If all, or even most of the citizens in your empire turn into free riders, the empire collapses. Certain types of groups like nations, startups, and schools of

If all, or even most of the citizens in your empire turn into free riders, the empire collapses. Certain types of groups like nations, startups, and schools of scientific thought, may be be inherently unstable on various time scales, yet that doesn't mean they don't arise, have dominating effects relevant to reproduction during their heyday, and that evolution doesn't need to adapt to the reality of their existence. That is to say, groups are not a unit of selection in the sense of natural selection. They are the context of selection. Powerful social groups are a fact of life. Powerful enough to decide your fate, choose who you could or could not marry. We see them all around us. We see such organizations form, thrive, and die on a wide variety of scales, both in time and level of influence. If you can't network, you will wither in this and probably every other major society which ever existed. No want wants to partner with, or stay partnered with useless dead weight. An example of a group of non-necessarily related individuals who share a common goal is an army. Soldiers may be more closely genetically related to many of their foes than they are to many of their comrades. Soldiers may be ordered to their deaths. Armies don't last forever, they don't have to. They exist to defeat other groups of people and impose some collective sanction. If a hypothetical free rider gene resulted in the formation of less effective armies, any population where such a gene predominated would be severely disadvantaged in war, and eventually massacred and/or enslaved.