We Are Confused, Maladapted Apes Who Need Enlightenment

With Homo sapiens, Darwinian evolution produced a new kind of animal: a species that builds worlds it struggles to understand.

Feb 02, 2026

In a characteristically insightful and entertaining essay, David Pinsof argues that intellectuals greatly overestimate how many of the world’s problems stem from popular misunderstandings. In reality, Pinsof argues, people are highly rational and well-informed about their interests. This is what we should expect on evolutionary grounds. “Show me an animal that has succeeded in surviving and reproducing in a hostile environment for millions of years, and I will show you a rational animal.” It is also supported by extensive evidence about the rationality and accuracy of human cognition.

In Pinsof’s worldview, even the dreaded cognitive “biases” that psychologists love to tell us about function as adaptive mechanisms that help us survive and thrive. Confirmation bias, for example, provides us with intellectual ammunition for persuasion and reputation management, while overconfidence and self-serving illusions help us win friends and influence people.

Why, then, do intellectuals so often chalk up the world’s problems to mass ignorance and irrationality? Partly, the narrative is simply self-serving. It is intellectuals, after all, who promise to liberate us from misunderstanding. They are our professional understanders.

But it’s also because they confuse our expressed motives with our real goals. Sure, Pinsof concedes, we look pretty stupid and misinformed relative to the high ideals and noble ambitions that we say we have. If we’re chasing objective truth, impartial justice, and effective altruism, we’re not doing a good job. But those goals are just elaborate fictions, self-serving public relations cooked up to make us look good. Our real goals, our hidden motives, are very different. We’re chasing the kinds of grubby rewards you would expect of apes forged in Darwinian competition: status, reputation, power, sex, and resources. And relative to those ambitions, we’re smart and sophisticated.

This analysis reframes many apparent examples of stupidity as strategies. For example, “tribalism” isn’t a cognitive error to be remedied by debiasing and education; it’s a winning strategy among groupish primates who care more about power and prestige than truth or justice. Ineffective altruism and slacktivism don’t result from miscalculating the most effective ways to help others; they help status-seeking activists buy noble reputations at a discount.

Unsurprisingly, this perspective leads Pinsof to a bleak conclusion. If most of the world’s problems result not from misunderstandings but from conflicting incentives, intellectual enlightenment cannot save us. And even if it could, nobody really cares about solving the world’s problems anyway:

Not every problem has a solution. Some things cannot be fixed. And once you come to the bracing realization that we have no deep desire to fix our broken world, you’ll realize that our problem is that we have no problem. What’s broken is that nothing is broken. The study of human nature is, all too often, the study of the hole we’re stuck in… In the end, the only misunderstanding is that there’s been a misunderstanding.

A Darwinian Defence of the Enlightenment

It’s a beautifully cynical, Pinsofian analysis—and one that, I think, gets a lot right.

Nevertheless, it is too optimistic about our baseline rationality. Yes, we are savvy and strategic primates pursuing goals we’d rather not admit, even to ourselves. But we’re also riddled with costly cognitive biases, maladapted to the modern world, and in need of enlightenment by intellectual knowledge that we often find deeply counterintuitive.

It is also too pessimistic. Some people really are motivated to fix our broken world, and in some cases, they make genuine progress. The motivation is never very deep or pure—no straight thing was ever made from the crooked timber of humanity—but it’s not merely a deceptive story, either.

There are many holes we will never escape from. There is an unavoidably tragic aspect to the human condition. But when scaffolded by the right incentives and error-correction mechanisms, we can draw on intellectual knowledge and cooperation to climb out of the worst pits we find ourselves in.

You can’t understand much of humanity’s significant progress over the past several centuries—in life expectancy, living standards, wealth, health, infant mortality, freedom, political governance, and so on—without embracing this fundamental optimism of the Enlightenment. Or so I will argue.

Evolutionary Expectations

Before getting into the details, it’s worth stepping back and scrutinising Pinsof’s assumptions about evolution and human rationality. He says,

“The default assumption of every intellectual should be that the human mind is about as well-designed as the hawk’s eye, the bat’s sonar, or the cheetah’s sprint.”

Our species complicates this default assumption in two ways.

A Uniquely Unique Animal

First, although all species are unique, it’s not just human chauvinism to think that we’re uniquely unique, a genuinely new kind of animal.

There is no single quality responsible for this—no magic bullet that set our ancestors on a novel evolutionary pathway. Instead, there is a set of interacting traits connected to our unique capacities for cognition (how we think and reason), cooperation (how we work together), and culture (how we share and accumulate information). Through such abilities, we have acquired unprecedented powers to design and redesign our environments, but we have also become vulnerable to novel risks and failure modes.

To take only one example, no other species is anywhere near as dependent on lifetime learning as we are, including extensive “social learning.” To achieve our goals, we rely on information acquired from others (parents, family, friends, allies, teachers, shamans, priests, Substackers, etc.), typically because they intentionally share it with us through language and other forms of communication.

Given this reliance, evolution has endowed us with highly sophisticated social learning mechanisms. In this sense, Pinsof is right that evolutionary theory correctly predicts rationality and adaptation. We’re skilled at extracting knowledge from others while minimising the risks of misinformation and deception. Even from a young age, we instinctively evaluate the plausibility of what we’re told, assess people’s reliability and honesty across different domains, and insist on persuasive arguments for surprising claims.

Nevertheless, such extensive social learning also creates novel vulnerabilities that won’t be illuminated by analogies to the hawk’s eye, bat’s sonar, or cheetah’s sprint.

Most obviously, it means that reflection on human evolution should never be used to discount the importance of ideas. We evolved to be a species dependent on good ideas—on the knowledge, wisdom, and understanding that we acquire from others. If such ideas are misleading or deceptive in ways we can’t anticipate or detect, even optimal learning mechanisms won’t prevent us from being misinformed in costly and sometimes catastrophic ways.

Before the Neolithic Revolution, this vulnerability wasn’t very pressing for most humans. The challenges hunter-gatherers faced were mostly local and small-scale: which plants are edible, which animals migrate, which group members are trustworthy, and so on. This meant they could often cross-check what they were told against direct experience.

Moreover, because our core intuitions evolved over hundreds of millennia in response to hunter-gatherer lifestyles, people’s instinctive bullshit detectors were broadly reliable in such domains. Whenever they encountered claims that seemed implausible or outlandish—that is, counterintuitive—they could usually safely dismiss them, or at least insist on practical demonstrations of their veracity.

Finally, because their social networks were mostly face-to-face, highly interdependent, and largely egalitarian, high-stakes deception was typically risky and counterproductive. When everyone knows everyone extremely well, and power is broadly distributed, it’s easier to discover and punish big lies. And when everyone depends on everyone else for the most basic necessities of survival, the social costs of getting caught lying can be astronomical.

Of course, hunter-gatherers believed plenty of preposterous falsehoods about matters beyond their experience—for example, about the broader cosmos, their ancient history, or the character of rival tribes. But such myths were generally costless and adaptive. When you lack the ability to influence the world beyond your immediate, day-to-day existence, you can believe whatever you want about it, which is exactly what they did.

The New World

Well, things have changed. The second reason humans complicate the link between evolution and rationality is that the modern world we must navigate is unimaginably more vast, complex, and unequal than hunter-gatherer environments. As John Dewey observed a century ago,

“The local face-to-face community has been invaded by forces so vast, so remote in initiation, so far-reaching in scope and so complexly indirect in operation that they are, from the standpoint of the members of local social units, unknown. . . . They act at a great distance in ways invisible to [them].”

Natural selection adapts organisms to their environments. When these environments change, such adaptations can become “mismatched.” This is why things aren’t going so well for polar bears.

In the human case, evolutionary mismatch is often invoked to explain relatively mundane things, such as why so many of us are obese. As the familiar story goes, sugar and fat were scarce in ancestral environments, so we evolved to crave them. In modern capitalist societies, they are abundant. So we gorge on cheesecake and pizza served to us by profit-seeking companies that place no value on our welfare. There is no savvy strategy behind such overeating. Most of us are simply heavier and unhealthier than we would like to be.

This basic lesson generalises to many other contexts, including those where our maladaptation is harder to observe than our fatness. The most important of these is modern politics.

Political Mismatch

The scale and complexity of the modern environment that bears on political debate are mind-boggling. Hundreds of millions of strangers are enmeshed in interacting economic, political, and institutional forces that bear no resemblance to the small-scale worlds we evolved in.

Although it’s important not to overstate the problem of mismatch here—popular talk of static “stone-age minds” obscures how we evolved to be highly adaptable and flexible—it’s equally important not to ignore the severity of the challenges.

First, the modern world radicalises our reliance on social learning. When forming beliefs about topics relevant to modern politics, we almost always lack the ability to cross-check what we’re told against our experience, either because it is too distant in space and time or because the topics concern abstract phenomena (GDP, inflation, demographic trends, economic growth, etc.) that no one can directly experience.

Second, the intuitions most people bring to understanding modern societies are systematically misleading.

We evolved to be highly skilled at forming alliances, reading intentions, tracking reputations, and playing local status games. In contrast, neither our evolutionary endowment nor first-hand experiences prepare us to understand large-scale systems characterised by emergent properties, distributed processes, and incentives. So we anthropomorphise institutions and frequently default to moralised, intention-based narratives that posit villains rather than incentives and structural constraints.

When pharmaceutical prices rise, we assume that greedy executives are to blame rather than laws, regulations, and insurance markets. When housing or renting becomes unaffordable, we blame the avarice of developers and landlords rather than building restrictions, permitting processes, and construction costs. Such tendencies served our ancestors well. In hunter-gatherer societies, it’s reasonable to trace significant events to identifiable agents with familiar goals, and to link good and bad social outcomes to good and bad intentions. Invisible-hand coordination and emergent order are, therefore, deeply counterintuitive.

Similarly, zero-sum thinking makes sense for hunter-gatherers. When you live at the subsistence level, one person’s dramatic gains likely mean someone else’s dramatic loss. Consequently, we struggle to comprehend how modern trade and innovation could make everyone better off, especially when gains are unevenly distributed or delayed. In fact, the very idea that something called “wealth” can be created is a profound theoretical discovery that conflicts with common sense. The more natural view, which modern economics education tries to shake people out of, is that there is a fixed set of goods to be distributed.

Third, the modern information environment through which people attempt to learn about this strange, new world and overcome their default ignorance and confusion is more of a hindrance than a help.

Most obviously, it is shaped by extremely well-funded propaganda campaigns by powerful strangers who profit from other people’s ignorance. Even if such propaganda is unsuccessful, as it often is, its presence can breed pervasive mistrust that prevents the uptake of trustworthy information, causing people to place greater weight on their personal—and highly unreliable—intuitions.

Even more importantly, the modern media environment in free societies is organised around intense competition for audience attention and engagement. When combined with our deep-rooted negativity bias—our evolved (and, for hunter-gatherers, adaptive) tendency to attend disproportionately to threats and dangers—the result is an information ecosystem systematically skewed towards catastrophe, conflict, and outrage.

The predictable consequence of this is that people develop mental pictures of reality far more negative than the objective facts warrant. They overestimate poverty, crime rates, and many other social pathologies and dangers, and believe most trends are going in the wrong direction. In affluent liberal democracies, people are not just largely oblivious to progress. Their minds invert reality, often treating the most peaceful and prosperous societies in human history as dystopian hellscapes.

The result of all this is pervasive ignorance and misperception. The facts and complexities of the modern world are substituted in people’s heads with cartoonish, catastrophising myths.

The Rational Irrationality Objection

If this analysis is correct, it suggests that mass ignorance and misperceptions are not figments of intellectuals’ self-serving imaginations. Evolution made us rational and well-adapted—but to a world that no longer exists. In the modern world, confusion and misunderstanding are the default.

Nevertheless, there is a popular line of reasoning that concedes the existence of mass ignorance but insists that it is “rational.” To introduce a bit of jargon, it acknowledges that most people are not “epistemically rational”—they are doing a terrible job forming accurate beliefs about reality—but it argues that such epistemic failures are “instrumentally rational”. In line with Pinsof’s perspective, it treats widespread error and delusion as an adaptive response to people’s practical circumstances.

One influential theory of this kind comes from the work of economists like Anthony Downs and Bryan Caplan. It points out that in large-scale modern democracies, an individual’s vote makes practically no difference to electoral outcomes. This means people have no incentive to become well informed. They have no skin in the game. On the other hand, endorsing political beliefs that are emotionally gratifying or that signal one’s tribal loyalties can be highly beneficial. So rational individuals opt for ignorance and (epistemic) irrationality.

This analysis could be strengthened by Pinsof’s “Alliance Theory” of political belief systems, which posits that people’s participation in politics is not rooted in a desire to form accurate beliefs. Instead, we’re tribal propagandists. Our beliefs are downstream of the alliances and rivalries we form, and the biased, hypocritical arguments we construct to make our allies look good and our rivals look bad.

Both perspectives are insightful, but they also go too far.

Sometimes Ignorance and Irrationality Are Just Ignorance and Irrationality

One problem for the “rational ignorance” perspective is the prediction that ignorance and misperceptions will evaporate when people have skin in the game. This is wrong.

The history of modernity is littered with examples of people making catastrophic decisions based on deranged, inaccurate worldviews in high-stakes contexts. The Nazis really believed in an elaborate Jewish conspiracy, which led them to undertake self-defeating decisions, such as diverting crucial wartime resources to mass genocide. As I will return to below, communists throughout the twentieth century genuinely believed in various myths about human nature and economics, which led to repeated catastrophes, many of which engulfed the revolutionaries who brought such regimes into existence.

For less severe examples, one need only look at the policy track records of populist politicians in modern democracies to see that people often make bad decisions based on ignorance and misperceptions, even when they have strong incentives to perceive reality accurately.

The idea that political cognition improves dramatically as stakes increase is not well supported by the historical record. And once you reflect on the vastness, complexity, and inaccessibility of the modern world, this shouldn’t be very surprising. When discovering the truth is extremely challenging, merely increasing people’s incentive to discover it won’t secure success.

Another problem with the “rational ignorance” perspective is the assumption that people know their individual vote has no impact on political outcomes and so “decide” to be ignorant and misinformed. As Jeffrey Friedman points out, this isn’t well-supported by evidence. Instead, people appear to be radically ignorant, not rationally ignorant. Because they don’t instinctively appreciate the sheer scale of the modern world, they dramatically overestimate the impact of their vote, and they treat political knowledge as much more accessible than it really is.

This analysis helps to explain many features of political psychology that sit uneasily with the “rational ignorance” perspective. The intensely negative, catastrophising worldviews that many people develop often just make them sad, distressed, and demotivated. They experience politics as aversive and anxiogenic. They sometimes damage close relationships with friends and family members. Much of this looks more like sincere participation than tribal signalling optimised for maximising emotional or social rewards.

None of this is to deny that people approach politics with a “tribal” mindset. There is considerable insight in Pinsof’s analysis that politics is rooted in alliances, rivalries, and self-serving (well, alliance-serving) “propaganda,” as well as in the popular idea that much political participation is performative, concerned more with tribal signalling than sober policy analysis.

However, the problem with such proposals is that the leaders and tribes we support and oppose are not independent of—in technical jargon, they’re not “exogenous” to—our political beliefs, so they cannot fully explain such beliefs. We choose leaders, allies, rivals, and enemies based on the pictures in our heads. If those pictures are systematically warped by misleading intuitions, mistrust, and negativity bias, the same will apply to our judgements about which leaders and allies promote our interests.

Put simply, someone with an accurate, evidence-based worldview will support very different political leaders and tribes than someone whose worldview is constructed from “common sense” intuitions interacting with their TikTok feed.

In general, political ignorance and misperceptions aren’t always or even commonly the product of savvy, evidence-based cost-benefit analysis or 4D Darwinian chess. They’re often downstream of the profound challenges of acquiring counterintuitive knowledge in a hostile and misleading information environment.

The Role of Intellectuals

This suggests a more optimistic assessment of the value of “intellectuals” in the broad sense of that term (scientists, statisticians, academics, etc.), and of the kinds of knowledge they can provide, ranging from carefully collected data to rigorous scientific inquiry. To successfully navigate the modern world, we need to be enlightened by such knowledge. It won’t fall into our lap if we let our evolved psychologies run on autopilot. Our default condition is one of epistemic darkness.

This optimism is, or at least should be, uncontroversial when it comes to the knowledge associated with the natural and medical sciences. Hundreds of millions of people died throughout history from diseases we have now eradicated thanks to discoveries about vaccines and other miracles of modern medicine and public health. We couldn’t rely on Darwinian adaptations to secure such knowledge. We needed rigorous, institutionally supported inquiry through which we could learn truths that are often highly counterintuitive.

The real controversy concerns whether intellectual knowledge can correct costly ignorance in domains like politics and collective organisation.

Here, scepticism is understandable. It’s much more challenging to conduct rigorous science in these domains, and prominent ideas and theories often function more like intellectual fashions governed by the subjective, internal criteria upheld by the intelligentsia than like scientific hypotheses evaluated by objective measures of predictive success.

For this reason, the practical track record of these ideas has often been negative, and in some cases disastrous. Despite concerted and ongoing obfuscation of this fact by many left-wing intellectuals, the clearest example lies with Marx, who, alongside many later generations of communist intellectuals and activists inspired by his work, argued that self-interest and social competition were not essential features of human nature but contingent products of exploitative economic systems like capitalism, feudalism, and slavery. This and countless other foolish ideas, such as the notion that law and conventional morality under capitalism are mere “bourgeois prejudices,” played a major and undeniable role in many of the worst human catastrophes of the twentieth century.

These catastrophes can’t be understood as moral abominations that nevertheless advanced the strategic interests of those who spread them. Most of the true believers who fought for communist revolutions in countries like Russia, China, Korea, and Cambodia were quickly victimised by the systems they helped create. They weren’t just playing cynical adaptive games. They were catastrophically misinformed about reality in ways that got themselves and countless others killed.

Notice, however, that one should not conclude from such disasters that intellectual ideas don’t matter. They matter enormously. But wouldn’t it be strange if they could only have negative consequences?

The Achievements of Liberalism

In fact, one can find many examples throughout history of intellectual achievements concerning society and politics that have had extremely beneficial consequences.

For example, as Steven Pinker, Joseph Heath, Jonathan Rauch, and many others have documented, one cannot understand the emergence of modern liberalism and the unique social and political successes of liberal states without appreciating how complex, counterintuitive intellectual discoveries informed institution-building. From at least Hobbes onwards, a tradition of intellectual inquiry—including Locke, Hume, Montesquieu, Smith, Kant, and many other Enlightenment thinkers—drew attention to two major theoretical insights.

The first was that human societies are pervaded by what social scientists now call “collective action problems”: situations where individuals acting on their rational self-interest are led to engage in collectively self-defeating behaviour that leaves everyone worse off.

For example, Hobbes observed how, in the absence of enforceable laws and contracts, people who would benefit from mutual cooperation would be driven towards pre-emptive aggression, fearing exploitation or cheating by others. Insights with a similar structure were later used to explain the value of political regimes that uphold religious and political tolerance, enforce extensive systems of individual rights, protect free speech even for dangerous and heretical ideas, maintain open trade between nations, and more.

The second insight was that institutions can be constructed to channel self-interest and social competition away from predation and violence towards beneficial outcomes.

For example, Smith demonstrated how regulated market competition could transform the self-interest of bakers and brewers into the efficient production of goods for others. In the political domain, Montesquieu and Madison explored how political systems could be organised to make ambition counteract ambition. And in domain of knowledge, many scientists and philosophers explored how formal societies and norms could be crafted to counteract individual biases and allocate “credit” only to those who made genuine discoveries. The core discovery across these diverse contexts was that specific systems of norms and institutions can convert human self-interest and ambition into innovation, investment, knowledge, and political accountability.

In both cases, these insights were genuine theoretical discoveries that sharply contradicted most people’s intuitions. Trusting in self-interest, social competition, and decentralised markets to coordinate economic activity; relinquishing power to people with radically different political or religious views; tolerating dangerous and offensive speech—these ideas don’t come naturally to human beings. They are insights that must be achieved.

Of course, the insights alone don’t change anything. Merely recognising the existence of a collective action problem doesn’t free one from it. And merely understanding that institutions can channel ambition into cooperation doesn’t create them. Nevertheless, precisely because these insights take humans as they are, not as we’d like them to be, and point to possibilities that leave everyone better off, not just some people, they can guide institutional design and tinkering, helping humanity gradually escape from the poverty, ignorance, and conflict that are our default state.

Notice, however, that for this progress to be possible, societies require a critical mass of people who appreciate these insights. Similarly, there must be enough people who have a grasp of the basic facts and trends demonstrating that such insights work—that, as a consequence of liberal institutions guided by intellectual insights, much of humanity has experienced objective progress along countless dimensions, including wealth, health, freedom, opportunity, governance, and much more.

The Desire to Fix the World

Reflecting on this history puts pressure on Pinsof’s pessimistic judgement that nobody really wants to fix our broken world.

Once again, there is more than one grain of truth here. Humans are unavoidably self-interested and competitive, and altruistic motivations are inevitably limited and accompanied by a large dose of selectivity and hypocrisy. This is what we should expect on evolutionary grounds, and it is confirmed by extensive historical evidence, not least the many examples where revolutionaries championing justice have quickly turned into despots after taking power.

Nevertheless, the historical record suggests that the deep human craving for esteem and honour can also be channelled into genuinely noble pursuits. As we created liberal societies that increased the scale of cooperation and the costs of predation, we also created conditions that made the pursuit of prestige—of admiration and deference—more profitable. As Will Storr documents in The Status Game, this channelled insatiable human ambition and social competition towards impressing others through demonstrations of competence and virtue, fuelling modern science, innovation, and social justice.

We reward those who try to fix the world, produce novel insights, and advance other people’s interests. At the same time, we are sensitive to the possibility that such motivations aren’t genuine—that people care only about the personal rewards, not the high ideals. Nichola Raihani calls this the “reputation tightrope”: to earn a noble reputation for performing good deeds, those deeds must flow from the right motives, not reputational ones.

As a consequence, in societies that consistently reward prosocial behaviour, people tend to internalise their motivations to help others. The best way to convince others that you want to help them and fix our broken world is to develop a genuine passion for doing so.

Such passions are never pure or extremely deep. They must be scaffolded by the right incentives, and they can disappear if incentives suddenly change—hence the many justice-championing revolutionaries who lose their love of humanity when they acquire power. But it is genuine and sincere nonetheless, and you can’t understand humanity’s progress over recent centuries without appreciating its reality—from the scientists and doctors who devoted their lives to understanding and combating disease, to the reformers who fought for social justice against slavery and oppression, to the entrepreneurs who created technologies that lifted countless people out of poverty.

Conclusion

The truth is messy and complex. We are rational creatures whose apparent “stupidity” is often a symptom of hidden strategies, but we are also maladapted to modernity’s vastness and complexity. In this strange new world, ignorance is our default, our intuitions mislead us, and the information environment exacerbates our confusion. To escape this bleak situation, we must unlearn our “common sense”. We need to be enlightened by insights and knowledge that only systematic, intellectual inquiry can provide.

Such inquiry has demonstrably improved the human condition. Liberal norms and institutions, products of hard-won, counterintuitive discoveries, function to channel our self-interest and ambition into cooperation and progress, helped along by a craving for prestige that can be—and has been—directed towards noble pursuits that have made the world measurably better.

And yet, at present, a shocking number of people are ignorant of this progress, and of the insights that underpinned it. If you read survey data or listen to the speeches of some of the West’s most popular politicians, you discover that many people sincerely believe that things have been getting worse.

This is a big misunderstanding.

To correct it, we must insist on the value of intellectual insights and carefully collected data. We must acknowledge that too many people are ignorant and confused about the world they inhabit, and celebrate those who aim to change that.

Conspicuous Cognition

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