Here is a model to help explain how a fairness-based social organization can evolve.

Suppose there is a group of 10,000 humans, newly captured strangers who must now live together. They are faced with a common problem. Maybe they are all enslaved by some other kind of people who have the capability of taking any of them away for punishment or execution.

If one of these prisoners betrays another prisoner in order to gain some advantage from the guards, all the other prisoners will soon know of it. If one prisoner helps another prisoner evade punishment by a guard, that makes the helper have some value to the one who was helped.

The prisoner who is especially good at defeating the guards may befriend and help several fellow prisoners. The whole group of them may coordinate their actions under the guidance of the most capable among them.They will come to be bound together by bonds of both trust and responsibility. Failure to act responsibly may merely cause ill feeling or it may cause the rest of that group to ostracize the irresponsible one.

Among a large population of prisoners, many such co-responsibility groups may form. If their leaders are wise, they will bind themselves into similar co-responsibility groups, and out of that may come a leader at a higher level who will be able to coordinate tasks alone the two or more lower-level groups.

If everyone keeps in mind that the main problem in their lives is the suppression and harm coming from their enslavers, then a single leader may emerge to direct the activities of them all. That is not to say that this leader will tell them individually what to do, but that s/he will tell leaders on the second level of some objective that needs to be achieved, and they will work out the practical details on their own.

An important feature of this kind of polity is the great importance of trust and responsibility. If trust is abused, the allegiance of one's allies and subordinates must suffer. If responsibility is avoided, then the actions needed to achieve communal goals will be less effective.

This kind of trust is so much a feature of a modern democracy that people seem never to think about it. This kind of responsibility is also so much a feature of modern democracy that even when individuals indulge their selfish impulses and do things like cheating on their taxes, they know that they are not only breaking the law but also doing something wrong. They must make excuses to themselves for shifting their burdens onto other people who do pay their taxes.

Contrast these beliefs and attitudes of ordinary people in a democracy with the beliefs and attitudes of people living under a totalitarian regime. If, for instance, people do not see national taxes as benefitting themselves and their friends and neighbors, the only reason to pay those taxes is the fear of getting caught. The only reason to break copyright and/or censorship laws to publish samizdat literature during the time of the USSR was to fight the system that was controlling and doing injury to the public.