Why Everyone is Crazy Now
These days, “clown world” seems like an understatement. Our entire civilization has gone insane. We have frequent crowd manias, such as “Black Lives Matter” and the COVID-19 hysteria. We have self-destructive social policies, such as open borders and de-policing. People seem to be losing their minds.
The craziness goes deeper. Men and women are not forming pair-bonds and having children. Most of the world now has below-replacement fertility. This is not normally recognized as insanity, but it is extremely maladaptive behavior. Human nature is breaking down in fundamental ways.
Why is everyone crazy now?
The human brain is a machine. It has a biological function: to generate adaptive behavior. The form of the brain is the result of evolution. Every aspect of the brain was selected to contribute to reproductive fitness.
The human brain worked in the past. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t exist. Our ancestors reproduced. But the present is very different from the past. The modern environment is very different from the ancestral environment. The human brain is not adapted to the modern environment.
This might seem strange or even paradoxical. How could the brain not be adapted to the modern environment? We created modern technology to satisfy our desires. The modern environment is much better than the ancestral environment, in almost every conceivable way. We are safe, comfortable and well-fed. We are not plagued by diseases and parasites. We have abundant food. Most hard, physical labor is done by machines. Most risks have been mitigated. To our ancestors, modern civilization would look like paradise. How could we not be adapted to it? How could progress make us crazy?
Modern civilization makes us crazy because:
- It takes away the ancestral problems that we evolved to solve.
- It gives us new types of agency that we are not adapted to.
- It creates a new informational environment that we are not adapted to.
- It creates a new social environment that we are not adapted to.
- New communication media allow harmful memes to propagate.
Our ancestors spent most of their time struggling to survive. That is the natural human condition. Modern civilization makes it much easier to satisfy our survival-related desires. Without the struggle to survive, a natural source of meaning is gone, or at least reduced.
The satisfaction of desire makes people happy in the moment, but it does not produce long-term happiness. When people are safe, comfortable and well-fed, they pursue sex and power. Those desires can never be fully satisfied, because they are open-ended, and because they involve other people. This leaves people in a frustrated state.
Frustrated people often channel their will into surrogate activities, such as travel, sports and hobbies. Surrogate activities feel meaningful, because they resemble ancestral behaviors. Travel is like roaming the landscape, searching for resources or a place to live. Sports is like combat. Collecting trinkets is like gathering food for the winter. People act out parodies of ancestral behaviors, rather than acting adaptively in the modern environment.
Modern civilization also gives us new types of agency, such as birth control, which our ancestors didn’t have. In the past, reproduction was a natural consequence of sex. Our ancestors didn’t need to choose to have children. It just happened, and then they dealt with it. Given birth control, most people choose to have few or no children. Instead, they spend their time on surrogate activities.
Voluntary low fertility is an error of value, not an error of truth. It is not a false belief about the world. It is a maladaptive value judgment. Human emotions do not generate adaptive values in the modern environment. Modern civilization allows people to pursue happiness (but not catch it) in maladaptive ways.
Modern technology has also given us information abundance, via radio, TV, the internet, computers, smart phones, etc. People are very attracted to this information, partly because it makes surrogate activities even easier.
The information that we receive through devices is highly artificial. Some of it is simply art: information created to entertain us. Even information that is supposedly about reality, such as the “news”, has been highly filtered and selected. Artificial information causes fake knowledge.
We subconsciously acquire knowledge from experience by induction. All the information that flows into your cerebral cortex will be processed, and you will induce conceptual knowledge from it, even if it is clearly artificial.
It’s not just that people become addicted to artificial information. They learn fake knowledge from it, and then they view reality through a distorted lens.
See Alienation and Art.
Modern civilization has also changed the social environment. Our ancestors lived in small societies, until the advent of (agricultural) civilization. Even after civilization emerged, most people lived in small communities, and interacted with only about a dozen people on a regular basis. Modern civilization changed that, with industrialization and urbanization. Today, most people live in big cities, and interact with strangers on a daily basis. Modern societies don’t fit our social instincts.
Some people use ideologies as an artificial substitute for the ancestral social condition. An ideology defines an artificial group, which people can join by adopting the ideology and signaling it. Ideological groups are not real societies, of course. They don’t have the functions of a real society. But they plug into social instincts better than modern society. They give people a feeling of belonging.
In the past, culture mostly propagated within families and small communities. Today, culture propagates through mass media and social media. The new media have created new types of culture: pop culture and internet culture, respectively. Parasitic memes can propagate much more easily through these new media.
Fashions are replacing traditions. Traditions tend to be adaptive, because they propagate from parents to children. If a tradition isn’t adaptive, it won’t propagate. That is not true for fashions. They can evolve to be parasitic on their hosts. Fashions need to motivate signaling behavior, not reproduction.
In the modern world, most people are crazy. They spend their time on surrogate activities. They have few or no children. They have learned fake knowledge from artificial information. They are alienated from the societies in which they live. Their brains are infected with parasitic memes.
To progress, we must leave behind the ancestral condition. Progress is the creation of a new environment and a new way of life. But the human brain is adapted to the ancestral condition. It is not adapted to modern civilization.
That’s why everyone is crazy now.