The Ape
That Dreamed It Was a God
For most of our history, humans appear to have
been reasonably competent creatures, in small doses. Place a dozen of us in a
village, a hunting band, or a tribal encampment, and society functions with
disarming simplicity. Everyone knows who grows the tapioca, who fixes the roof,
and, crucially, who stole the goat. Leadership tends to fall to the person who
can keep the fire burning, ward off predators, and remind the rest of the tribe
not to eat the bright red berries. But magnify this arrangement to millions of
strangers, add bureaucratic labyrinths, televised debates, and an occasional flag
waving ceremony, and suddenly the system produces something extraordinary, a
natural habitat in which theatrical, hyper ambitious, and occasionally
shameless individuals rise, almost effortlessly, to positions of authority. A
rare evolutionary niche indeed, the apex predator of the political savannah.
Meanwhile, the sensible people, the ones who
actually fix the roof, slowly edge toward the back of the room, confused. The
meeting that was supposed to be about replacing a broken ladder has somehow
morphed into a three hour argument about who deserves to hold it. Progress, we
call it. Though one suspects the ladder would get repaired sooner if left to a
tribe of moderately organized squirrels. Civilization, governance, social
institutions, all grand words for what occasionally looks like an elaborate
filtration system for selecting individuals who should not be trusted with the
office coffee machine, let alone the machinery of a country.
And perhaps this is the real flaw in our
planetary project, humans were never designed to run the world. We were built
for ambling across grasslands, sharing berries, and checking over our shoulders
to ensure we hadn’t been designated as someone else’s lunch. A modest, sensible
role in the food chain. But give us symbolic thought, agriculture, philosophy,
science, industrialization, psychology, and digital networks, and we take it as
a sign that we should appoint ourselves CEOs of the ecosystem. Yuval Noah Harari
(Historian and Philosopher, 1976- to date) might call this the inevitable side effect of
our dangerous superpower that is the ability to conjure shared fictions at
scale. Once a few of us agreed that lines on a map are sacred, that paper is
money, and that slogans are a form of truth, we could coordinate in vast
numbers but sadly, we could also mislead one another with professional
efficiency. A species that once negotiated over berries now negotiates over
narratives, currencies whose value rises with repetition. The same cognitive
fireworks that let us imagine a better future also let us invent better
justifications, more decorative delusions, and myths elaborate enough to
require ministries.
Humanity sometimes looks like a species that
accidentally promoted itself. We evolved for a modest job, wandering
grasslands, sharing berries, and nervously checking whether we were about to
become lunch, yet the moment we discovered stories and symbols, we interpreted
that as a mandate to run the entire planet. In global geopolitics, this plays
out like a prehistoric foraging tribe that somehow acquired a corporate org
chart where borders are sacred office partitions, currencies are colourful
reward points, and ideologies are motivational posters everyone pretends to
understand. Leaders gather in diplomatic boardrooms to negotiate narratives the
way our ancestors once negotiated berry bushes, only now the berries are trade
routes, alliances, sanctions, and “national interests.” The strange trick is
that most of it works because we all agree to treat the memos as real and
repeat a slogan often enough and it graduates into policy. Our great cognitive
superpower, the ability to believe the same story at scale, lets billions
coordinate, innovate, and occasionally build rockets, but it also means the
world is effectively managed by a former band of foragers who discovered
PowerPoint and decided that what the ecosystem really needed was quarterly
strategy meetings.
Long before any of this, Thiruvalluvar (an
ancient Indian Philosopher, circa 4th CE) had the courtesy to warn
us in couplets that a ruler without virtue is a calamity, that greed corrodes
judgment, and that governance without justice is merely a louder form of theft.
He might have phrased it more elegantly, but the gist is familiar, better the
leader who rescues the drowning than the one who asks whether the drowning have
filled in the correct form. In a village, this is common sense but, in a
nation, it becomes a manifesto nobody reads. If small societies rely on
character because everyone can see it, large societies rely on spectacle
because character no longer fits on a billboard. We keep mistaking applause for
approval and volume for validity, and thus the ladder remains tragically
unfixed.
Francis Bacon (an English Philosopher, 1561-1626),
who never met a cognitive bias he didn’t try to categorize, would likely
diagnose our misadventures as an infestation of idols. The Idols of the Tribe,
our species wide habits of overgeneralizing and seeing patterns where none
exist. The Idols of the Cave, our private preconceptions and pet theories,
which we defend with the ferocity usually reserved for family heirlooms. The
Idols of the Marketplace, the way language turns confusion into policy by
giving vague ideas sturdy names. And the Idols of the Theater, our fondness for
grand systems that are more elegant than accurate. Put these together and you
get modern governance, a theatre crowded with idols and not nearly enough exits,
where the debate about the ladder proceeds flawlessly in the passive voice, mistakes
were made, responsibilities were misunderstood, repairs were delayed, but the
press conference went very well.
Then comes Sigmund Freud (a Neurologist and
founder of Psychoanalysis, 1856-1939), whispering that the true ruler of the
polis might be the unconscious, the vast, inconvenient ocean beneath our
carefully ironed intentions. We advertise to desires we don’t admit, vote for
stories we can’t resist, and then rationalize our choices as if logic had been
invited from the start. The superego drafts the manifesto, the id writes the
campaign jingle and the ego edits the minutes afterward to make it all sound
deliberate. Industrial society discovered that the psyche is a lever, and so we
built entire industries to pull it. If Bacon taught us to watch our errors,
Freud taught us to watch the watcher, to suspect that the person holding the
ladder might be doing so to impress their father, terrify their rival, or
seduce the electorate, anything, really, except fix the roof.
Meanwhile, the spiritual economy upgraded itself
to a doctrine of ownership. Not just land or cows, but attention, identity,
opinion, and afterlife options. We collect followers the way ancestors
collected firewood, then pray that the algorithm, our new household god, will
smile upon our sacrifices. Death once retired us from the world, now it
threatens to interrupt our brand strategy. If Thiruvalluvar counselled
restraint and justice, our age prefers a more actionable virtue, scale. We
confuse “bigger” with “better,” “louder” with “truer,” and “trending” with
“true.” It turns out you can capture the world’s attention without once
capturing the problem at hand, which is why the ladder’s defect has more
publicity than solutions.
A contemporary thinker like David Graeber (an
Anthropologist and a Political Activist, 1961-2020) would add that bureaucracy
expands not to solve problems but to define them into eternity. Paperwork is
our civilization’s poetry, a sprawling epic in which the hero is a form and the
dragon is a missing signature. Whole categories of “bullshit jobs” arise to
service the narrative machinery that services the other narrative machinery,
until the only thing being produced at scale is justification. We used to hunt deer
but now we hunt compliance. We used to share meat but now we share meeting
invites. If Harari mapped how fictions make us many, Graeber mapped how
paperwork makes us busy, too busy, often, to notice that the roof is leaking
onto the file labelled “Roof Integrity.”
The Scientific Revolution promised us a method,
fewer idols, more evidence, fewer feelings, more facts. We honoured that
promise by building instruments of astonishing precision and then using them to
measure our preferences. We split atoms and then our attention. Rationality
became a toolkit for building better machines and better excuses, the same
empiricism that could heal a city could also optimize a distraction. We tell
ourselves that the data will save us, but data, like the gods, have priests,
and priests, like the rest of us, have incentives. Thus, empiricism often
arrives to the policy table on time, only to discover that the seating chart is
already fixed.
Industrialization dragged us into cities and into
ourselves. The modern psyche, half spectacle, half surveillance, oscillates
between craving visibility and fearing exposure. Freud’s descendants help us
label the oscillation, advertisers help us monetize it and the rest of us post
about it. Digital networks turned our cognitive village into a global amphitheatre
where everyone speaks and nobody listens long enough to pass the ladder. We
call this “networked cognition,” a charming euphemism for outsourcing memory to
machines and delegating judgment to trends. We have reached the point where the
town crier is automated, and the town itself is an app asking us to rate our
experience of the fire while the house burns.
Perhaps the truth is embarrassingly simple. Maybe
humanity was never meant to design social constructs spanning continents. Maybe
our wiring was optimized for cooperative foraging, not parliamentary theatrics.
Maybe the cognitive revolution was less an upgrade and more a cosmic glitch, a
misfired mutation that gave primates the ability to invent bureaucracy.
Thiruvalluvar would urge us to rediscover virtue and restraint. Bacon would
plead for method over myth. Freud would ask us to interrogate our motives before
we broadcast them. Harari would remind us that our superpower is a shared story,
and that stories can hand us both tools and chains. Graeber would advise us to
notice when the structure we built to help us has become the reason help cannot
arrive.
A clear 21st-century example is the global
response to the COVID 19 pandemic. A microscopic virus spread through a species
capable of sequencing its genome within weeks and designing vaccines in under a
year, an astonishing triumph of science. Yet the crisis quickly became a
theatre of competing narratives. Governments argued over borders, political
parties turned masks and vaccines into identity badges, and social media
flooded the public square with conspiracies and counter stories. In some
places, the logistics of saving lives were slowed by bureaucratic procedures,
ideological battles, and mistrust of institutions. Scientists pleaded for
evidence based method, echoing the spirit of Francis Bacon, while psychologists
pointed to fear, denial, and tribal thinking that Sigmund Freud might have
recognized. Meanwhile, the crisis revealed how global coordination depends on
shared beliefs, much as Yuval Noah Harari argues. Humanity possessed the tools
to solve the problem, but our stories about power, identity, and authority
often made the solution harder to reach.
Perhaps the quiet absurdity of our age is that
competence whispers while confidence campaigns. The thoughtful hesitate, the
theatrical govern. Our institutions resemble a ladder with missing rungs, still
ceremonially displayed, endlessly discussed, but rarely repaired by the few who
actually know how to climb. So, we polish speeches, redesign platforms, and
issue declarations of progress while the roof continues its patient leaking.
Civilization becomes a ritual of announcing solutions rather than practicing
them. Meanwhile, the squirrels, unburdened by ideology, bureaucracy, or
televised debates, solve the practical problem of winter with an efficiency our
committees might envy.
The tragedy is not that humanity dreamed boldly,
but that the ape who dreamed it was God occasionally forgot it was still an
ape. Power magnifies the illusion, language decorates it. And so, we continue
negotiating over narratives while the scaffolding of reality creaks beneath us.
As Friedrich Nietzsche warned, “He who fights with monsters should look to
it that he himself does not become a monster.” Until humility climbs the
ladder before ambition does, progress may remain what it too often is, a press
conference about repairs rather than the quiet work of fixing the roof.
Cheers.
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