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The Authoritarian Ratchet
Why things will continue to get worse over the coming decade.
For nearly all of our evolutionary history, we humans were a marginal species with a limited lifespan, operating in a world full of exogenous dangers. As such, we adapted to the pressures acting upon us. Our brains, and therefore our feelings and behaviors, are all adapted to handle the circumstances we faced for 98% of our evolutionary history. Thus, we feel and behave as if we were still living on the African savannah and in the primordial forests of Eurasia.
As such, we yearn to be part of a strong safe group, we automatically conform to group norms (whatever they happen to be), we project our dreams onto whoever happens to be leader, we fear and distrust outsiders, we have no ability to conceive of anything other than life as a zero-sum game, and we rationalize all our actions so as to paint ourselves in the best possible light. We also have no ability to envisage the longer-term consequences of our actions, because for 98% of our evolutionary history our lives were so short and so dominated by exogenous factors that our own actions had meaning only in the shortest possible timescales.
This is why today, living in a very different world full of technological marvels created by a tiny number of genuinely clever people, we continue to feel and…
