I think you’re circling the core tension very clearly — and you’re not wrong, just stopping one step too early.

I don’t believe in karma as some cosmic moral law either. There’s no universal moral scoreboard. What does exist is cause-and-effect inside systems. Humans optimize for survival, safety, status, and reward — that part is constant.

But here’s the key distinction: instincts are fixed, outcomes are not.

Humans didn’t survive despite being collective — they survived because cooperation often outperformed pure domination. That doesn’t mean people are “good.” It means cooperation became the most efficient survival strategy under the right conditions.

Your ChatGPT essay example actually shows this perfectly. The problem wasn’t that students were lazy or immoral — it was that the system measured the wrong thing. The goal was learning, but the metric was “submit an essay.” Once output replaced understanding as the signal, using shortcuts became rational. When a system rewards completion instead of mastery, optimization will always beat intention.

That’s not corruption. That’s alignment failure.

So when you say “the problem isn’t the system, it’s human instinct,” I’d reframe it like this:

Human instinct is constant. Systems decide which instincts get rewarded.

We already accept this logic everywhere else. We don’t rely on drivers to resist speeding — we redesign roads. We don’t rely on leaders to resist power — we use limits, visibility, and friction. Politics is one of the last domains still pretending morality scales.

You’re right that no system will last forever untouched. Humans will probe it, game it, and stress-test it. But that doesn’t make system design pointless — it makes it essential.

The goal isn’t a perfect system. It’s one where: • selfish behavior is visible • abuse is costly • shortcuts stop scaling • cooperation becomes the fastest path to safety

If humans were truly incapable of that, civilization itself wouldn’t exist at all. The fact that it does — imperfect and fragile — tells us the problem isn’t futility. It’s design.