This Tweet makes a serious point. We are talking apes who evolved for 2M+ years in a Pleistocene environment, until about 11,000 years ago. If you time-traveled back to this era of evolutionary adaptedness, you wouldn’t even be able to find a piece of paper or a pencil. Back then, “big” communities numbered only a couple hundred people. Instead of math and science, people exuberantly indulged in rampant superstition There’s no reason to assume that our bodies/brains have significantly evolved since then.

Why would any rational dispassionate observer today conclude that the deeply ingrained tribal instincts of billions of people can be sufficiently trained up through any culture to handle modern levels of physical and social complexity? I’m not surprised at the widespread dysfunction. Rather, I’m repeatedly shocked that the we have any sense of order at all.