Tit for Tat: How the West Won and Lost the World

According to German sociologist Max Weber, capitalism arose in Western Europe because of our moral system. Europeans had adopted a unitarian moral system, as opposed to one of a dual morality.

It means Europeans naturally treated each other about the same way as they would treat their family members. We didn’t need to learn about equality. We practiced it quite naturally. But the rest of humanity, back then, treated only family members as equals, and strangers as close to non-human.

It’s still like that in most parts of the world. There is a saying in India that goes, The tears of strangers are just water. It suggests Indian people don’t care about strangers’ feelings. It also suggests they don’t care about strangers. Perhaps that explains how they manage to live with such dense populations (and why their road traffic is so chaotic).

Culture, we now know, doesn’t magically carry over just because of people migrating to the West. When Europeans moved to the Americas, they brough their system with them. But many a U.S. lawyer has also noted that African-Americans rather live by a dual morality system, the African way.

Many African-Americans, for example, can’t fathom why anyone would care about someone they’re not related to. Convicted killers will accuse juries of being racist, because the convict can’t grasp why random jury members would care about an unrelated victim. The killer certainly didn’t!

To live by such a system of “I can rape and kill whoever I want as long as it isn’t family” sounds like an animal morality to us. Indeed, much of Africa, India, Asia, and even the Americas before the arrival of Europeans lived by a system of “my family is everything, strangers are nothing”.

Europeans were unique in this respect. Whichever way it came to be, by the time the Industrial Age began, Europeans had figured out the winning strategy: namely, to cooperate on a basis of “if you do good to me, I will do good to you,” regardless of one’s blood ties.

This game of tit for tat, however, doesn’t deny bloody retalliation when dealing with aggressive actors. For, “if you hurt me, I will hurt you.” Still, playing games of tit-for-tat with strangers is a winning strategy in the long term.

In fact, here is where the myth of White Supremacy was born. Because these white-looking Europeans were willing to give strangers good deals (equal benefits) in games of tit-for-tat, everyone else quickly learned to prefer dealing with Europeans over less scrupulous members of their own races.

Europeans, in other words, began benefiting strangers. That is, until the 1960s began.

After the 1960s, under the leadership of an American billionaire class looking to maintain its wealth, the West pivoted from production-based capitalism to speculative casino capitalism. We began outsourcing our factories to Asia, to enslave Asian workers and reap the labor cost difference as a benefit.

One might even argue that by 2019, this casino capitalism had morphed into a form of disaster capitalism, i.e., as in making money off of pandemics and the Ukraine conflict, just for profit.

Predatory billionaires began preying on people,including their own. The billionaires, like the rest of the world, now developed a dual morality system: we the billioniares versus the people.

The white middle class didn’t get the memo. Middle-class families kept operating on their tit-for-tat principle, thinking they were still engaging in a mutually benefical relationship with their governments. I would say the white middle class didn’t catch on about the scam until the early 2020s.

By that time, the BRICS nations has already risen to prominence. And how exactly did the BRICS nations manage to start posing a threat to Western intersts? Well, by using the very tit-for-tat moral system that once made Europeans so successful. They started supporting each other, at least at the higher political levels, on a tit-for-tat basis.

The problem with tit-for-tat conspiracies is that they eventually overtake the whole world, as Europeans once did. We can imagine that, one day, Europeans will prefer playing tit-for-tat with China and Russia to being exploited by U.S. billionaires.

As the American-led West is rapidly devolving into a dual morality system due to its exploitative elites, BRICS nations are instead adopting the winning strategy of a unitarian morality.

Europeans, in the end, would do well to return to their roots and start playing tit-for-tat with the world while understanding that it doesn’t deny us bloody retalliation against those who mistreat us.