From a reductionist perspective, perhaps the underlying observations to be made are: (1) money is the root of all evil, (2) all people desire money in varying degrees, and (3) some people use their positions in society to, in one way or another, steal money from other people.
In Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond talks about how agriculture enables one man to feed say 8 people including himself. What do the other 7 people do? Ideally, they help him farm, so everyone gains equal free time. If you didn’t want to work on the farm, and/or wanted more than your fair share of food, you’d invent a rain-dance and convince the farmer to give you grain, otherwise unearned, in exchange for ensuring a secure harvest. If the crops fail, you could forego your grain—not so fraudulent. Or you might convince him he needs your services no matter how poor the harvest—extremely fraudulent.
In Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition, Patricia Churchland talks about how love of your family becomes morality when you care about all people. But of course some people don’t love, and don’t care, for their families much at all.
In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow discuss how caring for one’s family could be a model for egalitarian societies, which apparently people have been successful at in the past. So maybe non-fraudulent civilization is possible.
In Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are, Frans deWaal details how chimpanzees and bonobos have structured societies. For some reason, bonobos have matriarchal societies and chimps patriarchal societies. Abuses can occur in both. However, chimpanzee societies are crueler and more violent. The alpha male brutalizes challengers who would disrupt society and his inordinate privileges. If there is a Ponzi scheme in chimpanzee societies, it is arguably genetically driven.
Netting out all of the above, if humans have varying genetic predispositions for selfishness and altruism, the more altruist of us will build civilizations for universal well-being, and the more selfish among us will hijack civilization for personal gain. It undoubtedly becomes collusive and conspiratorial, but arguably starts with individuals acting for personal gain.
