2+2 = Whatever We’re Told It Is
Why the avoidance of thinking invariably makes us foolish
The human brain has evolved to prefer simple over complex for the very good reason that attempting to grapple with complexity burns up a lot of calories in the brain. For nearly all of our evolutionary history calories were scarce and uncertain, and so thinking as little as possible was a highly adaptive strategy.
Unfortunately the world really is a complex place and our clever technologies have made it infinitely more so. As a result, we continue to gravitate towards simple-minded ideas but now very often cause ourselves a great deal of unpleasantness by mistake.
This is, by the way, one of the many reasons for the complete failure of representative democracy. It’s why we have succumbed to the tsunami of mindless populism that has swept the globe since 2015. It’s why we have Brexit, Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, Orban, Erdogan, and all the other blustering prancing imbeciles who are tearing our civilization to shreds: we voted for them because they offered us easy-to-understand lies in place of difficult-to-understand reality.
Today we’re seeing up-close and personal another example of the human brain’s incapacity to perform rudimentary reasoning tasks. SARS-COV-2 may be a trivial health problem (for justification of this statement, see the data at end of this article) but we successfully amplified it into a global catastrophe, creating the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. We’ve thrown 1.5 billion people out of work, caused at least 25 million to starve to death (but don’t worry — they have dark skins and our media won’t talk about their plight because it’s off-message), and we’ve put more than 300 million at risk of later death due to cessation of vital vaccination programs, collapse of food aid, and other deeply harmful and entirely unnecessary events.
All to “save” a much smaller number of lives. Which is akin to slicing off our legs in order to prevent an ingrowing toenail.
Fortunately for those who find a macabre pleasure in gazing at the unchecked folly of our species, there’s every sign we will continue to fail miserably at rudimentary thinking. My current favorite example is as follows:
