It is interesting how small systems replicate large ones. That is, when one looks at Second Life or Wa He Lut the problems seem to me to reflect problems of, say, the world in general. Hardly surprising, really. There might be something I can learn by looking at these systems - and indeed I've been thinking about things night 'n' day. Disclaimer: I'm happy 99.99% of the time but lately have been glum due to being unwell, so I recognise that everything is colored with glum tones. Still, my thoughts are like this:

1. There can be no level playing field for the unethical and ethical because unethical people will do things ethical people will not. The best that can be done is to structure our societies, as much as possible, so that unethical behaviour is undesirable and unrewarded.
"You just scammed me and took my money!"
"Yeah - you believed me so that makes you stupid. If you want to be smart scam someone and get your money back."

2. Societies seem to've been formed to provide the structure of a healthy family to unrelated individuals.
"Ha ha! I set the old woman on fire!"
"Ha ha! Hey - that's my MOTHER."

3. People view themselves as part of small subset communities, and it may be a failure of imagination that they don't understand they are part of the large one. Therefore they will hammer the search server 24/7 with bots, scam people by selling land with objects then remove the objects, create DOS attacks, grief people with extortionary tactics. Or start wars, steal money and give it to their cronies, use vastly over the amount of the earth's resources than they should, etc. Unfortunately the list can go on for miles.
No man is an island. entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. John Donne

I try to be conscious every waking moment and think about what I'm doing, as it's easy to fall into a lazy style of doing things. I'm not totally successful, of course, but things that go wrong are revealing. Ultimately, at this point, I can only be concerned with my own behaviour. As it goes externally, so it happens internally, too, and what I find so difficult to bear about the SL and RW external/internal situations is being required to cope passively with anything that is dished up.

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