[atoav]

I grew up in a small village. I always like to think how my village would look when theories like these would be applied.

Would my village be a happier, better place if the one or two families who already own most land used it as an leaverage to extort as much resources as they could from the others? Quite definitly not.

The idea here is that the individual cannot trust the group to consider their needs. This is not a theory it is a collective lifestyle choice. There are countries and regions where the opposite (people looking out for each other depending on their needs) works out just fine.

In German we speak of something called the Gesellschaftsvertrag — the implicit contract each individual has with society. It can be extremely enlighting think about whether someone subscribes to this contract and if not, why. E.g. someone who has been convicted for years of prison for a minor drug charge while bankers who steal billions go free, might just stop to believe it pays off to honor the rules of the contract. Someone who thinks everybody else is just a fool to extract money from probably even thinks of society as something with implicit rules.

However every human society, even societies with slavery, genocide, etc had these implicit rules of what a wealthy person was expected to provide, what a poor person was expected to endure. Break the contract on a large enough scale and you get a violent change of power or a revolution.