Stone Age emotions. Medieval institutions. Godlike technology.
This is not a bug. It's the operating system. And the operating system is trying to kill you with cheeseburgers and nuclear
weapons simultaneously. The Selfish Gene Made You Illogical (It Was a Good Idea at the Time).
Richard Dawkins put it perfectly: "We are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules
known as genes.". Translation: You're a meat puppet controlled by chemicals whose entire business plan is "make more chemicals
before something eats us.". Your genes don't care if you're happy.
They don't care if you live past thirty. They care about exactly one thing: making copies of themselves before something
with teeth finds you. For ninety-nine point nine percent of human history, this was brilliant engineering.
Now it's why you eat an entire pizza at midnight, feel anxious about emails, fund nuclear weapons capable of ending all
life, and slowly develop diabetes while your teeth fall out.
The genes are still celebrating. You are not. Part 1: Your Brain Was Optimized for a World That Doesn't Exist.
The Scarcity Brain (Or: Why It's Hard to Stop Eating). For two hundred thousand years, calories were rare.
Finding a beehive full of honey wasn't "prediabetes in a tree."
It was the difference between your children surviving winter or not existing anymore.
So evolution programmed you with one simple rule: When you find calories, eat ALL of them RIGHT NOW before the hyenas show
up. Fast forward to today: You live within walking distance of fourteen restaurants selling three thousand eight hundred
calorie meals. Each meal contains twice your daily calorie needs.
Your ancient brain still screams: "EAT EVERYTHING! WINTER IS COMING!".
Winter never comes. Diabetes often does. The exact same brain that kept your ancestors alive by gorging on mammoth fat is
now killing you with McDonald's. Evolution doesn't do software updates.
You're running two hundred thousand year old code on hardware that was designed for an environment that no longer exists.
It's like running a nuclear power plant on Windows Ninety-Five, except the nuclear power plant is your civilization and
it's connected to the internet. The Violence Module (Or: Why You Tend to Prefer Bombs Over Band-Aids).
Fifteen to thirty percent of your ancestors died from violence.
Not disease. Not starvation. Other humans, smashing their heads with rocks over territorial disputes about berry bushes.
You've since upgraded the rocks to intercontinental ballistic missiles, but the berry bush energy remains.
The tribes that survived weren't the peaceful, loving ones.
They were the paranoid, survival-focused ones who: Assumed every stranger might want to kill them (often statistically accurate).
Struck first when threatened (natural selection at work). Formed tight combat groups to kill other groups (teamwork!).
Hoarded weapons obsessively (can never have too many pointy sticks).
Your brain is still running this exact software. That's why: Humanity spends two point seven two trillion dollars annually
on weapons you'll probably never use. You instinctively distrust people who don't look like your tribe.
Twitter arguments feel like actual combat (your amygdala can't tell the difference).
Countries with ten thousand nuclear weapons are worried they don't have enough.
The violence module kept your ancestors from getting clubbed to death.
Now it's building weapons that could end all life on Earth.
Computer scientists call this "feature creep." Biologists call it "maladaptive."
I call it "the reason I'm writing this book.". The Tribal Brain: Why Democracy is Struggling.
Dunbar's number says humans can maintain stable relationships with about one hundred and fifty people.
That's your entire social capacity. Your brain has one hundred and fifty slots for caring about people, and you've filled
most of them with coworkers you tolerate and celebrities who don't know you exist.
For two hundred thousand years, this worked great: Your tribe had one hundred and fifty people.
You knew everyone personally. Decisions affected people you could see.
Free riders got kicked out or starved. Now you live in a democracy with three hundred and thirty-five million strangers
where: You vote for people you've never met. To make decisions about people you'll never see.
Using tax money that feels imaginary. To solve problems your brain struggles to comprehend.
Your brain treats anything outside your one hundred and fifty-person monkeysphere as an abstraction.
That's why: You care more about your neighbor's barking dog than ten thousand people dying of malaria (the dog is RIGHT
THERE being loud, malaria is just a concept with numbers attached).
Local corruption makes you angrier than trillion-dollar Pentagon waste (the local guy stole ten thousand dollars you can
imagine, the Pentagon lost two point five trillion dollars which is just syllables).
You'll donate to save one sick child but ignore statistics about millions (one child has a face, millions is just a very
big number that makes your brain hurt). Democracy feels broken (because it requires a level of empathy your monkey brain
literally cannot produce). Part 2: Genetic Slavery is Literally Killing Us.
We're Dying from Winning. Evolution prepared you for scarcity, predators, and violence.
You got abundance, safety, and Netflix. Your bodies responded with the biological equivalent of a computer trying to print
a sandwich: Evolution prepared us for starvation, we got unlimited calories, and the result is a forty-two point four percent
obesity rate. Evolution prepared us for constant physical threats, we got office chairs, and the result is anxiety disorders.
Evolution prepared us for a thirty-year lifespan, we got an eighty-year lifespan, and the result is bodies that fall apart
at forty. Evolution prepared us for small tribes, we got global society, and the result is constant existential dread.
Evolution prepared us for clear immediate dangers, we got abstract future risks, and the result is difficulty planning.
Evolution prepared us for scarce mates, we got dating apps, and the result is paralysis from too much choice.
Your genes succeeded spectacularly. Eight billion copies and counting.
From evolution's perspective, this is an unqualified triumph.
You're just the disposable meat robot they used to do it. Now you're confused why you can't stop eating Cheetos at two A.M.
Living in the Most Irrational Timeline. Here's the cosmic joke: Humanity has never been safer, healthier, or more prosperous.
You've also never been closer to accidentally ending everything.
You solved poverty and invented nuclear war in the same century.
Very on-brand. You solved all the hard problems. Then you immediately invented worse ones to replace them.
Like winning the lottery and using the money to buy a tiger.
Problems you solved. Starvation (you throw away forty percent of food because storing it is inconvenient).
Predators (you murdered them into extinction, then put them in zoos so your children could see what you killed).
Infant mortality (basically eradicated in developed countries, which makes the death rate in poor countries feel more optional
and thus more tragic). Most infectious diseases (vaccines work despite what Facebook says).
Dying at thirty (now you complain about turning forty, which your ancestors would consider a miracle worth celebrating daily).
New problems you invented with your big brains: Nuclear weapons (enough to end civilization twenty times because once wasn't
enough). Climate change (you're terraforming your only planet by accident).
Antibiotic resistance (ten million deaths annually by twenty-fifty because you gave antibiotics to cows).
A.I. that might become sentient and decide you're the problem (the A.I.
would be correct). Social media (voluntary psychological torture you pay for with attention).
Humanity is a toddler who found the nuclear launch codes. Godlike technological power, hamster-level impulse control.
On most planets, civilizations develop wisdom before weapons.
Yours did the opposite and seems quite pleased about it. Part 3: Why You Can't Just "Be Better".
Your conscious mind controls maybe five percent of your decisions.
The other ninety-five percent is your ancient lizard brain running software older than agriculture.
You think you're the pilot. You're actually a passenger who occasionally gets to suggest a direction.
This scales to civilization. The fear of violent death is older than language.
The fear of slow death from disease? Your brain files that under "boring, deal with later."
Later never comes. Neither does the cure. That's why you spent two point seven two trillion dollars on weapons while cancer
research got pocket change. Part 4: The Prison We Built Ourselves.
You Vote for Monkeys in Human-Skin Suits. Democracy asks your stone-age brain to make civilization-level decisions.
It goes exactly as well as asking a labrador retriever to do your taxes.
You vote based on: Who looks stronger (alpha male bias - your brain thinks the election is a wrestling match).
Who your tribe likes (social proof - if the clan approves, must be good).
Who makes you feel safe (fear sells better than policy ever will).
Who you'd have a beer with (relevance: zero, but your brain insists this matters for nuclear policy decisions).
You don't vote based on: Complex policy analysis (too many words, brain hurts).
Long-term thinking (your brain stops caring after next winter).
Statistical reality (numbers are abstract, feelings are real).
Actual competence (boring, where's the tribal signaling?). You elect leaders using the same brain circuits your ancestors
used to pick the guy with the biggest club. The Military-Industrial Cortex.
Your brain's fear center (amygdala) is directly connected to your voting finger.
Politicians know this. Say "terrorism" and your lizard brain overrides everything: More people die from falling out of bed
than terrorism. You're one thousand times more likely to die from heart disease.
But terrorism *feels* scarier, because evolution optimized your fear response for things with faces, not things with cholesterol.
So you spend trillions on defense against threats that barely register statistically, while the diseases actually killing
you get a fraction of the budget. Your bed is more dangerous than Al-Qaeda, but nobody's declared a War on Furniture.
Part 5: Breaking the Chains. Every single one of you is going to die.
From the most powerful president to the lowliest pauper, you face a life of gradually escalating suffering until it ends.
This is not a warning. It's a weather report. But now? You live in a world of abundance and nuclear weapons.
You can feed everyone twice over, but you'd rather burn grain to keep prices high.
You can cure diseases, but you'd rather sell treatments forever (cured customers don't come back; bad for quarterly earnings).
The software running human civilization is ten thousand years out of date, and the bugs are literally killing you.
Why don't you update the software? You could be immortal space wizards.
Instead you're cave-dwelling murderers with better tools. Because the current system makes irrationality profitable.
Spectacularly profitable. Every bomb makes someone rich. Every missile funds a yacht.
Every war creates a billionaire. Disease is profitable too.
Not curing it, treating it. Insulin costs three hundred dollars a vial because dead diabetics don't buy insulin.
But cured diabetics don't either. So you keep them barely alive.
It's good business. The people making money from war and disease aren't evil.
They're just rational actors in a system that rewards the wrong things.
You can't change human nature. Two hundred thousand years of evolution doesn't care about your TED talk.
But you can create economic systems that make curing people more profitable than killing them.
That's the only upgrade your species has ever responded to.
Part 6: Breaking Free from Your Programming. You're not broken.
You're just running 200,000-year-old software on hardware that was designed for a completely different world.
Your brain evolved to live 30 years, feed 5 people, avoid tigers, and fight neighboring tribes.
Expecting it to handle nuclear policy, climate change, and a 24-hour news cycle is like expecting a calculator to run a
space program. The calculator isn't broken. You're just asking it to do something it was never built for.
You can't fight 200,000 years of evolution. But you can hack it.
That's what a one percent treaty does. Instead of asking people to be rational (impossible), use their irrational impulses:
Greed: Make curing disease more profitable than building bombs.
Fear: Make politicians more scared of voters than lobbyists.
Tribalism: Create an us-versus-disease tribe instead of us-versus-them.
Social proof: Get three point five percent participation so others follow.
Immediate rewards: Pay people cash to join medical trials. Your genes enslaved you in brains that want sugar, fear strangers,
and cannot comprehend statistics. But they also gave you the ability to see the prison.
No other animal can think: "Wow, my instincts are completely illogical."
That's uniquely human. Use it. A one percent treaty doesn't ask you to be better.
It assumes you won't be, and redirects your worst impulses toward not dying.
It's the only plan that works for the species you actually are, rather than the species you wish you were.