The following is the first post in the Civilization and Cooperation sequence, with the goal of laying out a coherent, explicit, and actionable model of what humans are doing when they form societies and adhere to their rules. Each essay is intended to communicate something like a single step of a proof—they should stand alone, but are much more interesting in conjunction.

As a child (not raised within a church but surrounded by friends who were), I was always struck by the phrase thou shalt not covet in the last two Old Testament commandments.

Coveting (it seemed to me) was an entirely internal action, one which could at least in theory have no impact on the external world—if you had strong moral boundaries against theft, adultery, and (I guess) whining, then there seemed to be no reason why the act of coveting itself would be a problem. There were certainly things which I coveted which literally no one else on Earth was aware of, so ... ?

Eventually, eight-year-old me generated a pet theory: once in the Christian heaven, people can do anything they want, and thus it was not enough to simply block bad behavior. Heaven is a walled garden, and it's meant to be at least in part a wish-fulfillment paradise—thus, the only people you can safely allow inside are those who not only reliably act well, but also robustly desire only virtuous things. If someone was holding off only because of external prohibitions, they'd wreak havoc once they got into the wish-fulfillment zone.

(This theory was further reinforced by my vague understanding that swearing/cursing was also Forbidden, along with things like "being angry for petty or trivial reasons.")

Another way to express the above theory is something like "external restraints are less reliable than self-restraint." Anyone who has ever been responsible for preventing a toddler from gleefully offing itself will likely agree—there is a limit to what can be accomplished by cleaning and childproofing and making decrees. The job becomes vastly easier once you can recruit the toddler's own motivations, and convince (or bribe) it to not want dangerous things in the first place.

(This is what's behind the questionable-but-not-entirely-outlandish practice of letting toddlers touch the hot stove, once. Usually, goes that theory of parenting, once is all they need.)

No complex system of rules and b...

Civilization & Cooperation