[WarmWash]

If there is one thing free riders are generally skilled at, it's hiding the fact they are free riding. There is then an internal decay where as others learn the tricks, they realize that they can start coasting too, and they should, because why would you do extra work if you don't have to.

To defeat this you need intense oversight, but then you yourself become the man with an iron fist.

This is a super common theme whenever you dig into anything socialized. It works great when everyone understands the system and is dedicated to the work, the mission. But as soon as a single atom of "I can get away with not doing my full part" seeps in, it's like a seed crystal that eventually collapses the whole system.

[HardlyCognizant]

It's the prisoner's dilemma. I believe any self-preservation optimized intelligence is going to suffer from these problems until those behaviors are countered in interaction by design (e.g. process, societal/cultural pressures, etc.) or removed from the baseline (i.e. evolved out.)

Our desires make us our own worst enemies, and until we acknowledge and openly plan to counter these tendencies, any social structure at some scale is going to fail to them. Unfortunately, the problems we face as a species are increasingly at larger and larger scales.

I'm not sure if we can remain what we would recognize as "human," and solve for this without surrendering some level of executive function to an entity not afflicted by it. Government and regulation are already expressions of this, while retaining our intrinsic nature, but history has demonstrated this is inherently unstable.

[AlotOfReading]

Human societies already have solutions to this problem. There's a proposed explanation for why strict religious groups (like the Amish) survive so well: costly signaling. There are benefits to remaining in the community, so you have to demonstrate adherence to the group by constant, expensive signaling to keep receiving them.

In a union context, that could be anything from dues, to volunteering for shitty work, to community service obligations. Unions don't really exercise the power to expel members though, because it reduces their own leverage.