The norm would also, predictably, attract people who had no intention of reciprocation. 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 created a door that opened from both sides.
David Graeber, in his book "Debt," recounts the story of Tei Reinga, a notorious mooch within the Maori community who exploited this hospitality until his death. He was eventually murdered by the very people from whom he had frequently demanded food. While this reaction may appear harsh or cruel, the Maori people understood that they could not afford to let this parasitic behavior spread. For a society dependent on mutual trust, anything less than a definitive punishment might have simply encouraged others to test the limits of communal generosity. The severity of the punishment thus underscored the vital necessity to the people of upholding the norm.
The Brown Paper Bag Brigade at civilizational scale.
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 accomplish tasks with you rather than against you.
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. In a society built on the assumption of good faith, a person who quietly abandons good faith while maintaining its appearance can reap massive benefits without equal sacrifice.
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 bureaucratic judgment, lawyers, lawsuits, and formal legal contestation. Kagan was not wholly critical of a society that embraces adversarial legalism and admitted that it had real virtues.
But institutions built to enforce virtues, depend on the integrity of the people using them. When the institutional machinery of legal challenge is exploited, it becomes less a shield for trust 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 their book Abundance (2025), An investigation into what happens when a societies process and mechanisms intended to ensure fairness calcify into instruments of permanent delay.
Klein and Thompson argue that American governance has become process-obsessed rather than outcome-oriented. The most prevalent example in their book being California's high-speed rail, originally budgeted at $33 billion and scheduled for completion by 2020, it 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.
Klein and Derek document the full cast of obstruction: zoning laws, environmental review requirements, local veto points, and a culture of adversarial legalism that together make building anything homes, transit lines, clean energy, slow and expensive.
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.
Veto rights effectively organized by any number of special interests, mean that any sufficiently motivated group, a neighborhood association, an environmental advocacy organization, a competing interest with legal counsel on retainer can insert itself into the machinery and bring everything to a halt.
The procedural tools that were built to enable public projects are, in many cases, the primary mechanism by which progress is stopped.
The same can be applied in the diaspora of political and media settings where counternarratives are often rewarded. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented the effects of media discourse on public policy in Merchants of Doubt (2010). In which a small network of paid scientists credentialed, articulate, spent decades manufacturing uncertainty around settled questions: the harms of tobacco, the reality of acid rain, the trajectory of climate change. They were never explicitly for cancer or against clean air. They often responded to sound arguments by arguing the need for more research. For rigor. For not rushing to conclusions. While the brown paper bag costume these scientist were wearing was obvious to most of their peers. The sectors of the public for whom the narrative confirmed their worldview eagerly picked up these talking points.
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, one where audiences extend good faith to credentialed experts, where balance is a journalistic virtue, the performance of legitimate dissent is generally lucrative. The Brigade doesn't need a majority. It only needs a procedural foothold and the patience to hold it.
One might reasonably bemoan the systems and mechanisms that make this possible, but the reality is that any complex society needs checks and balances. Robert Kagan acknowledged as much, adversarial legalism, he wrote, carries genuine virtues: it "empowers citizens, lawyers, and judges to mount challenges to the arbitrary or unlawful exercise of government authority." Those are not small things. The problem is not the sword. It is who picks it up. Like any instrument of accountability, a legal process wielded in bad faith doesn't protect the public, it impersonates protection while doing just the opposite.
The faith of the people, the willingness to do what's right and often what's difficult, are what define a society, not the instruments they elect. The instruments are just the medium. In the end, who you are and what your true intentions are will always find a way to surface.
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 neighbor who recruits community opposition to a housing development while speaking entirely in the vocabulary of "community character" while secretly knowing that it was more about property valuation. They are the public servant who blocks necessary reform by invoking the importance of getting it right.
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. They clothe themselves in the garbs of virtue making the cost of accusation towards them high. The costs to the organization absorbing this behavior, especially when spread across a whole institution is 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.
This dynamic has a name in the academic literature. In a landmark 2008 study published in Science, economists Benedikt Herrmann, Christian Thöni, and Simon Gächter ran experiments across sixteen cities in fourteen countries, using what's called a public goods game. In this experimental setup, each player is given a sum of money and must decide, in secret, how much to contribute to a common pot. The total amount in the pot is then multiplied by the experimenter and distributed equally among all players, regardless of their individual contributions. This structure ensures that cooperation (contributing generously) benefits the entire group, while individuals who contribute little or nothing — known as free-riders — still benefit from the collective payout. This creates a powerful tension between individual self-interest and the group's success, setting up the exact dynamic for the cooperation and punishment observed in the study.
Their finding was striking: in certain societies, a measurable subset of participants would spend their own resources to punish the most cooperative players — the very people contributing most to the group. 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. Unfortunately much like when a bundle of sticks is placed together to form a stronger bond, likewise when the contributions are smaller the bundle becomes weakened.
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, goes extinct.
Francis Fukuyama observed in his book "Trust, Social virtues and the creation of prosperity" that communities depend on mutual trust and will not arise spontaneously without it. And 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 — empty, meaningless symbols of virtue rather than genuine guiding lights.
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 to be a part of the brigade. 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. Most people are not great negotiators and those who are often exhibit even greater powers of concealment of true intent.
The implications of Kevin and Robin's book The Elephant in the Brain leaves 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.