Member-only story
Our Intolerant Society
How crushing reasoned dissent is now easier than ever
Our species evolved over hundreds of thousands of years under conditions of scarcity. As marginal hunter-gatherers who should more accurately have been called scavenger-gatherers, we eked out a precarious existence as obligate omnivores scrabbling for whatever calories we could find. Most humans died in their mid-twenties, falling to sickness, injury, and a wide range of predators. While we humans love to self-aggrandize (even our self-appointed species name is hilariously inaccurate puffery) the hard fact is that we are very far indeed from being sapient. For most people at most times, the brain is merely 1.4kg of ballast that serves to stop the head from bobbing around when we walk.
This is because attempting to think can consume up to 30% of the body’s blood glucose, and for nearly all of our evolutionary history that glucose was far more often needed to power muscles in the search for food, to flee from predators, or to defend territory against other groups of encroaching humans. Not thinking, therefore, was highly adaptive. Even today we tend to distrust people who are obviously thoughtful because this makes us uncomfortable. We’re evolved to preserve group cohesion — because unless our ancestors were part of a group, their survival time would be measured in hours — and so we act to…
