To answer the question, if there has to be a Joker to stop Defectors, who is the Joker?
Joker does not need to be a person; it could be anything that destroys benefits with some good success. You get where I am going with this; Joker is any disaster that causes loss. For living things, death does the job pretty well. However, in real life, people are not the only entities which gather benefits, there are organizations that live beyond the lifetime of an individual. In that case, the Joker could be paradigm shifts, weariness, anti-trust cases, scientific theory, or the occasional market crash (you get 1 point for finding each entity these destroy).
Joker does not need to be a person; it could be anything that destroys benefits with some good success. You get where I am going with this; Joker is any disaster that causes loss. For living things, death does the job pretty well. However, in real life, people are not the only entities which gather benefits, there are organizations that live beyond the lifetime of an individual. In that case, the Joker could be paradigm shifts, weariness, anti-trust cases, scientific theory, or the occasional market crash (you get 1 point for finding each entity these destroy).