Can We Build a More Peaceful Society Without Genetic Eugenics and Without Money

2026-10-09 · by StepForge

Introduction

People have long dreamed of a society where no one kills anyone over power, wealth, origin, religion, language, or political views. Modern technology offers a tempting answer: if violence is produced by aggression, psychopathy, selfishness, and narcissism, then perhaps they can be found in the genome and removed in future children?

I believe this is a dead end, both scientifically and morally. My thesis has two parts. First, a more peaceful society is more realistically built by changing the conditions of life and the structure of institutions, not the people. Second, doing so does not require declaring war on money: what matters more is replacing the functions money performs, in such a way that the accounting is transparent and power over it does not settle in a few hands.

I do not claim to have a ready-made recipe. This is the reflection of an author who wants to test his ideas against the strongest objections. That is why the text contains places where I argue against myself.

Where Violence Comes From: What Is Known

If you ask where violence in society comes from, people have two familiar answers: "that's just human nature" and "it's all down to bad upbringing." The data confirm neither in its pure form.

The long-term trend. Historical data for Western Europe show that the homicide rate in the 13th–14th centuries was above 10 per 100,000 people per year (in some regions of Italy, estimates reach the tens), while today it is about 1 per 100,000 (Our World in Data). In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker explains this decline by the strengthening of the state, the growth of trade, and the change in norms: he draws on Norbert Elias's idea of the "civilizing process" (book review). An important caveat: historians dispute the quality of the medieval data. In an article in the journal Continuity and Change, the authors argue that the population size and homicide statistics of that time are extremely unreliable to estimate, and that the thesis of a centuries-long decline lacks a sufficient empirical basis (Cambridge). I would put it more cautiously: a decline in violence over the long run is probable, but its size and causes remain a matter of dispute.

There is more than one "human nature." The anthropologist Christopher Boehm describes, among nomadic hunter-gatherers, a "reverse dominance hierarchy": ordinary members of the group jointly rein in those who try to boss others around, from mockery and expulsion to ostracism (overview of Boehm's idea). Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg, having studied 21 groups of mobile foragers, found that most of the lethal violence in them came from personal conflicts and kin feuds rather than from wars between groups (Fry & Söderberg). This is a contested sample, and it does not mean that people are "naturally good." But it shows that aggression and a propensity for cooperation are built into us together, and which side shows up is largely decided by the rules of life.

Cooperation depends on the environment. In a large cross-cultural study of 15 small-scale societies, Joseph Henrich and colleagues found that the model of the "person who thinks only of gain" is not confirmed in any of them. The more a society is drawn into market exchange, and the greater the payoff from cooperation in everyday life, the higher the willingness to make fair offers in experimental games (Henrich et al., 2005). This is an important argument for my view: people's behavior depends noticeably on what is advantageous in their society. But it is also an inconvenient fact for me: in this study the market, if anything, raised rather than lowered the willingness to be fair toward strangers. I will return to this in the section on money.

Cooperation is held up by sanctions. In experiments by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter, participants willingly spent their own money to punish those who shirked their contribution to the common cause; when punishment was removed, cooperation fell apart (Fehr & Gächter, 2002). The takeaway for designing a society: good will alone is not enough; clear rules and mechanisms for responding to violations are needed.

Why You Cannot Simply Delete the "Bad Genes"

The idea of "finding the killer gene and removing it" breaks down at several levels.

Heritability is not a sentence. A meta-analysis by Rhee and Waldman (2002) of 51 twin and adoption studies estimated the contribution of genetic factors to antisocial behavior at about 40 percent of the variation (0.32 additive plus 0.09 non-additive), shared family environment at about 16 percent, and individual environment at about 43 percent (Rhee & Waldman). But this is population statistics. It says how differences between people in a given sample relate to differences in genes, and says nothing about the fate of a particular person. Moreover, heritability itself depends on the environment in which it is measured.

Genes and environment work together. The best-known example is the 2002 work of Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt: boys with a low-activity variant of the MAOA gene more often grew up antisocial, but only if they were maltreated in childhood. Meta-analyses (2006 and 2014) by and large confirmed this link for men, although individual replications gave contradictory results (review by Nilsson et al., 2018). If a genetic "vulnerability" shows itself mainly in a bad childhood, then a good childhood works as a "medicine" with no interference in DNA at all.

Predicting a complex trait from the genome is still almost impossible. Selecting embryos by polygenic scores yields, by the calculations of Karavani and colleagues, a gain on the order of 2.5 IQ points or 2.5 cm of height with current technology, and with wide uncertainty intervals (Karavani et al., 2019). For "character" the situation is even worse: there is not even a generally accepted way to measure the trait. The authors of an article in the NEJM add that one and the same gene affects many traits, so selecting for one can inadvertently lead to others (Turley et al., 2021).

Editing the heritable genome is a separate problem. After the 2018 scandal, when the Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced the birth of children with an edited genome, the WHO set up an expert committee and in 2021 published a governance framework and recommendations. The main reason for caution: the changes are passed on to descendants, and the risks (mosaicism, unintended edits, unknown consequences) are insufficiently studied (WHO, 2021).

Why Eugenics Is Rejected, Both Scientifically and Ethically

This is not a matter of taste, so I will say it plainly.

History. In the United States, the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927) approved the forced sterilization of the "unfit" (Buck v. Bell). In Germany, a 1933 law became the basis for the sterilization of, by various estimates, hundreds of thousands of people; the killing of patients followed later. Compulsory programs also operated in a number of other countries, including in Scandinavia: Sweden wound them down only in the 1970s (overview for Europe). The exact figures differ between sources, but the essence does not: these were mass violations of people's rights, justified by "science."
Scientific untenability. Complex behavioral traits depend on thousands of small-effect variants and on the environment. The "bad" variants cannot be excluded, if only because the same variants affect many other properties.
Ethical untenability. The decision about whose life is "worth" reproducing is inevitably made by those in power, and they will always be inclined to declare "defective" anyone who is inconvenient to them.

From this follows, in my view, a simple thing. Even if technology someday becomes precise, the question "which kind of person to consider right" will remain political, not genetic. That is exactly why I do not see in the genome a lever for building a peaceful society.

Four Specific Risks

Classification error. If a test wrongly labels a child as "potentially dangerous," society may restrict that child's rights in advance. Distrust and isolation worsen development, and the prediction becomes self-fulfilling.
Who defines the norm. For one government a "good citizen" is a peaceful and free person; for another, an obedient one who is incapable of criticizing the leadership.
Loss of diversity. Different temperaments help a society adapt. Impulsiveness turns into crime in one environment and into courage in another. Excessive suppression of competitiveness will diminish not only aggression but also independence and the ability to resist tyranny.
New inequality. If "improvement" is available only to the rich, a hereditary biological hierarchy will arise. If it is imposed by the state, the result is compulsory eugenics.

What It Means to "Defeat Selfishness"

Selfishness does not need to be eliminated. Self-preservation, personal boundaries, caring for one's health, protecting one's family, the right to personal space are normal parts of life. The problem begins when self-interest is pursued through deception, violence, exploitation, and the deprivation of others' rights.

So the goal is not to destroy selfishness but to develop reasonable self-interest that is bounded by respect for the freedom and safety of those around us. The same goes for narcissistic traits: self-confidence, a desire for recognition, and a drive for achievement are not evil in themselves. What is dangerous is exploitation, an inability to admit mistakes, aggression in response to criticism, and a thirst for power without responsibility.

A Realistic Alternative: Changing Conditions

Society can become much more peaceful without interfering with the genome. This takes work at several levels at once: a safe childhood, less poverty and chronic stress, accessible medicine and psychotherapy, teaching critical thinking and communication, protection from violence, fair institutions, a limit on the concentration of power.

I am not claiming that upbringing will fix everything. Biology influences behavior, but the environment often determines whether a vulnerability becomes a serious problem or remains a manageable trait.

A Safe Childhood

The strongest direction, in my view, is supporting children and parents. Here is what randomized controlled studies say:

The nurse home-visiting program (Elmira, New York, 1977). By age 15, children whose mothers received the visits had, by reports, noticeably fewer cases of maltreatment and fewer arrests compared with the control group. These figures (on the order of 50 and 60 percent respectively) are given in a summary by the US National Institute of Justice; this is one small study in one city, and transfer to other places did not always give the same effect (NIJ).
The Perry Preschool program. Children from low-income families were randomly divided into those who received preschool education and those who did not, and they are still being followed. By about age 55, the authors found less crime and better employment and health outcomes among the men who went through the program. The sample is small and the randomization was imperfect, and critics have pointed to these weaknesses for many years (Heckman & Karapakula, NBER).
The Becoming a Man program (Chicago). At-risk schoolchildren took classes based on cognitive behavioral therapy. Randomized trials reported a decrease in arrests for violent crimes and higher academic performance (J-PAL; Heller et al., NBER).

Worth singling out is the INSPIRE package from the WHO and nine other agencies: support for parents and caregivers is one of its seven strategies for combating violence against children, alongside laws, norms, safe environments, family incomes, support services, and education (WHO, INSPIRE).

A caveat, so as not to fool ourselves: the effect of many programs is broader for some groups and weaker for others, and large-scale rollouts often work worse than pilots. And a system of help for families must not turn into universal surveillance. Intervention should be proportionate, and harsh measures are acceptable only when there is a real threat to a child's safety.

What to Change in School

School should teach more than math. No less important are managing emotions, the ability to admit a mistake, cooperation, arguing without humiliation, critical thinking, recognizing manipulation and media literacy, respect for personal boundaries, long-term planning, and responsibility for the consequences of decisions. The result of such courses depends on the quality of teaching, so I would not promise miracles, but I consider the direction right.

Inequality, Trust, and Cooperation

People are in many ways what the system of rewards makes them. If a society rewards only money, fame, aggressive competition, and skill at manipulation, it reproduces exactly those patterns. That is why we need to consciously raise the value of honest work, discoveries, helping others, caring for children and the elderly, long-term projects, public resources, and the willingness to admit and correct mistakes.

What is known about the link between inequality and violence? Between countries, a correlation of inequality and homicide is often found and is considered one of the most robust in criminology. However, the conclusion is not simple. When poverty is added to the model, the link with inequality often weakens or disappears; the result is sensitive to the choice of countries (in the US, for example, both inequality and homicide are high), and the mechanism remains a subject of debate (study in Justice Quarterly; study of US homicides). So I put it cautiously: inequality and poverty most likely raise the risk of violence, but it is impossible to reduce everything to a single indicator.

On trust. In the Nordic countries, trust between people is highest. Delhey and Newton, using a sample of 60 countries, showed that high trust comes as a "package": ethnic homogeneity, Protestant traditions, good governance, wealth, and income equality, and causality is hard to determine (Delhey & Newton). The work of Bergh, Jordahl, and Öhrvall shows that the universality of the welfare state by itself most likely does not explain Nordic trust; what matters more, possibly, is the reduction of inequality (Bergh et al.). The honest conclusion: the "Scandinavian model" is not a recipe that can be copied but the result of a complex history, including a small and more homogeneous population.

Automation

Automation can take over a significant share of heavy and repetitive labor: robotic agriculture, warehouses, local energy, water purification. The estimate by Frey and Osborne that about 47 percent of jobs in the US are at risk of automation in the coming decades is often cited (Oxford Martin). But it is an estimate of the susceptibility of occupations, not a forecast of their disappearance, and the method is criticized: tasks get automated, not whole professions.

The main point: automation by itself does not create justice. We need to decide in advance who owns the technology, who controls the data, how the results are shared, and how residents can challenge the administration's decisions.

Unconditional Income as a Test of the Idea

Several experiments give cautiously encouraging results. Finland (2017–2018) paid 560 euros a month to 2,000 randomly selected unemployed people: the effect on employment turned out to be small (about 6 additional days of work in the final assessment), but people reported better well-being and a sense of economic security (Kela and the ministry, preliminary results; final VATT assessment). In Stockton (US), 125 recipients of $500 a month for two years experienced less anxiety and more often found full-time employment, but the sample is small and the funding was philanthropic (Stockton Demonstration). In Kenya, a large cash-transfer experiment showed growth in entrepreneurship without a drop in employment, although the researchers note its high cost and limited transferability to rich countries (interview with Tavneet Suri).

What these experiments do not prove: none of them measured whether violence in society decreases. They show only that guaranteed basic support does not lead to a mass exit from work and improves well-being. This is an important but not a final link in my argument.

Why Constitutions Often Do Not Work

Many states suffer not from a shortage of beautiful laws but from the fact that the mechanisms of enforcement can be captured by those in power. Courts depend on the leadership, parliament becomes an extension of the ruling party, the prosecutor's office chooses which cases to investigate, oversight bodies depend on the budgets of those they inspect, the media belong to the state or to large owners, citizens fear losing their jobs and housing, and society is split by disinformation. These processes reinforce one another.

The old idea of the sociologist Robert Michels, the "iron law of oligarchy," holds that in any organization the managing stratum becomes separate over time. Acemoglu and Robinson, in Why Nations Fail, draw a more optimistic conclusion: inclusive institutions that distribute power widely can be durable, but for that, many people have to benefit from them (summaries of the book). The practical conclusion I draw from this: one cannot rely on a formulation in a constitution; one needs a system that holds up even under a bad leader.

How to Make Rules Work

Every important rule should have:

a specific duty or prohibition;
an independent body of verification;
a clear consequence for violation;
the possibility of appeal;
a public trace of the decision taken.

For example, an official's duty to disclose a conflict of interest works if contracts are published in an open format, the data are automatically cross-checked against related companies, the audit is independent, there is a real penalty for concealment, citizens and journalists can file complaints, and the decision can be challenged in court. The move has to be from promises to procedures that can be verified.

This echoes Elinor Ostrom's findings about self-governing communities that have managed common resources for decades: clear group boundaries, rules matched to local conditions, participation of affected people in changing the rules, internal monitoring, graduated sanctions, accessible dispute resolution (Ostrom's eight principles). This is no guarantee, but it is a rare example of principles confirmed by observation rather than speculative schemes.

Protection From the Concentration of Power

A reliable system separates finance, the security services, the appointment of judges, election oversight, state media, digital infrastructure, and access to data. It needs term limits, the impossibility of abolishing the limits by a single decision, public asset declarations, independent funding of courts and auditors, protection of whistleblowers, contract transparency, free sources of information, and the possibility of class-action suits. One must not create a single "super-oversight body" that answers to no one: several independent bodies that check both the government and one another are more reliable.

Is a System Without Money Possible

Abandoning money could reduce the struggle for basic resources, corruption, and a person's dependence on an employer. But money performs several functions: a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a means of saving, and a signal of what is worth more where. If one simply declares that money no longer exists, the functions do not go anywhere, and the result is scarcity, a struggle for housing and equipment, hidden privileges, an exchange of services through connections, and a new elite managing the distribution.

The Strongest Objections

I want to state them directly.

The calculation problem. As early as 1920, Ludwig von Mises argued that without market prices for the means of production a planner cannot compare costs and benefits, and Friedrich Hayek added in 1945 that the necessary knowledge is scattered among people and is not gathered at a center (overview of the debate). My answers: modern computing and open data reduce the problem but do not remove it, and I am not sure they will. That is why I propose not a centralized plan but requests and parallel laboratories, that is, decentralized choice.
Historical experience. "War communism" in Soviet Russia (1918–1921) partly abolished monetary settlements and ended in the collapse of the ruble, a fall in production, and the famine of 1921–1922, after which it was replaced by the NEP (1914–1918-online encyclopedia). Of course, that was not a voluntary model but war, coercion, and requisitions, and one cannot generalize. But the lesson about the price of coercion remains.
Kibbutzim. Israeli kibbutzim lived for decades with equal distribution, and most moved to differentiated pay. Explanations differ: market pressure, a decline in the external threat (Diao) and, according to a more recent study by Omri Zenderowicz, social tension within the non-market system: endless arguments, envy, and constant group pressure (Senderowicz). This is a single author, but his conclusion is useful for me to keep in mind: removing the market does not remove conflicts.
Auroville. An Indian community that repeatedly tried to live without internal money ultimately relied on outside grants and donations; its latest experiment was a virtual currency in an app (review of Katarzyna Boni's book; academic study: Clarence-Smith, Sussex). For me this is rather an argument for the idea of "replacing the functions of money with transparent accounting" than for the idea of "abolishing accounting."

The conclusion from the objections is this: not the abolition of money, but the replacement of its functions with a transparent system of public access and accounting, and I allow that for some tasks monetary prices will remain the best instrument.

How Science Could Work Without Money

Imagine a settlement where everyone receives basic guarantees: housing, food, medicine, education, internet, clothing, transport, time for rest, and access to scientific and technical work. A scientist does not earn the right to live but gets access to a laboratory, equipment, a team, and materials.

Scarce resources are allocated by open requests that state the goal, the expected benefit, materials, time, risks, ways of verifying the result, and a plan for publishing the data. The requests are evaluated by a mixed committee of specialists, engineers, representatives of adjacent fields, citizens, and ethics specialists, and decisions are published together with the reasons.

Public planning will need units of account: kilowatt-hours, equipment hours, computing time, the mass of rare materials, laboratory area, specialists' hours, environmental damage, urgency. These are not personal wealth and not a way to buy power, but open indicators for comparing projects. A researcher does not "buy" computing power but applies for server hours, and society sees the project's cost in energy, time, and materials.

I honestly admit the weak point: such a system easily turns into bureaucracy, and "requests" into a struggle for the committee's favor. Publicity of decisions, rotation of committee members, and the right of appeal work against this, but there are no guarantees.

Voluntary Labor and Its Limits

A fully voluntary system may face a shortage of people in unpleasant but necessary fields: cleaning, repair, sewage, care for the sick, night shifts, emergency work, extraction of raw materials. A possible combination: maximum automation, a small common contribution from adults, rotation of unpleasant tasks, shorter working hours, medical exemptions, free choice of direction, and public recognition of difficult and responsible work. The contribution must be transparent and the same for everyone: the leadership has no right to demand "voluntariness" from ordinary residents while exempting itself.

New Power Without Money

Even without money, power can pass to those who control the distribution of equipment, access to data, computing centers, education, media, medical technology, the criteria of the "usefulness" of research, and security systems. A moneyless system can give rise to inequality of privileges even if no one officially owns wealth.

Protection: open registries of resources, public criteria for allocating equipment, rotation of leaders, independent audit, the right of appeal, several parallel laboratories, open source code, independent data archives, the right to create alternative projects, and the free possibility of leaving the settlement. If a person is denied access at one institute, they should be able to turn to another, publish their criticism, and continue working in an alternative team.

Open Science and Biosecurity

Open science can accelerate the development of humanity: in 2021 UNESCO adopted a recommendation on open science based on transparency, collaboration, and the sharing of knowledge (UNESCO). But not all information should be published without restriction. Detailed instructions for creating dangerous pathogens or weapons, like protocols for experiments on humans, can be used to cause harm.

So a two-tier system is needed. Safe results, data, code, and methods are available to everyone. Dangerous protocols are received only by vetted laboratories, an access log is kept, an independent audit operates, experiments undergo biosafety and ethics assessment, and a project can be stopped if the risk is unacceptable. Openness must increase the verifiability of science, not turn dangerous technologies into an uncontrolled set of instructions.

A Model of an Ideal Settlement

As a thought experiment, imagine a settlement of about 100 families. The basis: automated food production, local energy, water purification and reuse, robotic warehouses, workshops and 3D manufacturing, a medical station, a psychological service, an educational center, an open laboratory, a local network with independent backup servers, public transport, and emergency supplies. Residents receive basic services as public goods, and projects are evaluated by benefit, risks, and resource consumption, not by the wealth of the author.

Governance is divided: one body is responsible for infrastructure, another for finances and resources, a third for protecting rights, a fourth for medicine and security. An independent mediator resolves conflicts, residents can change the leadership, anyone can leave. Key data are not stored on a single server, and if the AI is switched off, the settlement keeps running in manual mode.

Here too an objection is needed: a hundred families is roughly 300–400 people, which is more than the so-called Dunbar number, about 150 stable acquaintances. This is a heuristic with a wide confidence interval (Dunbar's estimate is from 100 to 230) and it is disputed (overview), but the question of how to sustain trust inside such a settlement remains a real one. My answer: small subgroups, publicity of decisions, and internal mediators. It can be tested only in practice.

How to Measure Success

A system cannot be evaluated by productivity alone. One needs to track the number of violent conflicts and cases of domestic violence, the level of anxiety and depression, residents' trust, the availability of medicine and education, inequality, the concentration of power, the number of complaints and the speed of their review, dependence on outside supplies, the quality of scientific results, and the possibility of freely leaving the system.

If a project is efficient but residents are afraid to criticize the administration, that is not a success but a convenient form of authoritarianism. An important warning: every indicator has its own ways of being faked. So part of the data must be collected independently of the administration (for example, by anonymous surveys), and not only from its reports.

A Practical Digital Project

Such a model can first be tested not in a real country but in a simulator. In an app one can create families with different needs, food and energy production, resource distribution, a school, medicine, scientific projects, a level of trust, conflicts, media and the spread of false information, different models of governance, accidents and shortages, a change of leadership.

The system must model not "good" and "bad" people but the consequences of rules. One can test what happens when the central server is switched off, how an energy shortage affects things, what corruption does, how society changes under free criticism, what happens with unequal access to laboratories, whether a leader can be replaced without violence, whether a hidden elite emerges, whether the possibility of leaving is preserved.

The model, of course, shows only the consequences of the assumptions built into it. Its usefulness lies not in prediction but in the fact that it forces us to write those assumptions down explicitly and argue about them. Such a project could become an educational game, a research simulator, or a basis for discussing real social models.

Conclusion

It is impossible to safely create a world in which all the "wrong" people have genetically disappeared. It is impossible to guarantee harmony merely by abolishing money or by writing a new constitution. A more realistic goal is a society in which basic needs are guaranteed, education and science are accessible, heavy labor is gradually automated, knowledge is spread openly, resources are distributed transparently, power is divided and replaceable, decisions can be appealed, criticism is not forbidden, a person can leave the system, dangerous technologies are controlled, selfishness is limited by the rights of others, and mistakes can be admitted and corrected.

The main principle can be put this way:

There is no need to create genetically identical and "perfect" people. What is needed is to create conditions in which ordinary, different people can safely live, learn, cooperate, argue, and correct mistakes, without violence, poverty, a monopoly on knowledge, or unlimited power.

This approach does not promise the complete disappearance of conflict. But it can make conflicts less destructive, cooperation more advantageous, and abuse of power more visible and harder.

Sources

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