Here is a model to help explain how a fairness-based social organization can evolve.

Suppose there is a group of 10,000 humans, newly captured strangers who must now live together. They are faced with a common problem. Maybe they are all enslaved by some other kind of people who have the capability of taking any of them away for punishment or execution.

If one of these prisoners betrays another prisoner in order to gain some advantage from the guards, all the other prisoners will soon know of it. If one prisoner helps another prisoner evade punishment by a guard, that makes the helper have some value to the one who was helped.

The prisoner who is especially good at defeating the guards may befriend and help several fellow prisoners. The whole group of them may coordinate their actions under the guidance of the most capable among them.They will come to be bound together by bonds of both trust and responsibility. Failure to act responsibly may merely cause ill feeling or it may cause the rest of that group to ostracize the irresponsible one.

Among a large population of prisoners, many such co-responsibility groups may form. If their leaders are wise, they will bind themselves into similar co-responsibility groups, and out of that may come a leader at a higher level who will be able to coordinate tasks alone the two or more lower-level groups.

If everyone keeps in mind that the main problem in their lives is the suppression and harm coming from their enslavers, then a single leader may emerge to direct the activities of them all. That is not to say that this leader will tell them individually what to do, but that s/he will tell leaders on the second level of some objective that needs to be achieved, and they will work out the practical details on their own.

An important feature of this kind of polity is the great importance of trust and responsibility. If trust is abused, the allegiance of one's allies and subordinates must suffer. If responsibility is avoided, then the actions needed to achieve communal goals will be less effective.

This kind of trust is so much a feature of a modern democracy that people seem never to think about it. This kind of responsibility is also so much a feature of modern democracy that even when individuals indulge their selfish impulses and do things like cheating on their taxes, they know that they are not only breaking the law but also doing something wrong. They must make excuses to themselves for shifting their burdens onto other people who do pay their taxes.

Contrast these beliefs and attitudes of ordinary people in a democracy with the beliefs and attitudes of people living under a totalitarian regime. If, for instance, people do not see national taxes as benefitting themselves and their friends and neighbors, the only reason to pay those taxes is the fear of getting caught. The only reason to break copyright and/or censorship laws to publish samizdat literature during the time of the USSR was to fight the system that was controlling and doing injury to the public. The only “reward” was a vacation in the Gulak archipelago.

Maintaining the bonds of trust and responsibility not only means that the leaders will do things like build and maintain roads to the most isolated farms in the country, but also that the people will pay for the road system they benefit from by paying for the projects through taxes.

As a child growing up in a sleepy farm community, the street in front of my house was just there. It didn't occur to me that my family had to pay for the street sweeper to come by once in a while and remove leaves or trash. As a teenager I guess I knew that somebody had to pay for building and maintenance, but it was so much an accepted part of life that I never thought about how the whole system of streets in regular grids, sewer lines available underground on the same grid, etc. all went back to planning and development a century earlier. I didn't think I owed anybody anything for all that work and care.

As a child I was told the police would catch me and throw me in jail if I did anything wrong. As I moved toward adulthood, I learned more about the legal system of the community. It never occurred to me that there could be any real problems. Some of my acquaintances in high school thought that one particular policeman was cranky and unfair to them for some disagreement about what they could be permitted to do in or with their automobiles. But that was it. The police were just a fact of life, and it was something of a revelation for me to learn that we actually had elections every four years to elect the head of the police at the county level, for the office we called “sheriff.”

In a system in which trust and responsibility are regularly maintained, young people can be born and grow to adulthood knowing what expectations and benefits fall upon them, but not have any clear idea of why things were constituted that way and need to be maintained that way.

In a population in chaos, divided among people with different ethnic identities, religious identities, political identities, skin colors, etc., it will not at all be expected or accepted to have a form of organization that does not break into divisions along those lines or have the loyalties of people distributed among their own various identities. It will be something new and original for them to learn to trust and feel responsibility to someone who, e.g., comes from some minority population with no great group power of its own, but also someone who is truly competent in helping them achieve their own valid personal goals.