Hunter-Gatherer Hardware in an Industrial World

An interesting framework for thinking about health matters like exercise and diet is to consider the behavior of the original homo sapiens and the conditions they evolved within. Today, many humans experience winters, sit at desks for large parts of the day, and have constant access to food. Those conditions are far from what the original humans experienced, evolving as nomadic hunter-gatherers in the tropics of Africa. Since then, we’ve learned how to organize ourselves and harness accumulated knowledge and science to live much different lives, but that never changed the fact that our bodies haven’t evolved far from those tropical nomadic ancestors. As a result, the conditions and behaviors that homo sapiens evolved to thrive on are often different from our current lives, leading to worse health in certain ways. The lessons from early humans are not exclusive to health and wellness, though, they are also important in understanding human psychology in the modern world, and the politics that results in.

Learning Disorder, or Overly-Narrow Expectations?

The first thing to understand about the human mind is it’s incredibly malleable. Pop culture representations of early humans tend to portray them as dumb, e.g. Geico’s “so easy a caveman could do it.” While they almost certainly had more primitive language than us and thus would sound “dumb” by our standards, they were anything but. Today, we send kids to school for 12-24 years to learn the skills deemed necessary to live in a modern world. Early humans would score horribly on modern standardized tests, but only because their minds were molded in a much different way. Take one of those early humans, transport them to the modern day while an infant, and there’s no reason they couldn’t learn just as well as modern humans.

Just as an early human wouldn’t fare well in modern standards of intelligence, if you or I were transported back 30,000 years, the people we’d encounter would certainly think us to be helplessly stupid. We wouldn’t have the deep knowledge of plants, their preferred growing conditions and harvest times, animals, how to track them or know when one is present, setting up camp, or navigating. These were the types of skills that were useful to early humans, and their minds, through constant exposure, became impressive encyclopedias of local ecosystems. We choose to believe that learning a lot of math makes you smart, but an early human might wonder why you would spend so much time on such meaningless pursuits. If you did math in front of them, they might even consider you something akin to “learning disabled”. After all, you would be drawing weird symbols that meant nothing to them, instead of staying on the tasks that are important, like foraging.

Today, we do the same, diagnosing people with ADHD when they can’t stay focused on “important” tasks, and shaming people for being night owls, as if it’s somehow more ethical to sleep at certain times than others. In the past, these traits that are treated as defects in the modern day were actually valuable to have in some quantity within a group. Today, we’ve managed to create bona fide fortresses to live and sleep in and thus don’t need to constantly keep watch at night, but early humans were not so lucky. Living in much more minimal dwellings, humans had to be wary of predators and rival humans attacking at night. As such, it was good for a tribe to have night owls since they wouldn’t mind staying up on night watch duty until the earliest risers awoke and took over.

Studies have also suggested that people with what we now call ADHD would be better foragers than others. A tribe with both night owls and people with ADHD, as well as people outside those two groups, would have a better chance at survival than a tribe entirely made up of neurotypical early birds. In short, early humans might have preferred the acronym “ADHA” instead, for Attention Deficit Hyperactive Advantage.

Dyslexia is another prime example. Those with dyslexia are often more creative, strong problem solvers, and enjoy exploring new ideas. Some of the greatest human minds of all time were dyslexic, like Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Stephen Hawking. These skills would have been valuable in creating new tools and exploring new lands to inhabit, and later furthering the academic knowledge of the species. It just so happens that for whatever reason, the different wiring of the brain that creates a dyslexic mind often makes that mind struggle with words. Somehow, society decided that the trade-off of reading/writing/talking slower in exchange for a more creative, problem-solving mind was a bad thing, and dyslexia got named a disorder despite the clear advantages.

The only reason ADHD, dyslexia, and being a night owl are perceived as negative today is because we’ve collectively decided only one type of person is “correct” and the rest have something wrong with them, even though those other types were critical to humans coming this far, and still have benefit to society. While human minds are highly malleable, certain ones are inherently better at certain tasks than others, but we seem to have forgotten that over the years. Recently, there has been a move to bring awareness to and embrace neurodiversity, which is a step in the right direction, but we still have a ways to go. Society still seems to stigmatize having ADHD and being a night owl, and drugs are even prescribed for both, to make the person prescribed behave more in the “correct” way.

The reason this happened is clear. Hunter-gatherers lived in small groups where everyone knew each other. Everyone could be treated in a way that suited them, for example, everyone would know who the night owls were and wouldn’t expect them to be in bed early. Those who in modern times would be called dyslexic and ADHD would just be seen as being creative/inquisitive and being good at spotting different plants in the forest, respectively. Both would be given tasks that fit these skills, as everyone would understand who was good at what. In modern societies, we organize hundreds or thousands of people into companies, millions of people into nations, and billions of people into global economies. At these scales, it’s much harder to tailor everyone’s role in the company/nation/economy to fit their unique mental capacities, so such levels of organization are only ever achieved by forcing people to behave as interchangeable cogs.

The prototype of such a cog – hard-working, follows orders, awake 8 AM-5 PM, can remain on task no matter how boring and repetitive – is what gets perceived as “correct”, even though for the entirety of human history a significant portion of people have fallen outside that box. The only problem with dyslexics and people with ADHD is that society expects them to be something they aren’t. The system created without consideration for how people actually are is the problem, not the people who don’t fit its poorly-conceived, overly-narrow worker prototype.

Trusting of Your Tribe, Fearful of Others

Within the small tribes early humans lived in, trust and social bonds were strong. Individuals had a near-zero chance of survival without their tribe to support them, so these bonds and trust towards one-another were crucial in allowing tribes to stay together, work together, and survive. At the same time, humans would be fearful of people outside their tribe, and really anything unknown. While one’s own tribe was critical for their survival, other tribes were competition. Encountering humans from outside your tribe could be a perfectly cordial event, but it could also lead to an attack. Someone who was scared of all humans outside their tribe would be better off than someone who was welcoming of all.

Even if 90% of encounters were positive, the 10% that aren’t could lead to death. If person A is fearful and person B is not, then after several encounters, person B may make fun of person A, saying they were making a big deal out of nothing, and they were missing out on a chance to interact with someone new, and maybe trade or learn something from them. However, the downside of person A missing out on these encounters is far outweighed by the downside person B encounters when they come across a hostile human and are killed. Thus, person A’s behavior – fear of the unknown – is the one that survives, while person B’s welcoming disposition got them killed. Thus, fear of the unknown wins in survival of the fittest, making it the trait that lived on in humans.

What this means for modern humans, who live in large, interconnected systems rather than tribes, is that if someone can convince another that they’re part of the same “tribe”, they’ll believe just about anything they say, and not trust anyone who believes otherwise. I’m sure this sounds familiar to you. Chances are, you’re thinking about “that person” or “those people”, but it’s you as well. It’s everyone, because that’s how humans work. Religions, cults, political parties, and nations all work because of this. It’s the basis for all mass movements. Wars are fought using this, as most people can only kill others they see as sub-human, which you do by convincing them your nation is a tribe, who’s obviously the good guys, and your opponent is an existential threat against you, just like unknown nomads were to early humans. If this is done effectively, it allows people to commit terrible acts, as history has shown.

This is why it’s particularly troubling to see Trump use dehumanizing language, calling people “vermin”, “poisoning the blood of our country”. This is the type of language the Nazis used that allowed otherwise normal people to kill their fellow humans by the dozens in gas chambers. It’s establishing the in/out group, which is what fascism thrives on.

The flip side is that, when people interact with one-another and become familiar, they treat them as a tribe member, and are generally trusting and eager to help each other. In order to hijack this type of society into something like Nazi Germany, it takes a large-scale successful “tribal” movement, and the reason the word “fascism” is talked about at all is because it’s the best way anyone’s found yet to do so. Over the years, there have been countless attempts to overthrow governments, or take power within them, that failed and were thus never talked about, so we forget their names. But we remember the names of the ones that worked. Fascism is a “hack” that takes advantage of the “trust the tribe/fear the other” mindset humans evolved to have. When that mindset evolved, large societies did not exist, so there’s no way the human mind would have had time to evolve to thrive in such conditions. Naturally, there would be a bug in the code that could be exploited, and in the case of capitalist democracies, the name for that bug is “fascism”.

The Republicans are currently the embodiment of this. This makes sense, as studies generally find conservatives to be more fearful in general. The Democrats show some fascist tendencies as well, but that’s the reality, since fascism is basically by definition “the ideas that work to gain power in a democratic society.” A party that doesn’t follow at least some of the ideas that fascists use simply won’t succeed, so in a 2-party state like the US it’s inevitable both parties will be somewhat fascist.

The Republicans are so much worse, though, that the last paragraph should absolutely not be taken as equating the two. They’re both more violent and more explicit, with out-groups like LGBTQ people, Hispanics, Muslims, leftists. Most Democrats’ only out-group is fascists, as it should be. If you live in a western democracy and want to keep it that way, you have to keep the in/out mind hack from gaining too much power within society.

However, being the “in-group that’s not about in-groups” is a difficult task. This is why the Democrats are called the “big tent” party. There are more Democratic supporters than Republican by a sizable amount, but Democrats struggle to appeal to all the people in the “not Republican” base, because that’s a much more diverse group than the Republican base.

While fascism is the way this trait has been used to hijack democratic societies, communism is the way it’s been utilized to mobilize large numbers of workers to overthrow their feudal or colonial societies. Religious crusades have a long history as well, using this same principle to unite one religious sect against another.

No Universal Baseline

Continuing the topic of humans’ malleable minds, it’s valuable to understand how the mind differentiates good from bad. In short, the human mind can only base its understanding of good vs. bad on the experiences it has been exposed to. There is no universal baseline that everyone inherits of what constitutes good and what constitutes bad. It’s hard to see how this would ever evolve, as it would require the human genome to understand intricacies of the Earth and Universe that no human had ever experienced. How would early humans evolve to instinctively know polar bears are bad when no human had been within 1000 miles of a polar bear?

Instead of instinctively knowing about polar bears and that they’re dangerous, all that’s necessary is for humans to have a fear response, capable of being triggered by any number of things, and polar bears simply being one more thing that triggers it. In short, you don’t need to know what a polar bear is to be scared of one if you see it. That’s a good thing, humans would not be as adaptive otherwise, and likely wouldn’t have survived.

Similarly to how the mind can’t possibly have intrinsic knowledge that polar bears exist, it can’t have an understanding of a universal good-bad spectrum. All it can do is take in the information it’s exposed to, and decide whether each is good or bad, and in the process refine a subjective spectrum of good-bad, as opposed to a universal one. The result is that everyone has their own good-bad spectrum. We’ve all seen this before, where rich people who have been sheltered from any meaningful struggle get worked up at the slightest inconvenience. This is because their mind was hardly ever exposed to anything too bad, so their spectrum is calibrated to think the worst thing they’ve experienced is the worst thing anyone could experience. When that worst experience happens to them, they feel it exactly how anyone else feels their worst experience, even if one is far worse than the other.

This explains why people can have panic attacks about being late to work, when a hunter-gatherer who commonly had to evade lions would think this was a trivial matter by comparison.

What all this means is that, no matter how prosperous a society is, people will always have something bothering them. This means the people who prey on discontent for political gain will always have ammo, no matter how good people have it. This makes that a more durable strategy long-term than running on actual issues. Run on fixing the healthcare system and when (if) you fix that, you need to rebrand, but run on demonizing whatever cultural trend is bothering enough people and you’ll never run out of fuel. It doesn’t matter if it’s DEI hires, CRT in schools, trans people in sports or bathrooms, preferred pronouns, acceptance of gay people, M&Ms not being sexy enough, movies featuring people other than white men, violent video games, teenagers playing Dungeons & Dragons, rap music, rock & roll, black people drinking from the same water fountain as white people, etc. The issue used to promote outrage is never actually the point, the point is to outrage people, so whatever topics outrage enough people get chosen. Due to human nature, there will never be a shortage of those.

This effect can be seen if you look at the presidents of the last 40ish years. Reagan got his start in politics as governor of California by campaigning on the outrage conservatives had towards UC Berkley students protesting – something that didn’t actually affect them in a meaningful way, but pissed them off. He then became president by running on white resentment about desegregation and black people getting equal rights. He’s remembered for the positive image he projected about the US, but his campaigns relied just as heavily on tapping into conservatives’ outrage. His economic policies ran up huge deficits, caused multiple recessions, and, after a short reprieve, brought back inflation by the end of his term, not to mention drug use and crime skyrocketed. Bush Sr. was the only Republican president in these past 40 years who had interest in solving problems, so he raised taxes, which was needed at the time, and promptly got voted out of office. The message was clear: Republican voters didn’t want responsible policy, they wanted a leader who leaned into their outrage.

Then, Clinton won by appealing to workers, who were doing worse after 12 years of Reaganomics, and he cleaned up the mess the Reagan/Bush years created, lowering crime substantially and balancing the budget. After enough issues caused by recklessness under Republicans were solved by Democrats, there wasn’t enough remaining interest in actual governing, and the US went back to a Republican, George W Bush. By this point, Fox, Rush Limbaugh, and the like were giving their audience the full-court press of outrage at whatever helped Republicans. Bush, like the Republicans before, sent the deficit into orbit for no reason other than to benefit his rich friends, expanded government surveillance, got the US into cruel, unnecessary wars, and by the end of his term the US was in the worst recession since the Great Depression. Once again, the US turned to a Democrat, Obama, to fix the mess Republicans left. He did an okay job of that, and by the end of his term the economy was back in gear and crime was at record lows. After another Democrat fixed another mess left by a Republican, the US again went back to an outrage-peddling Republican, because there’s always something to be outraged about, and apparently the only time it’s better to vote for Democrats is when there’s real problems (caused by Republicans). Once the Democrats solve those problems, the Democrats have less to fix, and it’s time to get back to falling for Republicans’ outrage politics, the eternal strategy.

Trump once again skyrocketed the deficit to help rich people get richer, resulting in inflation that harmed everyone else, caused thousands to die unnecessarily with a bad COVID response, and oversaw a surge in crime. Under Biden, the deficit, inflation, and crime have all come down from their recent peaks. Time will tell if the US is bored of functioning governance again, and eager for more empty grievance politics.

Interestingly, though, this effect has been flipped to a degree recently. Trump pisses off enough people, particularly Democratic voters, that his near decade as the face of the Republicans has given the Democrats a cause for outrage politics instead of actual policy suggestions. Meanwhile, the Republicans recently achieved one of their few actual policy goals, which they’ve been working towards since Reagan, of overturning Roe v. Wade. This time it’s the Republicans experiencing the wind being knocked out of their sails by actually achieving the goal. This may help the Democrats win, which is better than the alternative, but it also makes the Democrats a worse party. Their platform in 2024 has less emphasis on the environment than in 2020, even though environmental issues are even more important than last election (and will continue to be more important each election). By giving the Democrats cover to simply run on hating Trump, the Republicans allow the Democrats to be the better party without actually being a good party. The way out of this scenario is not simple, but a good start would be to pay attention to policy instead of whoever gives you a better cause for outrage.

Bad at Understanding Abstract Systems

Humans originated in small bands in which everyone knew each other, and the impact one person had on another could be plainly seen. This is quite different from the modern day, in which someone might wake up in a bed made by people they never met, get in a car built by people they never met, drive on roads constructed by people they never met, go to a job in which their boss passes down orders from higher-ups they know of but never met, and gets paid in a money backed up by a government made up of many people they never met. In such a world, only actively seeking to understand how all this works can lead someone to even begin to grasp the system they live in. Most people don’t even go that far, content to understand only the basics necessary for them to continue existing within the system. This means most people have a very poor understanding of how large, abstract systems like governments and economies work.

This has perhaps the most obvious impact on politics of all the items listed here: most voters, whose votes decide who runs the government, don’t understand how governments and economies work. This is part of the reason why so many governments are republics: voters choose others who they trust to make decisions about things, so that the individuals don’t have to. It’s also why such governments have developed large bureaucracies as the economy grew in complexity with advancing technology: even the smartest elected representatives can’t understand all the intricacies of the system, so they delegate to experts in each specific field.

This sounds like a good solution, but it doesn’t get around the dependence on voters. With most voters not having a strong understanding of how the system works, it’s unsurprising that they’d often resort to whoever’s rhetoric makes them feel like “part of the tribe”, or aligns with the outrage they feel, as discussed above. Education is the most obvious way to address this, which makes it unsurprising that the conservatives who most feed on tribalism and manufactured outrage don’t want a strong education system and repeatedly sabotage and demonize education.

This lack of understanding of abstract systems also leads to an affinity for right-wing libertarianism (for the rest of this post called just “libertarians”, even though that term originally referred to a different, left-wing ideology). Libertarians see the handful of things the government does that they don’t like, and assume getting rid of the government, or vastly shrinking it, will solve those problems without introducing more, worse problems. They can plainly see the things that bother them, but don’t care enough to look deeper, into what good things the government is responsible for. Roads, libraries, and schools are common examples, but it goes farther than that. Vacation days, the fact that workers don’t die en masse in fires, having clean air and drinking water, a justice system that gives everyone due process, a stable enough society that the economy can run properly, and having edible, readily-available food are all things the government ensures. Getting rid of the government might solve a few minor problems (emphasis on might…), but it would cause far worse problems – previously solved by governments – to return.

That’s not to mention the fact that reducing government power while leaving corporations in place would simply allow those corporations, the other main power base in the US, to fill the power vacuum. As touched on in the previous paragraph, corporations would no longer have to follow government standards, monopolies couldn’t be broken up, and nothing would exist to prevent them from forming private police forces that could be used to enslave workers. Reducing government power in the way right-wing libertarians want increases corporate power, and corporations are less accountable to the public than the government is, meaning they would be more authoritarian. In sum, libertarians would make the country more authoritarian in the name of reducing government authoritarianism. It would be a disaster. But don’t take my word for it, go read up on Grafton, NH, the town that went libertarian. It was a failure in just about every way it could possibly be.

Still, libertarian style rhetoric is popular among Americans, who are highly individualistic as a culture. Both political parties will use appeals to freedom and liberty in their messaging, whether it’s Republicans promoting the freedom to turn away customers you don’t like, drive cars no matter the impact on the environment, or go maskless during a pandemic, or the Democrats promoting the freedom to make healthcare choices for yourself, marry the person you love, or dress however you like. The fact is, Americans love libertarian-coded messaging.

Luckily, we can all take a sigh of relief that “not working together” is basically libertarians’ entire thing, so they’ve never assembled into a meaningful political force.