To: letters@guardian.co.uk
Re: In society we all play by two very different sets of rules

Date: Wednesday 2 February 05

For the special attention of both the science and economics editors

Dear Sir/Madam,

According to today's Guardian, the Prime Minister has pledged to help up to one million people on incapacity benefit back into work through a series of "firm but fair" reforms. "The system should be there for people who are playing by the rules", he said ("Blair pledges backing for welfare reforms").

 I don't think the PM really understands what the game or the rules are. But then, who does?

Perhaps I - an eco-biologist - can help . . . . 

The game is the struggle for survival and advantage in the socio-economic environment.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is not universally popular, but essential for understanding the origins and functioning of biological systems, including human beings and the socio-economic structures we have created.

Man's behavioural programming (which plays a much more important role in human behaviour and the functioning of society than most people like, or are able, to admit) evolved over millions of years to serve the survival and advantage of individuals and their (extended) families in the natural environment.  It has had no time to adapt to the much larger social units associated with the civilisations which have arisen in just the past few thousand years.

With the advent of civilisation a fundamental change occurred, one which at the beginning of the 21st Century has still not been widely recognised or accorded the importance owing to it: the focus of man's behavioural programming shifted from his natural environment to his newly, self-created socio-economic environment.

Our free-market, capitalist economy has developed and been honed to take advantage of man's (primitive) behavioural programming: not least, the fears and ambitions associated with the desire to maintain or improve one's status within the socio-economic hierarchy.

Much confusion arises from the double role of - and thus our ambivalent relationship to - the socio-economic order (i.e. the state) in which we live: on the one hand, it is experienced as the "socio-economic environment ", to be ruthlessly exploited for our personal  survival and advantage (or that of the family, company or other such group we identify with), while on the other hand, it is the "community" (extended family) in which we must cooperate with others and "play by the rules". 

When Mr Blair urges those at the lower end of the social hierarchy to "play by the rules", he sees the state as the "community" whose members should cooperate and be fair to one another, while those he is addressing see it (probably more unconsciously than consciously) as the "socio-economic environment " to be exploited for all it is worth. Just as those at the top of the hierarchy exploit it, as they always have done, in the ways open to them (inherited wealth and social status, unearned income, the best education, jobs and health care, cleaver accountants, tax havens and loopholes, and so on).

From what I have said, it should be plain that our socio-economic structures are deeply flawed and in urgent need of radical reform. All the more so, because environmental non-sustainability on our finite and vulnerable planet, Spaceship Earth, is built into them and leading us rapidly towards ecological and human catastrophe on a horrific scale.

Roger Hicks