Evolutionary Games and Ecosystems (2)

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Which is more Useful for Evolution of Society, Egoism or Altruism?

Humans are social animals. We usually have to seek hapiness within a given society, unless you are a St. Hieronimus. The standard of hapiness varies in great degree from society to society. So in some cases, if you want to increase your own hapiness in a long run, it might make sense to devote youeself for upgrading the standard of hapiness of the society you belong, instead of pursuing your norrow interest within it.
In fact, if you look back your own daily behavior, you immediately notice that you are less selfish than you yourself suppose. That is true to the author of this text, who is infamous for ruthless grading in classes, and also for the total lack of group loyalty. We can easily guess how nonselfish you, the gentle readers, could be. Not only that is the result of your born good character, it could be the result of good education, and also of social rewards and punishments. We can ask a question to ourselves, then: "how much of individual effort should be diverted to pursue public goods in place of private gain in order to achive the optimal arrangement fo the entire society?"
To state the answer first, it seems that the right balance is achievd by half-and half mixture of egoism and altruism. But to get there, we have to go through the study of some math, and the background research of history of political philosophy.
For those who feel very allergic to mathematics, ans say they wouldn't go through the tirture just to get that self-evident conclusion, I would just drop an extrainsight obtained as a bonus. No existing society is without internal "class distinction". But if you spread the altruistic culture there, the disparity between different classes tend to increase, not the other way. If a society is made up of purely egoistsic individuals, there still would be classes, but the 'happiness differentials" between different classes approaches to zero.
So let us start with historical background first.

Hobbsian Monster and Maximum Happiness of J.S. Mill

There was a political philosopher named Hobbs long time ago in England, and he tried to imagin the original social state of primitive people without the rule of law. In that imaginary state, everybody is allowed to pursue his own interest unrestrained. Something like we have observed in Iraq right after the fall of Saddam's regime. Hobbs went on to argue that people get fed up with such anarchy with daily rooting and revenge killing, and choose to allow, as a lesser evil, the emergence of a tyrant who will establish an arbitrary autocracy (Leviathan).
He further theorized that this regime of a tyrant would, in time, evolve into something more civilized, akin to Plato's philosopher-king's reign, forcing everybody in the society to pursue the "public good" instead of his own personal gain. This line of thinking, in somewhat different form, achieved its apex in 20th century in so-called totalitarian governments. The readers surely remember the maniacal Mr. Ceausescu who tapped all the telephone conversations of whole Romanian nation. So the forced devotion to the altruism proved not to work at all in practice.
If neither pure egoism nor pure altruism would do, how about the playing them half-and-half? That seems to be a mediocre midle ground, but it turned out that this has a suppport from a ginius, progidy and gentleman of John Stuart Mill. He tried to make things quantifiable, and thought about supposing the existence of "amount of happiness". He then wanted to maximize "total amount of happiness" in a given society with the means of social engineering. The problem existed, however, in the form of "sweet taste of your neighbors unluck" (this is in fact a Japanese proverbe. Is there not any such proverb also in English?) And comes the game theory into play.